Civilization IV Annoyances

A relatively short list of things that I've found in Civilization IV that tick me off.

Colours

Civilization colours are too similar. Especially if there are a couple civs next to other with varying shades of blue it's really hard to tell them apart. I guess in a game with 16 civs this is hard to get around but if there's only five then why are three of them blue?

Camera

The zoom level isn't saved with the saved games so I have to adjust it every time I resume one. For some reason examining a city when a unit is selected moves the camera back to the active unit when you exit the city view – seeing as the camera "slides" rather than "jumps" this results in you have a camera flying all over the place when you're trying to examine a city to find out where to move a unit to.

City Switching

"The people of X are rightly asking to join to Y empire. Doing so will make Z happy with us." But … I founded the city, it's on a different continent to the Y empire and the population is 100% my own! Why would they want to switch?

Artificial Stupidity

Mostly to do with the diplomacy screen. If a civilization offers me, say, Rice for Wheat then why would they say the deal isn't good enough if I instead offer them Wheat and 200 gold? It makes no sense whatsoever. And why would a civilization continually declare war on me every few centuries, even though every time I take a few more of their cities, I have clearly superior military forces and they apparently like me? Maybe it has something to do with that fact that this same civilization was upset about one of my spies being caught in one of their cities 1600 hundred years later? I'm no sure no-one who holds a grudge for that long is entirely sane.

Religions

I can kind of understand why monastaries become obsolete with Scientific Method but unfortunately you still need to have built them to train missionaries to spread religions. Why? It basically means that if you discover Scientific Method and haven't built any monasteries then you're going to have a really hard time spreading religions (which I like doing as it's an easy way to increase culture). I'd suggest the proper way to handle this is to allow any city with a certain religion to build missionaries of that type (after discovering Scientific Method) or to move the missionary production ability to temples. Further to this, there's no guarantee that a missionary will successfully spread a religion – I would have thought having the Free Religion civic would make the chance of spreading 100% but apparently not.

Sounds

Whose idea was it to have the sound for war being declared be the same as the sound for peace being declared? Take a moment to think about how confusing that is…