What is Your Favourite Mainline Civ Game?

[Core Imposter]

You're right; Civ5 was definitely the "breakout" game in the franchise, so to speak.

Not so. Civ was big before gaming was big, Civ was big before many of you were in diapers. Civ games were always better than their predecessors. Until 5 went fluffy, common and commercial.

Repent ye infidels, lest ye die and find a stack of doom approaching.

 

[Hawke9]

Civ 5 has got to be my favorite, at least now that I haven't played civ 7 yet. Civ 5 is where I joined the franchise, and I have to thank the game for starting my interest in world history. I have too many fond and nostalgic memories of civ V, and Vox Populi had made my opinion of V all the better. Ironically I have more hours in VI and I've been very critical of that game. Especially in the looks department. The artstyle of VI REALLY wasn't my cup of tea but I'm very thankful of the changes it brought, mainly being districts. With VII being in my opinion the perfect mix of V and VI, I think I've got a new favorite coming up real soon

 

[lo24681]

having started with 5 right after BNW came out, I still have to say 6. I recently went back to play a game of 5 for nostalgias sake, and found its gameplay not as fun to me as 6. There is a reason why 6 is the only game in my steam library that has over 1k hours in it.

 

[AriochIV]

having started with 5 right after BNW came out, I still have to say 6. I recently went back to play a game of 5 for nostalgias sake, and found its gameplay not as fun to me as 6. There is a reason why 6 is the only game in my steam library that has over 1k hours in it.

I think that 6 is the more complete game, since it's newer and has been supported longer and has more expansions. I've gotten used to the things I dislike about it, and I haven't played 5 since 6 came out... but I still have more hours in 5 despite 6 having been out 3 years longer. A lot of what's good about 6 came from 5.

 

[Acken]

I have 3700hours on civ5 and around 400 on civ6 so gonna vote 5 But I also didn't have 2 kids during civ5 era

 

[King Flevance]

#1 Civ 4 is the clear winner for me. You can built tall, wide, or both. The diversity it offers in empire management is, so far, unmatched in the series. City maintenance being obscured is it's biggest flaw and takes some practice learning how the system works. Civics were a dynamic government system that worked very well as a concept. I could talk about Civ 4 all day.

#2 Civ 3. This is the pinnacle of the original trilogy for me. Culture came in, leader attributes, I think the map is clever and beautiful fake 3d. Classic government systems and base mechanics. I loved this addition. It's biggest flaw is mandatory ICS (wide) gameplay for power.

#3 Civ 6. This was edged out by Civ 3 for a couple reasons but I place it and 3 very close. First, it's pacing is inconsistent. I think Eurekas and production scaling are to blame. Science and production don't blend properly here. Additionally, Wonders are beautiful but just aren't fun to build. First, most wonders are unimpressive offering yields comparable to a regular building in mid-late game. Then if you do see a wonder you like, you need the right tile in a city with good enough production to get it. Most cities have a list of grayed out wonders that aren't even an option thanks to tight tile restrictions. The map dictates wonders you can build, and whether you will get strong district bonuses due to adjacent bonuses. Also, World Congress is super annoying and not interesting at all. All that said Civ 6 does have some fun elements. I like the idea of districts but think adjacency bonuses are too strong - the building yields should be stronger. Combat feels good in this title. Governments I like the basic idea, but feel policy swapping should cost to change.

#4 Civ 2
#5 Tie - Civ 5 & Civ 1

 

[P_S_]

#1 Civ 4 is the clear winner for me. You can built tall, wide, or both. The diversity it offers in empire management is, so far, unmatched in the series. City maintenance being obscured is it's biggest flaw and takes some practice learning how the system works. Civics were a dynamic government system that worked very well as a concept. I could talk about Civ 4 all day.

