I really do not understand the appeal of 5, though clearly it has appeal as it has tons of players active on Steam. 4 was the pinnacle for me - exploring and finding "that amazing city site". 5 for me... all cities are 'balanced' to be identical, and don't even vary that much if you turn them off. Every game kinda plays out the same. I have to uninstall 4 because I see the dawn light appearing through the window. 5 just bores me.

I'm also not usually one to complain about DLC, but 5 also seems particularly grubby in that regard.

Indeed, I feel like a combination of the "amazing city sites" being already occupied by city-states as well as how terrain bonuses seemed weaker, especially production bonus terrain, made exploration in 5 less exciting.

Personally, I prefer V's combat mechanics over IV's, and V sure looks prettier.

The one unit per stack thing really shows it's flaws when you have lots of large civs fighting across a landmass though. The land can become 'clogged' with units to the point where it can be hard to move around properly.

Couple that with Civ V having possibly the worst AI of any Civ game to date and it's a recipe for frustration in many cases. The AI civs would never use naval units properly and it made a large portion of the game easily expoitable.

Civ 4 was the other extreme, where with many large civs you would end up with the 'stacks of doom' on a single tile containing dozens of units. Obviously this wasn't ideal either.

Some sort of unit stacking limit would have worked I think. Some mods exist that allow you to stack between 2-5 units on a single tile in Civ 5 but I'm not sure how well they work or how the paltry AI copes with the change.

Still, I always felt like stacking by combined arms would have been better, like a stack of 5 units limited to 2 inantry units, a cavalry or vehicle unit, a ranged unit and a siege weapon.

I always found it amusing that in 5, archers ('missile') had a longer range than any gunpowder longarm ('infantry'), from muskets to modern rifles. I understand the gameplay concept, but it's just stupid when some ye olde archers can hit your riflemen and they can't hit back. I actually think that the transposition of unit tactics onto the world map doesn't make good sense at all; it's an ersatz experience.

not sure if it's just because I'm older and less into gaming, but civ5 seems markedly less fun as a game than civ1 and civ2 were. I just couldn't get into it, and I used to spend entire nights on the older games.

It's not your age; tons of people don't like Civ V. The game has a serious problem when it comes to the marginal utility of individual moves. There's way, way more things to do in the game but most of those are obvious moves in the execution of your larger strategy. This is not a good recipe for fun!

Alpha Centauri was always my favourite game in the series but these days I find myself playing a lot of Master of Magic, a game with way more tactical and strategic variety than any of the Civ games.

Civ V completely redid movement. The prior games would allow you to stack units, so you'd end up with a 1-tile "stack of doom"; later-game fights would be reduced to these stacks of doom wearing each other out instead of tactical play. Additionally, making a unified front was difficult because of square tiles (a unit could move in 8 directions).

Civ V changed it so that only a single unit of a given type (military vs utility) could occupy a tile, and switched from a square grid to a hex grid. Individual moves may matter less, but the combat game benefitted greatly.

Yeah, I was really excited about the changes to movement and combat back when Civ V was first announced. After playing the game, my enthusiasm disappeared completely. The AI completely sucks at positioning its units correctly. The widespread simplifications to the economic model (global happiness) dumb down the city building to a large degree. The vast majority of the decisions you make in the game have now become dull, trite, obvious.

It's not really even the same game any more. Like Trigger's Broom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUl6PooveJE

I feel the same way, and have been playing Civ since about 92.

One of the reasons (I think) that Civ 5 is not quite as much fun is the fact that the City no longer really has that sense of individuality.

In previous versions, the City was IT. Each one had its own production, trade, corruption, waste, polution, etc. It had personality! If a particular city had trouble, it could shut down or become extremely inefficient at production. The new game doesn't have this, only the aggregate of anything matters.

For me the game lost a bit of its personality, and that's why I like the older ones better.

I've played Civilization 1 and 2 and Alpha Centauri when I was a kid, kind of liked 3 and 4 even more, but they were not such a big deal for me anymore. Had a long pause I didn't play at all, and then picked up the fifth installment with the Brave New World DLC. And oh my, how good that is... I really recommend to get the game with that DLC, it adds very important aspects to the game, like religion, tourism, trade routes and the world congress. For the first time ever the cultural victory is super fun to play, no need to fight wars if you don't want to.

