I'm going to go against the grain here and say that you should get Civ II. For one thing, it has the most well-designed combat system, so it's the least susceptible to "spearman defeats tank" syndrome. Secondly, it's not nearly as complex as later Civ games, which makes the learning curve quite a bit shallower; you don't have to worry about culture, religion, promotion trees, or the fifty different kinds of terrain improvements that you can build and which ones can be built where. Third, it goes for realism instead of being stupid and cartoony. Foreign leaders are portrayed with actual photographs, paintings, mosaics, etc., and your advisors are live flesh-and-blood humans brought to you through the magic of full-motion video. One of them is an Elvis impersonator, too. It also retains the idea that Wonders of the World should come in groups of seven (one of those "well, duh" things that the later games have a habit of forgetting). What's most important, though, is the SCENARIOS. Conflicts in Civilization and Fantastic Worlds have, bar none, the best scenarios of any Civ game, from the historical (the Crusades, feudal Japan, the Napoleonic era, etc.) to Atlantis to the colonization and terraforming of Mars to the one in which biker gangs, mutants, robots, and dinosaurs are fighting for control of Earth in the aftermath of global thermonuclear war. Creating your own scenarios is also about a bazillion times easier in Civ II than in the other entries, though you can't deviate from the game's core design quite so much.