What is the best Civilization game?

Sid Meier 4 is the best Civilization game that does not have Alpha Centauri in it.

Alpha Centauri is the best though. Civ 5's attempt to stop Unit Stacking did more harm than good.

Latest game of cause.

Old games are bad(not all old games like Mafia and Battlefield 2)

Civilization: Revolution.

I've only played Civ V and Revolution so Im gonna go with V

Civ 5, needs all the expansions though.

Im gonna go with Civ 5. Before the expansions, 4 was the best, but 5 is significantly more fleshed out now.

I also think that removing unit stacking was a fantastic idea. It makes city placement much more meaningful, as a coastal or mountain city must be approached differently when attacking.

I only played Revolution but it's a lot of fun. I find the Sim like talk amusing, especially when figures like Gandhi shaking his fist demanding you give him enhanced flight in exchange for knowledge of the alphabet or he'll send his knights to contend with your tanks.

I was actually on Steam looking to try one of the later versions but it's still too pricey for me, hopefully it'll be a part of a Steam sale in near future.

same. Civ V with G&K and brave new world is the best in the series.

It really is remarkable how much better Civ 5 has gotten with the patches and expansion packs. It was easily one of the worst games in the series at launch, and now it is almost as good as Civ 4 with the Beyond The Sword expansion. Civ 4 is still the best, though.

Best DLC i've bought all generation. They know how to put together a good expansion. I picked up the Korean and Babylon too, awesome science Civs, not lost a game on immortal playing with them.

Its hard to criticize people's opinions as being incorrect, however, you're not only wrong but a monster.

don't mind blue hazy. he's just a bit blue today.

anyway i will go for civilization 5. i can't remember which one i played when i was a youngin, but it was also a damn good game.

Civilization IV: BtS. Granted, I haven't played V since the expansions came out, but I'm still addicted to IV. The religion/corporation aspect is too often overlooked.

I love AC as well, and if weren't for those damn mind worms it may have been my favorite.

I have only played Civ III and Civ IV so between those two, I would have to go with Civ IV, as it is more fleshed out and, as the poster above me mentioned, the religion and corporation aspect does make the game more interesting.

I originally did not get Civ V b/c of all the negative things I read about it when it came out (bugs, AI issues), but might eventually get it once I also get a new PC that can handle it on more than just minimum settings. It will be interesting to play, as I will have to change my tactics since I'll no longer be able to charge the enemies with my "stacks of doom" ^^.

Civilization V in its final form.

I like 5, but XCOM spanks this series

Civ 5 at release it wasn't that great. Now it's amazing. I LOVE the 1 unit per tile rule but I think the combat would be better if they allowed a ranged unit stack with a melee unit. I really enjoyed 4 and revolutions though. Never played the other ones

Civ IV + Expansions followed closely by Civ Rev.

I don't play much Civ these days due to them being so damn time consuming so I haven't played any of Civ V's expansion which seems to remedy a lot of the issues I had with V.

Definitely Civ 5... the expansions make it even better!

Dem President vs Republican Congress. Been in a stalemate for years

The one I enjoyed the most was Civ 2. I'd played the original but Civ 2 was the one which blew me completely away. I had all the expansions and managed to create a few nice mods for it on it's own customisation suite. So that's my favourite. Didn't like 3 but have really enjoyed every single one since. And if I was going to recommend one, my nostalgia be damned. I'm going to recommend the latest one. It's terrific. As deep as any of the others, with a lovely look to it.

Civilization 2 will always be my favorite if only because of the High Council.

Civ V + expansions

only played revolution and civ 5, civ 5 was very addictive

My favorites are Civ III and Revolution (DS version, I'm playing the 360 version).

I would agree with this.

CIV IV i consider to be about perfect. Civ V was awful when I first played it but people tell me to try again with expansions + patches.

@charizard1605 - "no more fucking unit stacking" - that's called combined arms, that every army in the world does. Sending siege weapons along without an infantry escort is dumb.

BTW if anyone wants a code for CivV and Gods & Kings send me a PM I think I still have codes for them.

4 is my favorite...i havent got around to 5 yet though... from what ive read 5 sucks unless you have all the expansions to fix most of that sucky stuff.

Alpha Centauri. The Civ game with regrettably the BEST political A.I. in the series. How did they go downhill from there?
Thematically and description wise the most interesting CIV for me and closest to the heart. The only Civ game where I could work together with the A.I.
Disliked the workshop though. I don't like wasting time playing Bob the Builder when I could be spending time nerve stapling my citizens.

@locopatho: Oh, I definitely agree. I just think that stacking wasn't the right way to go about representing it, it led to too many cheap brute force and spammy tactics. In Civ V, for instance, I can still have an infantry escort for my siege weapons, I just need to place them on an adjacent tile, which is not only more realistic, but also leads to more thorough strategy and tactical thinking which requires the player to consider the lay of the land and actually try to utilize the terrain =)

I think it's actually less realistic when you consider just how much land a tile is supposed to represent, though. I think the best solution is to tie military organization into the social policy trees. You would only be allowed one unit per tile at the start of the game, but as your military becomes better organized, you would be allowed to stack a certain number of units per tile, allowing for combined arms.

Certainly not 3. I still have the disc of that game and god was it annoying. The amount of times I had tanks and other advanced units get killed by some guy with a spear....ugh.

Civilization V was, for sure, a inferior game compared to Civilization IV: The Complete Edition (which includes its two expansions and Colonization).