Civ IV for me as well. I always keep coming back to it. City management and expansion balancing are imo the best version in the series in IV; essentially I enjoy every single aspect of the game. I would go into more detail, but then I'd just have to describe the entirety of its mechanics. Okay, maybe I dislike Gilgamesh and Churchill.
I also am somewhat nostalgic over the game, having watched my uncle play it for what felt like hours as a child when I didn't even understand the mechanics of it, but being amazed by history, exploration and expansion unfolding in front of me, and then, when I got the game myself, playing it for years and starting to rediscover my love for history through the civilopedia (after school made me not care about history for a few years). Also, doom stacks are a meme (just build artillery bro).

2nd place I would guess Civ V or VI. Civ V I rather disliked for a long time, mostly because I was annoyed by the global happiness mechanic, with imo is the worst expansion-limiting mechanic in the entire franchise. I came back to it last year (after years of ignoring it) to find it very fun and extremely addicting. I defintely see why it has so many fans (even though 1UPT can be annoying, but it's not horrible). Civ VI on the other hand I played quite a bit, and coming back to it recently, I found it to be quite aggravating a times. I immensely enjoyed the vanilla version back in 2016, but feel like the expansions added a lot of plain feature creep and busywork (I really dislike gouvernours and think that tile appeal never should've been implemented). To me the game feels very bloated (look at the city info screens and tell me otherwise!) and like I always have to 'work' for having fun with it, if that makes sense. The core Civ-gameplay is obviously there, so I definetly like the game despite all its flaws.

4th place is Civ Colonization. I absolutely adore this game, though I think that the TAC mod is needed for it to truly shine. Not a mainline Civ game, but great fun.

Last place in my ranking would be Civ Revolution. Not bad, but very simple. The AI is some else in that game since it's never a question of if but always of when they will attack you and thus end themselves.

Civ 1 I never played, Civ 2 I have like 30 minutes of playtime as a kid one evening, and Civ III I'm getting into right now, but I can't judge it yet.

 

[kaspergm]

I voted Civ5, although it's not a clear win between that and 6. It's been many years since I played Civ5, because there are some elements of Civ6 I have a hard time going back from, but I think overall - marginally - Civ5 is the better game.

What I like about Civ5 was:

• Each civ felt unique yet still had enough freedom to allow you different play style between different games depending on circumstances (whereas in 6, I feel there is a tendency for each civ to be shoehorned into a specific type of play dictacted by your uniques).
• Policy trees (when rebalanced through mods) opened up for very different game paths depending on your choices.
• Many good new features like city states, religion system, great works of art/archeology and of course 1UPT (which I prefer to SoD).
• Looked great.

What I like about Civ6 compared to Civ5 is:

• Districts and playing the map (albeit poorly balanced).
• Great person system.
• Retains many good features from Civ5 (but also makes some worse, particularly world congress, government/policy cards and AI personalities/agendas).

I had hoped Civ7 would take the best things from Civ6 and make some of the best features of Civ5 return. Instead it seems to do the opposite, keep the things from Civ6 I liked the least and throw away some of the things where I think Civ6 made the biggest advances over Civ5.

 

[Unaha-Closp]

Civ 6 was my jumping in point, so it's my favourite one. I have dabbled in 5, I find it kind of abstract, but I know that is because I am not really digging in and have 6 mechanics all up in my head. I haven't tried any of the others, though I own them in various places. Hoping 7 becomes my favourite, we shall see, soon.

 

[gimley_gunner]

The base game of Civ 4 has Leonard Nimoy as narrator. So instant win

 

[LastSword]

Civ2 & civ5, rest are forgettable.

Surprised that moderator encourages negative-talking.
Anyway I always wanted to write a rant about civ6 and now it is almost officially dead, it seems like it is a good time.
Not surprised that many people voted civ6, it is the newest and the shiniest iteration. It all started with the infamous Shafer vs Beach conflict from which civ5 release suffered. It resulted in Shafer (much younger newbie who was acting as lead designer) to actually behave classy, take a fall and leave a company. Firaxis acted like a true company and blamed the guy who left (iirc they stayed silent). Anyway, ultimately an old firaxis veteran (Beach) took the lead designer role.
First act is Brave New World (civ5 dlc #2 - first 100% overseen by Beach). Not so bad mechanics-wise. Only game became suddenly noticeable easier which was foreshadowing things to come.

