Why do I think the focus has changed?
Lets see compared to civ 4:
removed - religion, tech trading ,health
simplified - improvements, happiness
added - hexes, ranged attacks, strategic resource use, city states
I do have a problem with this change as some of the most interesting civ games I had contained very little fighting.
But the real problem is in how warfare works. I think that since adding things like giant death robots was necessary things might not turn out too good.