not sure if it's just because I'm older and less into gaming, but civ5 seems markedly less fun as a game than civ1 and civ2 were. I just couldn't get into it, and I used to spend entire nights on the older games.
It's not your age; tons of people don't like Civ V. The game has a serious problem when it comes to the marginal utility of individual moves. There's way, way more things to do in the game but most of those are obvious moves in the execution of your larger strategy. This is not a good recipe for fun!
Alpha Centauri was always my favourite game in the series but these days I find myself playing a lot of Master of Magic, a game with way more tactical and strategic variety than any of the Civ games.
Civ V completely redid movement. The prior games would allow you to stack units, so you'd end up with a 1-tile "stack of doom"; later-game fights would be reduced to these stacks of doom wearing each other out instead of tactical play. Additionally, making a unified front was difficult because of square tiles (a unit could move in 8 directions).
Civ V changed it so that only a single unit of a given type (military vs utility) could occupy a tile, and switched from a square grid to a hex grid. Individual moves may matter less, but the combat game benefitted greatly.
Yeah, I was really excited about the changes to movement and combat back when Civ V was first announced. After playing the game, my enthusiasm disappeared completely. The AI completely sucks at positioning its units correctly. The widespread simplifications to the economic model (global happiness) dumb down the city building to a large degree. The vast majority of the decisions you make in the game have now become dull, trite, obvious.
I feel the same way, and have been playing Civ since about 92.
One of the reasons (I think) that Civ 5 is not quite as much fun is the fact that the City no longer really has that sense of individuality.
In previous versions, the City was IT. Each one had its own production, trade, corruption, waste, polution, etc. It had personality! If a particular city had trouble, it could shut down or become extremely inefficient at production. The new game doesn't have this, only the aggregate of anything matters.
For me the game lost a bit of its personality, and that's why I like the older ones better.
I've played Civilization 1 and 2 and Alpha Centauri when I was a kid, kind of liked 3 and 4 even more, but they were not such a big deal for me anymore. Had a long pause I didn't play at all, and then picked up the fifth installment with the Brave New World DLC. And oh my, how good that is... I really recommend to get the game with that DLC, it adds very important aspects to the game, like religion, tourism, trade routes and the world congress. For the first time ever the cultural victory is super fun to play, no need to fight wars if you don't want to.
Now I have the Beyond Earth with Rising Tide waiting for me, but that game doesn't scale that nicely to my television... And oh, btw, Civilization 5 played with the Steam Controller comfortably from the sofa is a very nice experience.
I also don't really like 5 and I think 2 was by far the most balanced one and fun to play. SMAC had an amazing story and varied factions but the replayability just wasn't there for me.
Recently I've found Endless legend and that is a bit of cross between SMAC and Civ 5. Very pretty but a lot of depth too, different strategies possible, varied factions, you HAVE to make custom units (there are only 5 by default, each has ~6 slots for one of 20 pieces of equipment). The combat is completely fucked up though.
EDIT: oh yeah and another thing I kinda like about it is how there is no civilopedia or good tutorial so you have to figure stuff out
You know what I miss? Civilization: Call to Power. Its balance was always a little wobbly, but I liked dragging my civilization into the Diamond Age, building cities in space, bombarding the enemy from orbit and taking out their capitol with nanites.
I never was a Civ player, but through involvement in a different gaming community (Descent) I ended up as friends with the guy (Bob "Sirian" Thomas) who led the Civ IV alpha-testing effort. He noticed that they didn't have any inexperienced testers to look for the sorts of things that would make the game hard to understand for new players, so he asked me if I'd be willing to get involved.
In the middle of all of the balance tweaks the expert players were calling for, the devs took the time to listen to my newbie feedback along the lines of "every so often this chart showing political alliances pops up, but I have no idea how to trigger it intentionally" and they added easy-access buttons to the HUD for me. At one point I counted something like a dozen minor UI improvements that had come out of me saying "I don't understand what I'm doing". They, of course, didn't make any game-balance tweaks for me because I had no business even attempting to comment on game balance.
The fact that they knew not merely to listen, but what types of feedback to listen to from which testers, really made the game shine. They listened to experts when it came to strategy, and noobs when it came to discoverability, and all sorts of players when it came to general aesthetics and coolness. IMO a lot of game-design efforts could learn from that.
4 was by far the best 'classic' Civ experience. That being said, I think the one unit per tile change in Civ5 was needed and added a lot of strategy to actually fighting. My hope in Civ6 is that tiles are smaller and that cities and other features can take up multiple tiles.
I tried playing V. Probably spent 15 hours on it to make sure it was the game and not me. Finally decided that V and I just would never get along, and I went back to IV. Best of the series, imho.
I agree. I like 5, in all the ways that it's different- but I always feel like 5 has a long expanse of seemingly meaningless turns until all of a sudden things get good. Then it will have another long lull between interesting events.
Maybe in a way, the team finally got their model of Civilization true to real life? :)
The Brave New World expansion really fixed this. With the world congress, trading and collecting art, there are no more meaningless turns in the game. Definitely try it out.
I bought all the expansions in a Steam sale (I think it was like $5 or $15 for all of them, couldn't press buy fast enough). You're definitely right about BNW having a lot more to do between turns. I kind of forgot that World Congress was part of the expansion- I can't remember playing Civ 5 without it. It's one of my favorite parts of the game, though I do wish it was a little easier or possible to get other civs to form a voting bloc.
It's not that difficult. You just need to have something another civ wants, and trade them for their vote on an issue. Also, you can form your own voting bloc by allying city-states.
4 removed it's anchor to the real world. I wasn't playing on earth anymore, along the tapestry of human history and invention, against the great leaders of every epoch.
It's just some fantasy land composed of abstract references to the real world, and I find it hard to care.
That was my first impression, but I've actually found that I enjoy Civ 5 more. It's more dynamic and polished, and they've removed exactly these aspects of the game that I used to find annoying.
I felt that way before the Civ5 expansions. Bounced right off of it. With the expansions, though, I enjoy Civ5 quite a lot. It is emphatically not the same game as Civ4BTS, which I still play pretty regularly too, but it's a pretty decent spin on the formula as far as I'm concerned.
there's a lot of streamlining that happened, so it depends on why you played civ
If you played the older civs for the micromanagement aspects, then civ5 probably disappoints. I play Civ for the "macro" (I really enjoy watching my civ grow, and don't really do much in terms of strategising), and I enjoy Civ 5 a lot.
Alpha Centauri was always my favourite game in the series but these days I find myself playing a lot of Master of Magic, a game with way more tactical and strategic variety than any of the Civ games.