it's awesome. but I have played only one game in Prince and other two in lower levels, so I can't really talk about balancing issues yet. I'm not really in love yet with the focus on Gold, but as I played on easier levels I could just build mostly everything without worrying about maintenance.
as I played Civ IV for one year, and after that I only played Fall from Heaven, it's also tough to judge the research progression, for example. but I have noticed that with the difficulty bonuses it's fairly easy to progress the tech tree, and people playing on the higher levels (which give the bonuses to the AI) report the AI getting into medieval era too early.
I didn't like the post-game screen, it only shows the demographics which is the most useless stats, your rank (which won't appear in the Hall of Fame) and a VERY summarized score screen. I think that the domination victory is pretty stupid too, it should be total conquest instead of just capturing the capital, and the other ones are too much focused in the end game (but this might be the FFH fanboy in me, because FFH doesn't have any modern era).
about the diplomacy and lack of the modifiers, I think that they could have made it similar to the City States diplo, which you know that are hostile, friendly or neutral towards you. or with wording similar to Civ2, "receptive", "furious", etc. but I'm not really angry about that because I didn't notice a lack of consistency regarding their actions.
there are a number of minor bugs and other stuff that could be improved, but nothing that stops me from playing the game so far. and it's good that it's Civ V and not Civ IV on hexes.
