Every single other version of Civ came with a big printed manual. I'm not cutting ANYONE any slack if I'm buying a hard copy of a game if you have run (and/or could install) via steam in the first place. They wanna be too cheap to print the fracking manual, then they either make people read it for instructions or make your in-game civiopedia HAVE ALL THE INFORMATION. Not half-arse it; if there's enough in the civiopedia for me to be reading an hour anyway, there's NO excuse for not having ALL the information in there, instead of most if it.
And I also have a big fracking objection to having to exit/tab out the game to find the manual (especially given how crawlingly slow Civ V is) because they wanna be tight on paper. For frack's sake, they couldn't even be arsed to list all the keyboard commands in that strip of paper they provided in the book (which was mostly just license blurb).
I have a really big objection to the trend of PDF manuals (
especially now that there's digital distribution and half of my games that I buy in hardcopy require me to install via steam anyway (Supreme Commander 2, lookin' at you, you risible pile of monkey-leavings).
Before I made this post, I thought I ought to go and check in both pdf and game, just to check I wasn't being grossly unfair. I pretty much wasn't.
Nowhere does it say how to change a unit name (so if you don't notice that "edit" button on the promotion bar...) Civ IV let you rename both cities and units by double-clicking on the name (in the city screen). Why make it harder?
I'm not sure when happened with the citizen editing, but it doesn't work unless the citizen tab is open (it was closed when I started, so either the very first time I went into a city screen I inadvertently closed it, or it started that way) - doesn't say anywhere that if that tab's closed you can't do anything. (In earlier games (i.e. Civ II - IV), that was an umremoveable default function of the map. That
might be my own incompetance, but I'm only about 50% sure of that.
I think part of the problem is the massively over-sized interface. Seriously.
Spoiler
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Compare the two. Civ IV's much less intrusive and needlessly graphic - and there's far more information on there. (Note especially the difference between the Civ IV specialists in the bottom corner there, and the huge list in Civ V...)
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_wktVUEZXOZA/TK...y%20Screen.jpghttp://cdn.arstechnica.net/civ5%20ci...ment%20ars.jpg
That's Civ V's big problem; the interface is actually
pretty crappy (I think - and I'm not rebooting the computer to boot up Civ IV to check, so forgive me if I'm wrong, that the unit command buttons (of which there were a lot more of) all had the keyboard shortcut mentioned when you moused over them - of course, Civ IV also had a manual with a full list anyway...!), emphasising big, pointless graphics, as if it assumes everyone playing it is unable to read small words or something. Perhaps they thought they were designing for mobiles and not PC monitors...