Sorry, but that's nonsense. The Civ series from the beginning had the Spaceship victory - that basically worked like it still does today. It had government types like Republic or Democrazy that actually forced you to keep peace by a senate that could veto war declarations and it had wonders like the Great Wall or the UN that forced your opponents to make and keep peace. So it was always possible (and intended by the game designer) to play a perfectly peaceful game in any of the Civ titles.
Republic and Democracy allowed the senate to veto a range of decisions, not just war; the reason the latter sticks in the mind is precisely because of Civ I's military focus - not being able to go to war when you want was a serious strategic limitation.
The Great Wall and UN worked the same way as one another: they forced a civ to offer peace during negotions. To force peace, you have to be at war to begin with, and only one civ can get the benefit of either. You surely aren't seriously suggesting a game isn't a wargame because it has an option to make peace treaties? If so, I'll get right on that claim against Creative Assembly - their Total War name is clearly in breach of the Trades Descriptions Act. Why is forcing peace a good thing in a wargame? Because you may be losing, perhaps? You may have had war declared when you aren't ready, or when you're already at war? These are not the considerations of a peaceful builders' game - there's a reason Civ had the Great Wall and Sim City didn't. Both these Wonders were time-limited and, as above, restricted to a single civ each - the Great Wall became obsolete with Gunpowder, the UN didn't become available until the Industrial Era. Civs could happily declare war on anyone else (and invariably did).
Yes, it had the spaceship victory. No, this wasn't a peaceful alternative to domination - it was the only victory condition available that involved anything less than
wiping out every other civ on the map. There is plainly a huge scope for warfare between these two extremes (even combat-focused Master of Orion had as its main victory condition a 'science victory' that, while it did explicitly require combat - you get the best weapons tech, then attack the Guardian of Orion - didn't require you to wipe out any of your competitors).
I don't know if you ever played Civ I or are just theorising, but the game simply wouldn't let you play a fully peaceful game even if you wanted to - the Great Wall and UN were valuable precisely because the AI would go to war with you. You would need to go to war to achieve your own objectives - take out specific rivals (the "peaceful" spaceship victory made explicit provision for destroying a rival's spaceship by capturing their capital), and as in any Civ game grab the land you need to expand. Your argument is akin to looking at the Total War games' victory condition "hold 20 provinces" and thinking "that's nice, maybe I can just ask nicely and the AI will give them to me - nothing in the victory condition
says that war is involved" (indeed in Shogun 2 you can take many provinces by bribing them with agents rather than going to war).
Simply as it's designed, the Civ game engine has never allowed for any significant 'sanctions' against rivals that don't involve going to war - if another player is in the lead, what can you do to stop them? You can attack them, or ... no, you can attack them and that's basically it. Since Civ III introduced the idea of strategic resources, you can disrupt enemy plans by going to war and then pillaging and sitting on their resource, or capturing the resource city, but back in Civ I conquest was the only answer. A game designed as a peaceful race to the finish would not feature this kind of design limitation - it would feature more ways to get ahead by building or negotiation, or such features as embargos (not handled well in Civ V, but at least actually there). The AIs certainly weren't programmed with any understanding of alternatives - if they saw you as a threat, they didn't quietly tech rush or trade for valuable technologies, they threw giant stacks at you.
I am an academic so I do research on topics that I analyze (e.g., Civilization and other games).
Sorry, but this is a meaningless comment if your academic specialty has nothing to do with Civ V. I'm a biologist, but that doesn't have any obvious bearing on the topic at hand, and your assertion that Civ was not designed as a wargame was just that - an assertion, without any supporting analysis. If you provide the analysis, then it's of no consequence what your job happens to be - the analysis can be taken on its own merits. An analysis of Civ's intent entails looking at its design features (such as the ratio of military units to non-military buildings), its AI programming, and details of the sort I discussed in my response to gps above.
Sid Meier has explained what I posted in many interviews. Go watch some or read some and learn rather than adopting a smart attitude that attempts to deny what the creator of the game has stated.
Links would be helpful in that regard.
To reiterate, Civ was never intended to be a war game. It was (and is) intended to be a game where you create rather than destroy. Sid literally said that the inspiration for creating Civ I was to make a game that allowed players to create rather than destroy because all the games he saw at that time were designed to destroy things via combat of various types.
Which is a better source of authority, do you suppose - a retrospective comment by the designer or a game that, as designed, has a victory condition that requires total destruction of the rest of the world, detailed military technological progression, and AIs that force warfare of some degree?
Re: 4x and eXpansion... no, expansion does NOT mean aggression. It means "expansion" and nothing more. Expansion means that you will discover new things and experience new environments, including possibly meeting new people.
Not in this context: the 4xes are 'eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate'. Discovering new things, new environments, and new civilizations is where the 'eXplore' part comes in. eXpand is much more specifically land grabbing, and not necessarily into unoccupied territory.
If people want a wargame, there are plenty out there. This is a similar problem with so-called "real time strategy" games... "real time" and "strategy" don't really go together in the same sentence, let alone as a game genre. Official chess matches have a specific set time but are not speed chess (i.e., real time) and chess is one of the oldest, well established strategy games.
Ironically given your argument, chess is also fundamentally a wargame - it has nothing to it beyond tactical positioning (a lot of pedants can get very sniffy about describing chess as a strategy rather than a tactical game, particularly in the chess community itself) and "destroying things via combat". The best chess matches will usually feature more of the former than the latter, but it's very unusual to have a 'bloodless' chess game and tactical positioning itself is part of warfare - a wargame isn't all about combat. This may itself have been what Sid was getting at when decrying games that are just about destroying things via combat - most of the intended targets of his comment were probably not wargames (not an especially popular genre on computers in 1991).
This same problem occurs with modern role playing games where "role playing" has taken a back seat to "real time action" or even been eliminated entirely except for marketing. Role playing requires outcomes to be based on a character's abilities, not the player's, something that makes or breaks any actor who auditions, just as one example.
"Role-playing" has rarely been a literally meaningful label in the way it's been applied to games. The name was of course popularised by the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, which was pretty much exclusively combat-focused. The idea of a role-playing game where the player has complete freedom to invent the role they play is one oddity: as you say, an actor auditions for a part, which they then interpret within the constraints set by that character, they don't invent a character of their own that lets them do what they are instinctively inclined to do anyway. Computer RPGs that put you in the role of a given character are closer to the spirit of a 'true' RPG than the tabletop genre, but as you say most seem to boil down to real-time combat dictated by player reaction speed. This is not just a modern phenomenon: Baldur's Gate had real-time combat that depended on player reactions as well.
It's all rather silly because it actually undermines variety in the industry. Everything becomes real time action (or turn based combat where any other strategic approach is neglected or undermined by the game mechanics). Civ has enough problems with combat being the best approach to any situation. There is absolutely no need to exacerbate the problem any further than it already is.
I fully agree with this, however Civ has this problem precisely because "combat being the best approach to any situation" is the way the series was designed from its inception.
I especially love when AI starts taunting me that my culture is terrible, while my culture is dominant over his.
