Yesterday, I played civilization revolution for the first time and it is way much better than Civ IV. There is still a few flaws like diplomacy is very limited, but in general, it plays much better.
Anyways, what I want to get at is that in CivRev, the way the buildings are designed makes each of them not necessarily essential in each of your city. In Master of magic, constructing buildings takes a lot of time and most of the time, there is no interest in not having them all. Which creates a huge list of buildings to build before a city is ready to do other stuff. This can be annoying with races which has a lot of building. Here is an comparison example:
In MOM, the "sawmill" building gives you 25% production bonus if you have a forest around your city. Unless you do not have any forest, there is no reason not to build this building. Generally, have a city with 1 forest tile is relatively easy especially when you have the change terrain spell. So you are going to build a saw mill in each of your cities.
To make the "Sawmill" works like a CivRev building it would look like this: "Each forest tile double their production value".
In this case, if you do not have much forest tile, it does not worth loosing time making a sawmill becasue the production bonus you would gain are very limited. But if you have nothing else to do, or if your production in this city is so low that you want to get any bonus possible then you could build the sawmill.
In CivRev, there are many upgrades that works by terrain, like the trade post which add 2 points of trade in deserts. If you have no or few deserts, it's useless. Libraries double the research gain from trade if set in research. Since a city can either produce gold OR research, if you do not intend to do some research with this city, there is no interest to build a library. There is also barrack which allow creating veteran units. If you don't intend to build units because for example, it is a low production city, you don't need any barrack.
But in MOM, you need a barrack in all your cities because it unlocks access to units. While in CivRev, You have access to all units. You need a library in each of your cities, because it gives you a free 2 points of knowledge. etc.
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Here are other elements that makes CivRev Pleasurable.
No unrest/health/Starving: In all civ games, I always ended up with the problem that population is unhappy and in order to make them happy, you must not make them work which reduce the food you produce and make you city starve. In CivRev, there is no way a city can stave. I think if you have 0 Food, it simply do not grow, but you can never starve.
No Maintenance: You do not play for army and building maintenance. The advantage, is that you can build without worrying if you will have the ressources to maintain it. I remember in some Civ/Mom/Moo games that I did not build certain buildings because since the maintenance cost was so high, it would place my city in deficit (In Orion 2, that was the case for food replicators which had a 10 credits maintenance)
The disadvantage, is that you could build an infinite army size. Also if you lose cities, it does not force you to lose military units since you do not need to maintain them by supplying food. So it's hard to destabilize a player by capturing key cities since he has nothing to maintain. It only prevent him from brigning back new units.
