I quite like SMAC, but in many ways it's hard to go back to and I don't think I'd recommend it to a newcomer. Civ provides a certain kind of historical grounding--like I said in another post, Pottery implies Granary, which implies better food storage, which implies growth, in a way that Recycling Tanks don't off-the-bat.

I think I'd probably recommend Civ4 or Civ5 as a starting point. Civ4 is the "old school" style, Civ5 is a very boardgamey experience. Colonization, modulo the historical issues I described in my other post, could be a good fit for the more economically-minded.

It's funny, I liked SMAC exactly because it did not have any historical baggage. This allowed it to have more "pure" leaders and historical projects (I can still quote Prokhor Zakharov and Chairman Yang by heart) in a way that regular Civ never could, because historical leaders just can't embody an ideal quite as purely as a fictional character. It also allowed for a "story", even though in hindsight it was pretty thin, which is not really possible in regular civ because we pretty much know how it ends...

Sure. I'm saying, SMAC made much more sense to me after playing a Civ game to which I could draw analogies.

Oddly I could never get into SMAC.