RockPaperShotgun: These are your 50 favourite strategy games of all time (with Civ1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and Alpha Centauri)

[The_J]

RockPaperShotgun has published an article about the 50 favourite strategy games of all time, as voted by the community. As a community vote, there was no collapsing of a series to a single title, so Civ made it into the list with 5 titles (1, 2, 4, 5, 6), as well as Alpha Centauri. We wonder though how Civ3 was missed .
There seems to not have been other types of curation for this list, as e.g. StarCraft and it's addon Brood War made it separately on it.
The article doesn't forget to mention that sadly Civ1 and 2 cannot be purchased online right now .

An excerpt from the Civ5 part in the article:

DWDuck: Many strategic options from early to end game, all classes' units are effective for something but not too many to make it difficult to learn. Can micro a small army with great affect or play defensively and manage the battle field at large. Awesome stuff!

Don: Gaming comfort food. You can play in multiple styles in excruciating micromanagement or just coast through and watch history unfold. I never tire of playing this game even if the end-game is a bit of a slog at times. Just boot up history again with a new map, a new leader, and new opponents. A classic that keeps getting better.

quarrel: One... more... turn...

 

[Lord_Hill]

Shows you the impressive longevity of the series, civ 1 is the oldest game on the list (ran close by good old Dune ii), Civ 6 is on there too and still getting new content today! Will Civs 7 through 12 show up on another list in 30 years?

 

[Quintillus]

Two of the four "Sadly, nowhere" games are in the Civilization franchise. Hint, hint, Firaxis/Atari/2K/GOG...

 

[Lord_Hill]

Come on 2K, you could create a monster version of Chronicles if you bundle in all the quality of life/compatibility mods floating around these days.

Civ I with JCivEd's EXE patches integrated into a little launcher, Civ II MGE with UIA, ToT with TotPP, Civ III with C3X, Civ IV with BULL and BUG (or whatever people are using these days, I don't play that one as much anymore)

 

[gimley_gunner]

Good going with Alpha Centauri placed @17 well deserved just wish their was a remastered version.

As for Civ 1 it was certainly inovative for its time but Civ 3 is leagues above it

 

[GPR]

I played in a small number of games.
In my ranking strategy games CIv1 is on 1 place. Next is:
Football Manager, Rome Total War, Red Alert 1, Warcraft 2, Settlers 1, Shogun Total War 2
I think I never played in Civ above 1 even though I have civ 4 and I had civ 3.
I don't like the non-tiled civ with forced three-dimensional graphics. If there were mods changing the graphics civ above 1 to a simpler civ1, I would love to play.

 

[Blake00]

Colonization didn't make it in there either sadly.

Quick reminder to folks that we've setup a thread with links to the GoG voting threads for trying to get Civ1 & Civ2 (+ToT) back in digital stores here:

Vote for Sid Meier's Civilization I and II (MGE & Test of Time) to be added to GoG

SUMMARY: Amazingly the first 2 big Civilization games that started it all are still not legally sold in any digital stores (& can only be found on archive & dodgy warez sites) while other classic Microprose games and all later Civ games are all being digitally sold. Presumably the pre Firaxis...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[cuc]

Civ I with JCivEd's EXE patches integrated into a little launcher, Civ II MGE with UIA, ToT with TotPP, Civ III with C3X, Civ IV with BULL and BUG (or whatever people are using these days, I don't play that one as much anymore)

Except for all the legal conundrums of using decades-old fan mods with no clear licensing, whose authors may have disappeared off the net

If we are on things not too likely to happen:
One of Civ2's biggest if less talked-about features is the beautiful Civilopedia made in Macromedia Director, which MGE simply cut away. A "perfect" version of Civ2 will need to port it over. Or better, "remaster" Civ2 with higher res, full-color versions of its source stock images (and built-in modding functionality so that Test of Time is included as data mods).

Also you'll need to port the CivRev series to PC.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Well GOG manages to package quite a few of it's older titles with fan made mods, but yes, vanishingly unlikely in this case a man can dream though right? Indeed, original Civ 2 is underrated because being 16 bit makes it harder to play these days. But it's got the civilopedia and way more cd tracks than mge. It's the more polished product I'd say.

 

[Blake00]

Fortunately in the case of Civ2 both FoxAhead (Civ2 UIA) and TheNamelessOne (ToTPP) are still around working on their projects.. for now anyway.

