Born in 1991. I started with Civ 2 playing on my truly pathetic PC back around an year after Civ 3 came out, which was way beyond my computer's reach. Even though I don't think I ever truly understood the rules of the game and mostly followed what my advisors told me, to this day my first game of Civ 2 was one of the most stunning gaming experiences of my life. When I was even younger my favourite game was Age of Empires. I would build my small base and advance through the ages all the while imagining I was ruling an actual civilization. Warfare didn't interest me nearly as much as setting up my base. And here comes a game that actually lets me build an entire civilization from scratch, found cities, engage in diplomacy (something I had never seen in a game before) and research dozens of technologies, and all of this spanning more than 6000 years? To say that it blew me away would be an understatement.
Over the years I grew tired of conventional RTS games and nowadays I play mostly old and new WRPGs and the occasional german adventure (those are just amazing btw), but I never got tired of Civ. And unless they completely ruin the series, I probably never will.
On a side note, does anyone else miss the throne room/castle building and city view from the 2D civs? I understand why those were removed and they never had any influence on the game whatsoever, but I just loved to watch my city grow and to decorate my throne room the way I like it, it really immersed me in the otherwise graphics-wise pretty bare-bone game.