Have you ever played anyone of the civization games?

[LemiaOfThunder]

Yes

No

[NamerOfStars]

Yes- ALL of them, in fact. Well, except Revolution, but that doesn't really count. One was actually a boardgame adaptation, and a pretty good one at that; two blew it out of the water. Call to Power (one and two) were better than their reputation, but not amazing or anything. Alpha Centauri was proof that God (or at least Sid) loves us and wants us to be happy (and terrified). Quantum laser helicopters launched from a submersible aircraft carrier to protect your formers as they build a land bridge to the other side of your enemy's continent? You got it!

Three was, in some regards, a step backwards; five was about twelve steps backwards ("You remember how Master of Orion 3 handed major gameplay decisions over to the art department, and wound up so awful it killed the entire genre? What if we did that, but to an even GREATER extent?"). I'd been playing the franchise since the time I learned to read, and I'd never gotten more than a few dozen turns into a deity game before getting crushed or giving it up for hopeless. With five, I ran into AI so incompetent that I GOT BORED and gave up my deity-level game. It was just too easy.

Beyond Earth was an attempt to recapture the glory of Alpha Centauri, without the solid mechanics or the amazing writing. I don't blame them for the experiments of five not panning out, but when something doesn't work, you CHANGE it; you don't double down. The only really positive thing I have to say about it is that the expansion was called "rising tide", meaning the acronym for it was "BERT", which is mildly amusing in a Sesame Street kind of way.

Six COULD have been an improvement (spyware aside), but the Firaxis of the 2010s was very different from the Firaxis of the late 90's; they just didn't have it any more.

That just leaves four. Four didn't have the complex game options and planetary engineering of AC, and it obviously didn't have the writing, but in purely gameplay terms it was the peak of the series; the AI was smart WITHOUT needing to cheat, and the mechanics didn't gimp you to cover the incompetence of the underlying systems. A friend bought me Beyond Earth, and I came back to check out six on a free weekend, but five burned me out so badly I made the jump over to Europa Universalis and never really looked back.

[NathanDavis]

Age of Empires... lol

[GoodGuyBreakingBad]

No, sorry, I don't