 

[cuc]

Colonization didn't make it in there either sadly.

Quick reminder to folks that we've setup a thread with links to the GoG voting threads for trying to get Civ1 & Civ2 (+ToT) back in digital stores here:

Vote for Sid Meier's Civilization I and II (MGE & Test of Time) to be added to GoG

SUMMARY: Amazingly the first 2 big Civilization games that started it all are still not legally sold in any digital stores (& can only be found on archive & dodgy warez sites) while other classic Microprose games and all later Civ games are all being digitally sold. Presumably the pre Firaxis...

forums.civfanatics.com

Yeah, I was going to mention original Colonization, which is available on GOG & Steam, but only the DOS version IIRC - the original CD-ROM carries both DOS & Windows 3.1 versions, which have entirely separate art assets.

And Civ1 has 3 major iterations from MicroProse: DOS, Mac / Windows 3.0 (which is a port of CivMac), CivNet (which is based on the Windows version) with CD soundtrack. It'd be interesting to have at least DOS & CivNet together too.

 

[Blake00]

Yeah, I was going to mention original Colonization, which is available on GOG & Steam, but only the DOS version IIRC - the original CD-ROM carries both DOS & Windows 3.1 versions, which have entirely separate art assets.

And Civ1 has 3 major iterations from MicroProse: DOS, Mac / Windows 3.0 (which is a port of CivMac), CivNet (which is based on the Windows version) with CD soundtrack. It'd be interesting to have at least DOS & CivNet together too.

Yeah if you expand the 'Full Pitch' section in that thread I link to you'll see I go into the technicals of the different versions of Civ1 & Civ2, the 16bit app issue, and also use the Colonization situation as an interesting example of this being possible since Nightdive & Retroism somehow wrestled the classic Colonization license from either 2K or Atari and put the game back in stores. Unless the GoG guys make a deal with the WineVDM guys like they did with the DOSBox guys all those years ago it's unlikely we'll ever see CivWin, CivNet, ColWin, or vanilla non-MGE Civ2. But they could easily do CivDos, and with a bit of effort with the fan community get Civ2 MGE & ToT out there.

Oh and as side note yeah ColWin (Colonization for Windows) is awesome isn't it. It lacks the animation of the dos version but I love all the higher resolution redrawn assets it uses. I did a video about playing it in HD (in a VM as I didn't know about WineVDM back then) a year ago in this thread here:

[Col] - Civ Video Series Ep 02 - Colonization HD Tour + Col Fan Games, Mods & Scenarios

Civilization Genre HD Video Series: Welcome to the second episode in a huge video series years in the making where I show you how to play each classic Civilization genre game (including spinoffs like Colonization) in 1080p HD, while showing off some of their best scenarios and mods along with...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[Skybuck]

Civilization 3 initially was no fun, lack of civilizations/special units.
Civilization 3 conquest the world/complete was fantastic for multi player with all the additional races/civilizations/special units !

Unfortunately civ 3 may have had some sync-bug during multi player or caused by players activating cheats/hacking the game, most likely the later.

I have played 15 hour multi-player sessions, and even a few times 35 hours sessions with some sleep in between, so the game can function as long as all play fair.

There might be a case where if both players move the same unit at the same time and fight that there might be a sync error, but it's quite rare... as far as I know... or maybe not even possible...

The point being: Back in those broadband/flat internet might have been rare in the rest of the world...

The few times I tried civ 3 solo vs ai it wasn't too impressive, AI not that smart, or moves all at once.

I do intend to play civ 3 conquest solo some time to see how the AI is truely like... but for now my GPU is broken so can't really do it, except in VM but it's too slow and akward in there...

Also the installer does something weird and installs some "ET phone home tech" that's not so nice !

I never liked civilization 2, because of it's build-in cheat capable, also the graphics not that good. Feels like there is no point in playing it if you can just cheat...

Comman & Conquer and
Conquest Frontier wars
Definetly also belong on that list... hmmm... gonna check it out if they are there, the first I bet, the second woooow... not a well known game but was also pretty awesome to play online/multiplayer !

LOL, One of the worst strategy games actually made it onto number 1:

Total Annihilation​

Totally bad game for two reasons:

1. Whoever clicks the fastest wins. Spam single unit...
2. Bases destroyed in 2 minutes, after building it for like 1 or 2 hours.

Totally not fun game, at least not in multiplayer. BLEH.