I started with Civ II, and I need to be honest: it has been worse every single iteration, ever since.
While some might hate the pixelated Windows 95 Civ II, in terms of streamlined, fast, logical, hex-based war gaming and civ building, it remains to this day a better game.
Civ IV was the last playable Civ for me; it seemed like some new team came in, said "there needs to be more sunlight in here" and a community of moms who knew nothing of balancing rules vs fast game play took over.
Here is the biggest flaw in the modern versions, even when a user toggles off "watch other players move" the amount of time for decision making by the AI is mind boggling, even with cutting edge computers.
There is a bug in the engine since Civ III that keeps being reused, that rather than simply updating values on a .txt doc and then starting another turn, the engine since XP makes every single move render as if it is being viewed, whether it is viewed or not. So you spend time waiting for the computer move to literally create the graphics whether they are used or not.
To be clear: I am not against seeing other players turns nor great graphics. What I am against is a development team that did not comprehend prior code, and failed in separating Basic Movement Rules from graphic instantiation.
Remember this was coded on less than 500 MG in C, and then C++.
These errors that do nothing but inefficiently waste time even got moved to mobile platforms on Android Civ VI.
What used to be a completely fast and huge game, is now a completely beautiful front end with absolutely boring game play. And what is saddest is that after such a PR campaign about some developers moving to Humankind, they kept all the mistakes while claiming a new platform.
What Civ II had that all others lack-- even Solaris, Sins of a Solar Empire, or any other 4X game is that tech advances literally changed the nature of war. The speed of Civ II play made this clear.
The developers seeming lack of war boardgame experience coupled with efforts to show off the graphic quality of beveled edges of early XP has seemingly doomed this title since Civ IV, no matter what the quality of game computer.
Finally, the spartan nature of Win95 allowed a player to look past some of the cultural appropriation. But with every single advance since Civ II, the lack of clarity on what is legitimately rude and uncivil and downright racist has been part of the essence of the selling point of these games. Never are European leaders goofy, but make sure Gandhi is lampoonish.
In real life history, Gandhi was The Great Soul who liberated Bharat with Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence.
There is no reason to spend money on Civ VII when Shiro's WarTales exists.
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