It's also worth remembering that Civ games are mostly judged in hindsight.

By the time Civ 5 came out in 2010, most series fans would have been playing fully-expanded Civ 4, with all the rebalancing and new content that entails. Anyone who liked vassal states, Great Persons, corporations, or the complex space and culture victories was going off expansion content.

First-release Civ 5 made some interesting alterations to the series, but had a lot of implementation issues. Unbalanced wonders, AI bugginess, and a late-game slog often made it feel bad regardless of the design choices. BNW-era Civ 5 brought a lot more logic to the tech tree, smoothed out broken features like "one free technology", and made the late game vastly more interesting.

Honestly, I suspect we've only recently gotten to a 'fair' comparison of 4 and 5, with both of them feeling like classics in light of BE and 6.

I have very mixed feelings about Civ 5 after ~200 hours. I started with BNW but it still never felt quite finished – the tech pacing & unit balancing always felt a bit off; the AI, trade, & diplomacy felt unfinished; and multiplayer was a flaming dumpster fire (we had to scrub a game a hundred turns in when it deadlocked, and their support took 3 weeks to say they didn’t support Macs and close the ticket (it was running on Windows)).

There was so much polish in other areas that it was odd that the rough edges were never sanded down. The bad AI & especially diplomacy were one of the most immersion-breaking experiences and unlike some of the other tweaks they haven’t been well solved by community modders.

Excellent point about how they are judged in hindsight.

It's funny seeing Civ V so praised, because it was a decisive game when it was released. The AI bugs you mentioned were occasionally annoying, but overall I loved V - the combat changes alone made the game better then IV, but I always felt like a bit of an outcast when people would rag on the game.

I feel similarly about VI now. I really enjoy the depth added to the city changes and how they cleaned up the UI. I hope it gets a similar hindsight appreciation as V.

>Honestly, I suspect we've only recently gotten to a 'fair' comparison of 4 and 5, with both of them feeling like classics in light of BE and 6.

Let's just pretend BE and 6 never happened.

6 still has time to mature, I think the district system is neat and make you think about the geography of you empire more, but it defenitly needs some tuning. Also they really need to get a handle on the AI.

I always find this so weird -- the tech world is rife with machine learning and AI, but the big game studios can't produce a good single-player opponent even though it's year after year at the top of the wishlist. Note that even smaller studios (like Paradox) and hobbyists (like Vox Populis for Civ5) can outpace the mainline Civ AI experience. It's nothing short of embarrassing for 2K Games.

I've never understood this - it's like they insisted on some bizarre approach to AI creation (a trained neural net or something?) and then flatly refused to add fixes by hand.

I'm not sure how else you explain screwups like "will trade 9 gold now for 1 gold-per-turn over 10 turns". It's like they understood the concept of a loan but got the system backwards.

Or military strength judgements, which are blatantly just running on "number of currently active units". You can be feared for having lots of spearmen in the Industrial Era, but the ability to crank out 10 high-end infantry per turn isn't even present in the assessment.

It's a bizarre and embarrassing weakness for a series most people play in single player. These aren't grand strategic errors, they're "make the number bigger/smaller" errors that random modders handle vastly better than 2K.

>The general consensus is that Civ 4 is the series' high point. I prefer Civ 5 myself, though. It set out to streamline the Civ formula, which led to a game a lot of purists thought was too simplified but I found quicker to play and more enjoyable.

5 is a perfected 4. 4 Will forever be the GOAT because of Leonard Nimoy's narration, but 5 is technically the better game IMO.