Now I have the Beyond Earth with Rising Tide waiting for me, but that game doesn't scale that nicely to my television... And oh, btw, Civilization 5 played with the Steam Controller comfortably from the sofa is a very nice experience.

I second that. Plain Civ V is just ok but Brave New World improved the game so much that it's my favourite game in the series (and most played by far)

I also don't really like 5 and I think 2 was by far the most balanced one and fun to play. SMAC had an amazing story and varied factions but the replayability just wasn't there for me.

Recently I've found Endless legend and that is a bit of cross between SMAC and Civ 5. Very pretty but a lot of depth too, different strategies possible, varied factions, you HAVE to make custom units (there are only 5 by default, each has ~6 slots for one of 20 pieces of equipment). The combat is completely fucked up though.

EDIT: oh yeah and another thing I kinda like about it is how there is no civilopedia or good tutorial so you have to figure stuff out

You know what I miss? Civilization: Call to Power. Its balance was always a little wobbly, but I liked dragging my civilization into the Diamond Age, building cities in space, bombarding the enemy from orbit and taking out their capitol with nanites.

This is still my favorite of all of them.

Did you ever play 4? Was the best one, IMO.

I never was a Civ player, but through involvement in a different gaming community (Descent) I ended up as friends with the guy (Bob "Sirian" Thomas) who led the Civ IV alpha-testing effort. He noticed that they didn't have any inexperienced testers to look for the sorts of things that would make the game hard to understand for new players, so he asked me if I'd be willing to get involved.

In the middle of all of the balance tweaks the expert players were calling for, the devs took the time to listen to my newbie feedback along the lines of "every so often this chart showing political alliances pops up, but I have no idea how to trigger it intentionally" and they added easy-access buttons to the HUD for me. At one point I counted something like a dozen minor UI improvements that had come out of me saying "I don't understand what I'm doing". They, of course, didn't make any game-balance tweaks for me because I had no business even attempting to comment on game balance.

The fact that they knew not merely to listen, but what types of feedback to listen to from which testers, really made the game shine. They listened to experts when it came to strategy, and noobs when it came to discoverability, and all sorts of players when it came to general aesthetics and coolness. IMO a lot of game-design efforts could learn from that.

4 was by far the best 'classic' Civ experience. That being said, I think the one unit per tile change in Civ5 was needed and added a lot of strategy to actually fighting. My hope in Civ6 is that tiles are smaller and that cities and other features can take up multiple tiles.

I tried playing V. Probably spent 15 hours on it to make sure it was the game and not me. Finally decided that V and I just would never get along, and I went back to IV. Best of the series, imho.

Agreed. Civ 4 with Beyond the Sword was the pinnacle of the series I think.

Thousands of hours I lost in that game.

I prefer Alpha Centauri and Civ 3.

MOO2 was much more to my liking. (I still play it)

Civ end game are just brutally boring and just never really wanted to finish them. The start and middle were the best parts.

I agree. I like 5, in all the ways that it's different- but I always feel like 5 has a long expanse of seemingly meaningless turns until all of a sudden things get good. Then it will have another long lull between interesting events.

Maybe in a way, the team finally got their model of Civilization true to real life? :)

The Brave New World expansion really fixed this. With the world congress, trading and collecting art, there are no more meaningless turns in the game. Definitely try it out.

I bought all the expansions in a Steam sale (I think it was like $5 or $15 for all of them, couldn't press buy fast enough). You're definitely right about BNW having a lot more to do between turns. I kind of forgot that World Congress was part of the expansion- I can't remember playing Civ 5 without it. It's one of my favorite parts of the game, though I do wish it was a little easier or possible to get other civs to form a voting bloc.

It's not that difficult. You just need to have something another civ wants, and trade them for their vote on an issue. Also, you can form your own voting bloc by allying city-states.

4 removed it's anchor to the real world. I wasn't playing on earth anymore, along the tapestry of human history and invention, against the great leaders of every epoch.

