It was fall 1992, and I was in my first year of college. My best friend had a Macintosh laptop (a dark gray plastic thing with the old rainbow Apple logo - it was the John Sculley era) and he was raving about this new game he had - the original
Civilization. His laptop could only display black and white, so the graphics were a bit hard to look at, but we were hooked. The game got much better when I played my own copies on computers with color monitors - both Mac and PC.
In Civ I you would see an animation of your troops marching into an enemy city after conquering it. In the diplomacy leader screens you could tell how strong and how advanced a civilization was from how many advisors stood behind the leader and by the way they were dressed. Stalin was the Russian leader and Mao Zedong was the Chinese leader. Stalin was just as aggressive as Shaka or Genghis Khan - if you saw him nearby you had to prepare for war. The Pyramids had a weird effect - you instantly got the most advanced government possible (Democracy). So you were a pharaoh running for re-election...
I have played all the versions of the game since then.
Civilization II was a quantum leap in sophistication, especially the graphics. They had a visual theme that tied everything together, based on 19th century engravings. There were two leaders for every civilization, male and female, and that helped keep things fresh as you didn't see the same leaders every time. Some of the diplomacy leader screens had stylized art inspired by that civilization's real life art, like Japanese prints or Celtic manuscript illumination. There was a scenario-building and modding method, but it was pretty clumsy. There were overpowered Wonders like Leonardo da Vinci's Workshop, which instantly upgraded all your military for free, and oddities like Women's Suffrage, which made it easier to wage war as a democracy. (How much wood and iron and cement do you need to "build" votes for women? Can a building contractor give you an estimate on that? What is this, I don't even...
) The AI was even stupider than that in Civ V. Wimpy backward civs would try to threaten you into giving them gold or tech, and if that didn't work they would try to lay a guilt trip on you - "Your decadent lifestyle makes us ill, our people demand that you share 500 gold with us". Basically every AI personality was like North Korea. Even so I still loved that game, especially the fantasy and sci-fi variants introduced in Test of Time. The Wonder movies and the animated advisors are sorely missed, especially the "Elvis" happiness advisor - if you were doing well on happiness he would tell you "Sire, the people - they can't help fallin' in love with you" LOL.
Civilization III was fun, but I was always annoyed by the way the corruption mechanic made it impossible to do anything with cities planted far from your capital. Overseas empires like those in real history were impossible. Civ III still has a place in my heart because it had the best, and easiest, building/modding mode that was built right into the game. Sure, you can do more with IV and V, but only if you know programming pretty well. Civ I through III also had two happiness mechanics we could use today: citizens could be designated "entertainers" to maintain local city happiness, and all religious buildings gave happiness.
There was a board game called
Civilization published in the UK (1980) and USA (1981) which may or may not have influenced Sid Meier in developing the first of his computer versions, but I never got to play it.