Ed Beach likes (and designed) board games. Board games do not really have AI opponents like video games (solo automas do not count).

Personally I find Beach's design philosophy limited to two things: content pulp & fan service. "It sounds good? Let's do it." No consideration for AI, mechanics interaction, balance, strategy, whatever - game must sell, players must reach no-refund time and that's it.

Writing about civ6's AI is a bit like beating a dead horse. Extra settler at 6/8 difficulty, introducing combat bonuses for AI. Still can be overrun by barbarians even on relatively high difficulty.
Some AI opponents just become lethargic at 100-150 turns (I don't know if it based on individual leaders' behaviour numbers). Civ7 tries to fix it by limiting games to 100-150 turns.
However, what is worse is that AI was officially pushed to gameplay mechanics (by fan-favourited Agendas) and reduced to some silly numbers. Opponents have no personality, reduced to cardboards.
Just before civ6 release there was an "official" AI game (no human players game). Such games were popular at the time (civ5). However it was the biggest shoot in the feet for otherwise good marketing campaign. We could see all the flaws, no conquering, no unit upgrading...
To summarize, AI is no in yellow-zone "he, he, die stupid AI" but in red-zone "oh no, I bully a disabled". Though those zones are obviously personal.

Okay but what about military emergency? I believe it is one of the worst designed mechanic ever in the history of gaming. I don't mean that whoever came up with it or green-lighted it should be fired. I just hope they will learn from this mistake. When you have an AI that hardly stands on its legs you should do everything to hide it, not expose it. Watching AI moving zombie-troops through your territory just to die... Not a good experience.
That's the same reason why agendas are bad. AI can't comprehend a situation (oh no, you have no navy, pal!) and agenda system exposes its stupidity. Hide it!

Even small things like capturing settlers... (gone with civ7 - we are learning). Why introduce something that allows human players to make such impactful power swings on AI?

Music, they experimented with tunes based on era. It was okay at best. I believe it is gone from civ7. Good riddance.

Visuals. Not a single one of previous iterations had issues that civ6 so bravely introduced. Not a single one had issues with scale, world feel, or ask players to look at individual buildings. Not much to write about, some people like it, I don't. Ancient canal cities are probably the worst graphics that suppose to represent a city in the series.
Lenses are so bad that Firaxis disabled them for starting settler.
Leaders have detailed models and animations and yet... they are just cut-scenes. What is more you have to leave a cut-scene to be able to further interact with game. Double escape to make annoying popup go away. By declaring war you are not rewarded with a cool animation but a black mask fading - it is an initial game reaction to it. Lack of 3D background was also a downgrade.
Oh, a transition from dark to heroic age is a blatant attack on eyes.

UI/UX. That's where civ6 died for me.
Lack of options. You don't like lenses? You have to mod them out on your own (or select another unit...). Natural wonder discovery animations - again you have to do it yourself.
Hotkeys? Almost none. Ctrl-S, Ctrl-L? Forget, consoles do not have such things.
Lack of proper refresh. You make city changes and top panel do not display yields correctly. And so on.
Information is either hidden (wonder placement criteria hidden in civilopedia from top of my memory) or just straight unavailable.
In general UI mods are very popular in civ6 for a reason. Thanks, modders.
Unfortunately each time you want to introduce new mod, your game configs are obsolete. Just great.
However I can't explain why moving/interacting with units feel so bad in civ6. It is especially feelable when you autoplay X turns in fire tuner and then want to fortify/sleep units to process another turn normally. In civ5 it simply feels good and responsive. Civ6: each fortification is such a drag. After an attack you have an obvious delay before damage numbers float. Moving is also not as fluent as it should be. My only theory is that every unit action rechecks modifiers. More civilizations => more units and modifiers, more units => more modifiers and movements. That's where I believe performance issues lie. Civ7 limits number of players and also movement (railway station are airlifts, commanders).
I simply realized I intentionally do not build units/make wars in civ6 because interacting with units feels bad.