It's just some fantasy land composed of abstract references to the real world, and I find it hard to care.

Most "expert-level" players seem to think so, as well. That said, the rest of the series are not at all bad games.

no, missed everything between alpha centauri and civ5. I just picked civ5 up out of nostalgia when the humble bundle ran it.

Civ 5 is definitely the weakest game in the series. I think Civ 4/Beyond the Sword was the highest point the series has yet reached.

That was my first impression, but I've actually found that I enjoy Civ 5 more. It's more dynamic and polished, and they've removed exactly these aspects of the game that I used to find annoying.

No Baba Yetu, though :(

I felt that way before the Civ5 expansions. Bounced right off of it. With the expansions, though, I enjoy Civ5 quite a lot. It is emphatically not the same game as Civ4BTS, which I still play pretty regularly too, but it's a pretty decent spin on the formula as far as I'm concerned.

I loved Civilization: Beyond Earth, except I could not stand the 500 turn limit. It killed the longevity of the game for me.

there's a lot of streamlining that happened, so it depends on why you played civ

If you played the older civs for the micromanagement aspects, then civ5 probably disappoints. I play Civ for the "macro" (I really enjoy watching my civ grow, and don't really do much in terms of strategising), and I enjoy Civ 5 a lot.

Civ2 was a world of railroads. I always "fondly" remember the games for my getting nuked by Ghandi or Lincoln

Are you my twin? Playing my pirated copy of Civ 1 in the basement at 12 or so most have occupied hundreds of hours of my childhood. These days Civ 5 on the Mac almost brings me back.

I still play Civ 1 every now and then. I just love the aesthetic of it. It doesn't feel dated to me gameplay wise at all. I attribute much of my knowledge of history as a kid from reading the Civilopedia.

From my perspective Civ III was the best of the series however. I always loved building massive empires and Civ III was great for that.

Special mention to Civ: Call To Power where you could build underwater and space cities in the super advanced age. That was fun! I wish there was more of that.

I wanted to see if anyone mentioned Call To Power. That Civ had great concepts, I liked the soft revolutions you could cause with lawyers and religion. Might have to fire it up again.

Fall from heaven mod was also an all time favorite. So much stuff.

Another nice thing in CtP was the videos you got of each tech when you finished researching it. Felt like a bigger accomplishment than today where you just get a historical quote.

I didn't have a computer that could play civ 1, so I had to go to a friendly family's house who kindly allowed me to come over and play because the dad was equally addicted to Civilization. Whole saturday afternoons would pass this way.

Oh my. I wish I could always do this on the plane. In reality, I rarely have the time to do that "full immersion", but when I do, I love it.

I started with Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and Civ I, and kept playing them until recently. I love these games.

In the exact same boat, or plane I suppose. Every time a trans-oceanic trip is in order this is my go to time killer. I started playing Civ 1 back in the Amiga days and when I was young it took me a while to sort out what the game was all about - I'm glad I stuck with it thought, as over the years it has been an absolute joy to experience the new versions. I have to say, that on the Amiga the games did seem to take a lot longer, I suppose it is because once the game got sufficiently complex the time for the computer turns ended up ever longer - not so much an issue on modern laptops.

I still haven't really been able to make the jump from Civ 5 to Civ:BE. BE's civ and tech choices somehow manage to feel painfully samey and confusingly unorganized all at the same time.

Civ 5 polished most of the core Civ mechanics (With only a few regressions).

Civ:BE is an unfocused mess.

I weirdly haven't even tried BE. It's like I'm worried I'm going to break the spell.

I was super excited for it, but I couldn't get into the future tech tree.

It was hard to determine what tech to reasearch and if I needed "whatever" what tech to research, since I didn't have any historical reference to draw from.

Also one of the new victory conditions was difficult to keep track of and kept sneaking up on me multiple times.

I got a good 40 hours of play out of BE, but I'm back to 5 now. It essentially felt like a big scenario rather than a whole new game.

Ultimately, the dynamics of playing historical civilizations offers a lot more diversity and interest than a single sci-fi game.