So, a long time ago in the early 00s I was still a kid. And like most kids fortunate enough to have a father in their lives, we had a bonding activity. Unfortunately, neither my father or I were any good at sports, so we got something else.
After he got done teaching me how to use MS Excel, he showed me how to play Civilization III. Apparently he had played a little bit of Civ 1 when it first came out (a bootleg disc from his telling of it, since they couldn't get the real thing in his home country), he was surprised to find Civ 3 on sale at my school's book fair. So, we purchased it, and that's how it all got started.
I remember very fondly that we almost always played Babylon. My dad and I weren't really aware of expansion packs at the time, and he reasoned that Babylon was sorta kinda close enough to our country of origin (Turkey) that it was good enough. At the time it was sorta like me watching him and giving him goals while he was the one actually accomplishing stuff. We played off and on for many years until Civ 4 came out (at yet (not) another book fair) and I purchased it.
Again, we had no DLCs, but this time the Mongols were in the base game without it and we had the benefit of two leaders! Kublai, and Genghis. I always preferred Genghis while my dad preferred Kublai. It was probably this that lead me to my warlord tendencies. Around this time, my sister had grown big enough to be aware that we were playing civ but she was still too small to actually get into it. Civ 4 we played a lot less of than civ 3.
And in 2010, Civ 5 came out! I was the one watching the updates for this one quite a bit. Thanks to my dad's early influence I had developed into quite the young gamer, and for the first time the Ottomans were a base civ! I remember I only played a little bit thanks to early civ 5 clunkiness, but once Brave New World came out I was finally aware that Expansion Packs were a thing and bought it. That just about changed everything. A year or so afterwards, my friends were all talking about this thing called Reddit and I joined up, soon after finding the civ subreddit. That's where I got my exposure to mods for the first time, and finally got to the release of Civ 6, where my enthusiasm for the franchise really hit it's peak. By this point I was finally in college, and I actually ended up getting my whole dorm involved. I remember playing a big final game of civ 5 as Yu the Great (Xia) to close out my experience with civ 5, finally winning the game during a late night. We were running an experiment for an extracurricular project, and in the parts where I was waiting around for a result I was playing turns. Once civ 6 came back, I found that was a good decision: I just couldn't go back to civ 5. It felt pale and dull and lifeless by comparison, and the four city meta felt too restrictive.
Civ 6 is where I finally got really fussy about history. I fell into the modder community thanks to a reddit thread linking to the Civ Modding Helpline discord at some point, and I started up a design for something called Thule lead by some guy named Dave at the suggestion of one Senshidenshi. I didn't yet develop the coding skills to make it (though I was rapidly learning) so I started mostly by making text for other modders. There were suspicions (fears) that I would be brought into the orbit of TPangolin and become a part of CLs. Ultimately, that didn't happen and I'm all the better for it. I was eventually dubbed a lad, and my skills increased: I learned art from Leugi and DarthKyofu, code from anyone I could steal code from (mostly JFD and Sukritact), design from Chrisy15. But weirdly, I seemed to be the modder that enjoyed playing civ 6 the most - usually I ended up just sort of playing during test games without a care in the world. Alas, that's probably why so many of my mods have non-functional components and part of why my grades suffered so much. This is also where I got really into Mesoamerican, Ancient Near East, and Mercantile/Naval history. Surprisingly I actually ran into a lot of people who played civ 6 during my aerospace classes, and someone actually recognized me by my mods. That was a weird one. A lot of the modders recognize me as an unrepentant warmonger, but I don't think that's exactly true. Yeah, I can be pretty conquery, but usually by the midgame I blossom into an enlightened despotic trader king, whose benevolent rule protects the city states in my orbit: all those that are on my continent. No, there were never any other civilizations on my continent, why do you ask? Nothing suspicious about it. London has always been a Japanese city. And these city-states have always been mine.
My love of civ has been with me for most of my life, and just this past Thanksgiving while my family was cooking we all played a hot seat game of civ 6 against each other. It ended in my sister ragequitting after my Vietnamese pikemen decimated her Scythian horde. It was probably an extreme reaction in retrospect, but she did attack and conquer one of my vassal city-states. She tried to justify it by me having brutally conquered Brazil early on, but it was like the ancient era, man. She also got pretty peeved at her boyfriend because he didn't attack me (I permitted him to conquer one of my other vassal citystates in exchange). While we were all murdering each other my dad ended up winning as Maori, which I still contend is a badly designed and badly balanced civ. Nothing lasts forever, and between my career and my relationship I don't have a lot of time to mod civ anymore (or tend to my older mods, sadly). And besides, my standard of quality for my mods has ballooned so high that it's become hard to make them. Civ 7 definitely looks to be a weird one, and I'm skeptical if it's ever going to replace civ 6 for me like civ 6 did for civ 5. But clearly based on this long account of close to 25 years of gaming, this franchise and I have stood the test of time.