Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions

I started playing civilization when I was 12 or 13 (Civilization 1), and still, to this day, the closest thing I have to meditation is playing Civ V.<p>I travel a decent amount, and one of my great joys is being on a plane <i>without</i> wifi but <i>with</i> inseat power (Civ V on the mac is a ridiculous power hog), and knowing that I&#x27;ve got X hours of civilization to play with no one to bother me.<p>My strategy isn&#x27;t great, I have everything set to Random, and I just drop into whatever situation and work it. At the end of a flight, I close that scenario, and rarely pick it back up - I start a new one. And I feel relaxed and my mind is clear. It&#x27;s amazing.

Nobody else has mentioned this, but something Civ has taught me is how to appreciate realpolitik. Nothing makes it more clear than when you catch yourself having thoughts like:<p>- &quot;Washington spawned too close for comfort; they&#x27;re a threat to my peoples&#x27; long term security. Annihilate them first.&quot;<p>- &quot;Hmm, the Mayans have some strategically valuable territory...&quot;<p>- &quot;Hey, the Persians are way back in the Renaissance, while I&#x27;m in the modern era, and they have luxuries I need. Let&#x27;s send a few battleships over there.&quot;

I highly prefer Colonization to all the Civilization episodes I have played. Colonization feels more focused, more tangible, and yet still manages to be a great management game with credible threats with multiple parties: natives trying to fight back for their land, other European powers trying to establish successful colonies on their own, and ultimately the royal power you will fight against to secure your Freedom. The tension gets really high, really quick. And there is no &quot;shortcut&quot; you can take to have a technological advance versus your enemies.

Amazing series.<p>I still recall being able to recount all of the 7 wonders, all of the large Greek city states, and all that other countless historical context that the developers packed into the game that gave me a slight leg up in middle school history class.<p>And of course I&#x27;ll encourage my children to play someday. No childhood is complete without having to fight back Gandhi&#x27;s unrelenting hordes of musketmen with stealth bombers.

I came perilously close to failing several university assignments thanks to an unhealthy obsession with original Civ. And I loved every minute of it.<p>I still play the newer versions now and then, but the original stands out as a paragon of game design. It was grid based, so unit movement was easy with keystrokes. That along with hot keys for everything meant that you could play a complete game without a mouse. This was particularly useful at keeping the endgame speedy. Something that I think is missing in later versions.

My favorite thing about Civ is that its creator has kept control over it, and continues to evolve it. We&#x27;ll probably be enjoying a new Civ in 2026. The charm is that it&#x27;s the same game in many respects — parts evolve, but the core remains.<p>This seems unusual; I can point to several popular 90&#x27;s games that peaked there and never recovered (Roller Coaster Tycoon, Age of Empires II, and arguably SimCity 4 if you include the early naughts). I wonder why; as a player, the Civ model seems preferable (you always have modern versions and new, but not heretical, variety).

I&#x27;ve played 1-5 extensively and Civ III is the most fun by far.<p>Anyone know how I can get Civ III on a Mac?<p>It&#x27;s been &quot;not available&quot; here forever: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aspyr.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;sid-meiers-civilization-iii-complete" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aspyr.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;sid-meiers-civilization-iii-compl...</a><p>I&#x27;ve tried playing the Windows version via Parallels but it fails out during load.

Gods the amount of time i spent on civ.<p>But didnt that article seem to stop all of a sudden? I checked twice on my phone to see if i missed a more button.<p>Didnt civ 4 get an award for audio?(and i loved the music on 4, was so disappointed with 5s audio), the article left me with a , meh, what about. . . ! for so many things.<p>Being only 32 i would imagine a great article to show me things i didnt know.<p>Sigh. The temptation to play more right now is strong, but i need to get this work done :-)

free &amp; opensource version: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freeciv.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freeciv.org&#x2F;</a><p>web version: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.freeciv.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.freeciv.org&#x2F;</a>

My father still plays civ 1. His windows 94 broke down a number of years ago. He was so sad about not having civ 1 so I set the game up for him in dosbox.