Monetization. Introduction of personas. Multiple leaders of civilizations that coincidentally are big video games markets (amount of chinese leaders were grotesque). It was okay because it happened at the end of game life-cycle. We have those things in civ7 from the beginning (and more).

Gameplay for last.
Loyalty introduced for fan-service reasons (people crying about forward settle) leads to circucal blob empires, players can't really have cool shapes like settling just coast, etc.. Obviously AI can't handle it.
Districts, ultimate noob traps, leads to the biggest tech gaps recorded in series for otherwise "alive" players. AI just can't handle it. Thankfully after only a single failed iteration we have a solution in civ7 (we had to dethrone science to allow yield specialization, who would guess?).
Districts also have an ugly cost formula. It is less fun than civ5 global happiness, however it is "hidden" therefore not many people hate it.
No anti-snowball mechanism. Initial archer rush = ahead in cities, territory, production, science, -5 diplo favour. Game is over.
City strength's formula. Baiting opponent into war just to buy a single Man-at-arms which almost triples the city's defense...
Oceans, navy... those are kind of redundant in civ6, aren't they?

Gameplay, balance, wonders, and even map scripts. I will have to finish it another day. To summarize, a game of 1000s mistakes, lack of strong lead which would forge it into the game that stand the test of time.

 

[King Flevance]

4th place is Civ Colonization. I absolutely adore this game, though I think that the TAC mod is needed for it to truly shine. Not a mainline Civ game, but great fun.

Last place in my ranking would be Civ Revolution. Not bad, but very simple. The AI is some else in that game since it's never a question of if but always of when they will attack you and thus end themselves.

Civ Rev certainly deserves last place.

I have tried to use it as designed and help someone who is not familiar with strategy games ease into the Civ franchise. But this did not work, I suspect because your choices felt too light and easy and it intentionally snowballed the leader.

Colonization is a good honorable mention. They did a great job remastering it in 4's engine. I have been playing Age of Dicovery mod but I may check out TAC next time I have the itch.

 

[Isengardtom]

Oh, good, it's not just me who feels that way.

You definitely are not. I’m also in the Civ 5 is just plain ugly camp, i loved the look of civ 4 and 6.

For me 6 and 4 were the best. Never got into 5, probably because it was ugly in my view and not great at launch and I just gave up on it. I hear it got great though after a while and for many is still the Civ game to go to. If they ever remaster it with civ 7 graphics I’ll buy it for sure.

Definitely never played 1-2 and 3 I don’t think so either, in any case I don’t remember so even if I did it didn’t leave a big impression

I have a feeling though 7 will be my new favourite. At base game there’s already a lot of great mechanics which to some extent 6 didn’t get until Rise and Fall. Base 7 feels more complete than base 6. And graphics wise I love it. I might still prefer 6’s music overall but will see after playing a while. Too early to call that part.

Not much feels missing
- I can do without the world congress which was too RNG and un impactful in civ 6.(ban luxury goods )
If they do bring it back I hope they flesh it out more so we can have something that adds strategy instead what just feels like an annoying pop-up.
- end game victories could do with a bit more meat on the bone. The legacy paths are much more interesting than the actual victory in the current game. Those definitely feel like placeholders
- currently just looking forward to see more Antiquity and Exploration civs being added. And more leaders. I like the less traditional leaders of this edition.
Don’t need to see Ghandi for example.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Looking at the numbers, I understand why Civ4 gets significant amount of voices - Civ5 brought a lot of changes some people didn't accept. But seeing Civ6 receiving the same love as Civ5 makes me think Civ6 did something wrong - being evolution for Civ5 instead of revolution and being later one, it should be gaining more voices.

 

[Revolutionist_8]

Civ 5 by a large margin. The general athmosphere and "feel" of the game is just superb (the art, the UI, the peace / war musics, and so on). Although I must confess that I couldn't play without mods (oh yes,moddability another big plus)

I really like(d) Civ 6, but even with a bunch of amazing mods, it still always felt half-baked somehow. It had good ideas and features, but never reached the "compactness" of Civ 5 for me. The goofy-cartoonish characters and a bunch of questionable UI elements just completely killed my interest to even try to do serious modding, let alone immerse myself properly.