But now? Civilization V: Complete Edition ( which includes the countless DLCs and its two expansions, Gods & Kings and Brave New World) is a better game and my favorite of the series. Highly recommend you give it a go now, you can find Civ.5: Complete Edition on Steam.

But man .... you really can't go wrong with either one of these two. They're both fucking amazing games. Easily the best two games of the entire series.

I thought Civ IV stacks were perfect. They give you the brute force, yet I can damage your entire stack with one or two siege units of my own. It means as the attacker you actually needed to have light infantry/cavalry as screening units, to protect your powerful yet vulnerable stacks. Very cool, very fun and somewhat realistic.

Civ always utilised the terrain btw, from defense bonuses to movement costs to line of sight.

The one unit per tile thing isn't realistic for the strategic scale. I'm from Ireland (over 70,000 km^2) and the Civ 5 world map I saw had 4 tiles. So 4 infantry units fills my whole country? (3 actually, and one in the North ;) ) And we better not want to build some tanks to go with that infantry cos every square inch of those 70,000 km^2 is already covered in dudes!? :P

And what about cities, which take up 1 tile? Are we saying a tile can hold millions of civilians and only a couple thousand soldiers?

I like one unit per tile in small scale, tactical games where it's a tile is physically very small and filled by 1 person. As in, I can use one guy to block a one tile doorway in Fire Emblem. Cool, sensible. But when we are looking at a global scale map, the idea of a single military unit entirely filling the large chunk of land represented by a tile is very silly.

I wish the newer games would still let you pimp your throne room, though.

I will defo go back to Civ V at some point. I was so very bitterly disappointed at 5 when I first played it but logically I know it's better now. I'l;l overcome my emotional "JUST PLAY 4 YOU KNOW IT'S PERFECT" response one day :)

Played them all, like 2 the best.

This is actually a great idea! I hope they do this for VI.

I can agree with the sense of scale and realism, definitely. But I also think a lot of that comes down to poor map design (either make the maps bigger, make cities expand past just one tile, and so on!). It would make exploring it a big pain, but again, that would be realistic (and they could give movement bonuses to specific kinds of units like they already do, but specific units meant only for exploration).

I also think a lot of these issues come with the fact that this was the first hex/non stacking based Civilization game yet- I think (hope?) that they will be fixing a lot of these issues in the inevitable Civ VI. Or well, I hope at least that they try- I would hate for them to give it up and return to unit stacking, when there is so much potential to take the concept forward!

Also, I know Civ always utilized terrain, I meant the absence of stacking opened up even more possibilities in that regard :p

This! Civilization V with all the expansions is amazing! You should give it a shot, the Complete Edition is on Steam, and it is incredible now.

I'm a little nostalgic for Civ IV. One of the very first games i bought in early 2006, same day wen i bought a good PC + 5.1 system to get into gaming. The second day after i recieved my salary, at my second job. Still have that copy in good condition, with a huge strategy book i never read, and a gigantic skill poster. I remember that i had to rush to work, but i couldn't, not before i installed and start the game up because my curiosity was tearing me apart. Wen i first started the game and heard that Baba Yetu song, i knew i was in for something amazing, memorable and wonderful.

Love this game, so many good memories tied with it.

It still really bothers me that roads are bad for your economy in Civ 5 if you do more than just the bare minimum to connect your cities. Also, I don't like how happiness is global, rather than local like it had always been in the past. These are pretty minor gripes, though.

Not THAT minor. I remember breaking the happiness limit very easily. Thought it made way more sense for a metropolis with advanced buildings and resources to be happier than a backwater or frontier town with nothing. But yeah I'll shut up til I play it again :P

Yeah, it makes a huge difference gameplay-wise, but it's not such a big deal that it makes Civ 5 a bad game. I think that Firaxis really should be borrowing mechanics from other strategy games for the next game. For instance, in Empire: Total War, if your citizens in Europe were unhappy, they migrated to your new world colonies at a higher rate. That sort of mechanic makes a lot of sense and it would be cool for Civ to incorporate something similar. Unhappy populations should migrate to cities with high happiness. Immigrants from foreign countries would make native populations less happy but increase productivity, etc. That mechanic makes a whole lot more sense than the age old "I'm not happy so I'm just going to stay at home and not work" mechanic.

Civ 5 has the best combat but I enjoy Civ 4 more, especially with all of the expansion packs. With Civ 5, they removed a lot of core functionality from Civ 4 and improved combat mechanics. They then charged you $30 a pop to add back in stuff that was in the most basic version of Civ 4.

Perfect Civ for me would be Civ 4 with the graphical and mechanical changes of Civ 5 (six-sided tiles rather than squares, one military unit per tile, ranged combat, cities can defend themselves). Basically, the combat of Civ 5 but literally everything else be from Civ 4.

5 is the best, but I had the most fun with 3

Except that in Civ 5, the notion of having a strong military was figuring out where to put everyone; which wasnt any better. Rather than applying increases to say... upkeep to stacked units (which is the solution that would have seemed best for the game, in my opinion).

Alpha Centauri and Civ V (but only with expansions packs included)

I can't say how I think Charizard1605 makes these topics of appraisal for PC games to pleasure the PC gamer audience he so desperately wants to appease in quite the way I want, without provoking moderator intervention, but I will say that these games suck dick and that I hate that I own the fourth and fifth one (System Wars told me they were fun!).