Played the original Civilization on an Amiga and have played every release since (including CivNet).<p>Civilization II was easily the best game in the series. It&#x27;s sad that Civ V, as pretty as it is, is so freaking horrible.

In my opinion this is the best game humanity ever managed to design. I&#x27;ve never played anything that I&#x27;ve enjoyed more.

The way Civ let you email a multiplayer round was awesome when connectivity was an issue.

After I graduated to dwarf fortress, I never looked back.

Im still trying to tell myself that the time played clock is because I left it open all night on accident... a few times...I didnt.

Sid Meier&#x27;s Civilization V<p>You&#x27;ve Played 786 hours<p>Last Played Today

By far the game I wasted the most time in my life :) Managed to kill my addiction and stop after Civ 4.

One of the greatest games of all time - recently added windows 10, bootcamp, virtualbox... just to be able to re-enjoy the original classic version again. Future versions don&#x27;t do justice to the original.

I think Civ.Net was the first game I played on the internet against someone I didn&#x27;t already knew. Could have been early 1996.<p>It wasn&#x27;t the best gaming experience though. Each turn took like forever (well, minutes), after a few hours we had to pause the game and agree on when to continue the next day.<p>Still, finding an opponent &quot;on demand&quot; was something that did hint about what was to come later.<p>(well, there were BBS &quot;door games&quot; earlier, but not really &quot;real time&quot; in the same way)

I like how so many of the posts in this thread are &quot;[this one] was the best!&quot;, but I&#x27;m pretty sure I&#x27;ve seen all 5 of the main games held up and possibly one about Alpha Centauri too.<p>I&#x27;m sure when Civ 6 comes out we&#x27;ll have people complaining because it&#x27;s not like 5 or 4 or whichever one was their favorite, but I like that they change every time. If I wanted to buy a new game every year that was the same as the previous one, I&#x27;d be playing Madden.

The Civ series has always been on my radar as they seem to be quite interesting games. I remember going through the tutorials of either 4 or 5 but I never really got hooked. Not for a lack of trying, but I just didn&#x27;t know what to do in the games. I always felt like I needed more guidance or something. Are there guides out there to help learn how to play these games? I might try 5 again after reading this!

Count me in as another person who was hopelessly addicted as a kid. I remember one summer in middle school I would hit the power button on my PC and play this game until dinner. What&#x27;s different about this game was that I would play it and not feel bad that I spent so much time doing it. Few games are like that for me today. This has to be one of the best dynamic puzzle or strategy games of all time.

My first intro to overrun bugs. I couldn&#x27;t otherwise have found myself yelling &quot;effing Ghandi&quot; so often.

Civ is hella fun but it doesn&#x27;t scale well - massive games become untenable due to app slowness and memory footprint.<p>I think this is in part due to Civ&#x27;s design of each player gets all their moves consecutively, rather than in parallel. Although it would change gameplay Civ could take advantage of multi cpu by either staging decision trees based on likely actions taken by the player and other civilizations or creating multiple rounds of actions in each turn which are executed in parallel.<p>This would have the added advantage - if &quot;they&quot; chose to code it this way - for hardcore civ players to offload compute to AWS or other services. I would love to crank up a world domination Civ game with 50+ entities that doesn&#x27;t take minutes per turn.<p>Wishful thinking for Civ VI but there you go.

I hate to think how many of those hours I am responsible for...

You can see the video here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;SPmKCh5BOjo?t=1991" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;SPmKCh5BOjo?t=1991</a>

All I want is an orthogonal perspective UI with Civ I or Civ II rules, minus Civ I&#x27;s bugs. I find the freeciv angled view unusable.

Does anyone have a good suggestion for the most civilization like game for iOS?

Civ I is impressive, even to todays standards (mobile gaming)

The serie in its latest iteration is hugely underwhelming.

I used to play Civilization II... damn I feel old.

first time heard of this, how does this compare to mindcraft? is this good for young kids?

Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri are still the best balance of simplicity vs fussiness in my opinion. I like Civ 5 quite a lot but there&#x27;s a lot of fussing about with the resources like horses or oil and there are a lot of edge-case city improvements.