Civ 4 is amazing (especially with mods), but I could never get around the stack of doom and lack of meaningful combat (among other things with the UI and some mechanics)

 

[untitledjuan]

I will say Civ4, but purely for the sentimental factor of it being the first "mainline" Civilization game I ever played and perhaps the one I've played the most across my life, mainly due to me having more time to play video games back then than latter on.

The actual first Civilization game I ever played was Civilization Revolution for the Nintendo DS and then Civilization 4:Colonization (which I played even before playing actual Civ4)

 

[kaspergm]

Anyway I always wanted to write a rant about civ6 and now it is almost officially dead, it seems like it is a good time.

Wow, that was a pretty brutal rant. I actually agree with most of the points you make, although I'm less negative in my overall assessment of the game than you are. I do agree that games became easier starting from second expansion of Civ5. Whether it's an effect of the split as you say, or something else, I'm not able to answer. But I do remember than in C5GnK, AI would frequently ambush me with sizeable army quite early, and it would be a real struggle to survive, while after C5BnW, AI became significantly more passive.

 

[Methos]

Hard to say...

Civ 1: I was in HS when it came out and I loved it, as it was different than any other game out at the time.

Civ 2: I played it, but can't remember it.

Civ 3: The most memorable game I ever played was in Civ 3. It was a culture victory (one city to 20k culture) as my empire was being gobbled up by an AI. I was throwing units at the AI to slow it down until I hit the 20k mark.

Civ 4 & 5: Loved them both.

Civ 6: I didn't like it and pretty much walked away from Civ until now.

I didn't vote, but if it was multiple option, I'd pick 3, 4, and 5.

 

[Lord Lakely]

It's Civ4 for me because my laptop can run it. Which is weird because it's the computer game that frustrates me the most as a player.

As someone who mostly plays RPGs and City Builders, I love games with rich mechanics that allow for min-maxing and experimentation. So in that sense Civ5 and Civ6 were both pretty good for me in their way - Civ5's austere gameplay leaves me with little distractions so i can execute my prefered strategy basically every game (though I do find the game itself painfully boring when I don't roll a culture or production Civ), with any civ (religion => extreme expansion). Civ6's rich gameplay allows for custimization with an ai that fortunately is not too challenging to threaten you.

Civ4 kind of isn't like that at all. It has many game elements but the difficulty, even on Noble, is brutally unforgiving. I LOVE playing it, but only on the largest possible map with a low amount of opponents (like 4 or 5). And even then, I quit half of the games I play when I get invaded before I've finished maximizing my empire. It's a frustrating game, and has no right to be as addictive as it is.

My ranking pretty much goes Civ6 > Civ4 > Civ5 > Civ3, I think?

 

[fantsu]

tl;dr: IV > II > VI > I >>> III > V
Absolutely biased nostalgia involved, personal opinion.

IV BtS is still the peak for me. Only Civ game I cannot win deity games as I please. The AI just handles python code in such a clever way and vice versa. Also the most personality in leader behaviour. Least unbalanced seven victory conditions.
II is just fun to play. Infinite cities wont bother me when the game keeps its pace till the end. Later games tend to turn into work I feel like. Too much decisions to move forward that acrually wont change the outcome.
VI became such a nice game eventually. Its the one to feed somekind of autism. Release was rough. Too many concepts crammed around later, but so many ways to go forward and try new things. Its depth without strategy but in a pleasing way. It feels more of an management sim than any previous one for me.
I is just such a clever game, its has some problems like all of these but I have to credit the genius though behind it. Also love the silly tech tree.
III and V were both really bad at release. Made bitter taste in my mouth. No multiplayer at release. Play the World made III bearable. Corruption was a worse way to prevent ICS so far. Unable to even play the games after purchase. Was really dissappointed at first. I have gone back few times with both, they are the two I have played less than thousands of hours from the main series. V had the stupidest AI and looked worse than IV on the map. Blocking armies with a worker, forcing them to disembark in water was funny.