Edit: Fixed VPN users blocking: I don’t know why, it was blocking VPN users, even though I had set it to allow VPN users before Poll creation! Just checked it again and set it back to allow. My apologies.
Look only after voting: Poll results
1 day later at 2026-09-09 07:29 (German Local Time)
The Poll: Allows for up to two title selections. I set option to “Anonymize voter data” and allow VPN users.
Your Tierlist: You can share an image by downloading your Tierlist. No account required.
Do you have a favorite in the series? Which one do you want try and what do you would avoid? Is there any alternative game series you prefer over Civilization?
Sid Meier’s Civilization Series: Wikipedia
- (1991) Civilization: MobyGames | GameFAQs | IGDB | Metacritic: - / -
- (1996) Civilization II: MobyGames | GameFAQs | IGDB | Metacritic: 94 / 8.6
- (2001) Civilization III: MobyGames | GameFAQs | IGDB |Metacritic: 90 / 8.4
- (2005) Civilization IV: MobyGames | GameFAQs | IGDB | Metacritic: 94 / 8.4
- (2010) Civilization V: MobyGames | GameFAQs | IGDB | Metacritic: 90 / 8.1
- (2016) Civilization VI: MobyGames | GameFAQs | IGDB | Metacritic: 88 / 7.3
- (2025) Civilization VII: MobyGames | GameFAQs | IGDB | Metacritic: 79 / 3.8
My story
I started with Civilization 1 on Super Nintendo. Amazing game, worked well with gamepad optimized port, but loading times were abysmal in late game. Won all matches by domination. Later played Civilization 2 on Playstation 1. Won all matches by domination too. This time loading times were even worse, to a point I stopped playing because of this. My next game in series was much later when Civilization 5 came out on PC, then later Civilization 6. Both great games. Its the first time I won by other means than domination and the loading times were not an issue anymore. Just purchased and downloaded Civilization 4, which I will try out after posting this.
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V is the best that I’ve played. 2 is a solid choice since it’s the foundation more so than the original. 6 is a garbled mess of systems that don’t work well together, and attempts to steal mechanics from other games but poorly done.
I’m a bit surprised about this negative feedback over Civ6. Granted I’m not as deep as some others into this, and my experience is limited here. I played Civ5 and Civ6 and didn’t have the impression that it was a mess. I know in the initial launch phase of Civ6 lot of people were unhappy about the bad Ai of the enemies. But for mechanics and balance, I didn’t think it is that bad.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t try to invalidate your opinion or anything like that! Just saying that it surprised me.
Civ VII having 0 votes over 12 hours into the poll is hilarious to me.
I’m not sure anyone who only played 7 could call it their favorite civ game.
Every person can vote for 2 titles. Civ VII is not even the second favorite for any of the voter. :D
Also relevant is the user ratings of each of the games in your post (ignoring the “critic” ratings).
SMAC is the best Civ game followed by Civ IV. Civ III is the worst.
Alpha Centauri
By a light year
I may be in the minority, but Civilization Revolution on my iPad circa 2009 was my favorite thing ever. I liked that it wasn’t as complex as other installments and the mechanics were perfect for mobile device.
Then CivRev2 came around they stopped support for the first one. I hate CivRev2 because it shoehorned a 3d globe map and the mechanics got clunky. Just give me my first edition with bird’s eye view again!
I loved that game too! The simplicity was what made it so good.
I’ve played a few of them, but I loved playing Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (SMAC) the most. My favorite was playing as Gaia’s Stepdaughters since you could quickly get control of the planet’s “mind worms” which were units that would never go obsolete.
This was exactly my play too, mind locusts were crazy OP, especially with movement bonuses over Xenofungus. I usually played Zahkarov over Deirdre but the result was always the same, lol. A planet covered in Xenofungus and a massive mind worm/locust army. That game is so good, I was immensely disappointed in Beyond Earth. It couldn’t live up to the original unfortunately
Civilization Revolution was my introduction to the series. I havnt played it since 2010, but I loved it.
Now I play civ 6, have hundreds of hours, all the essential mods, and I think Ill play this version til I am dead.
What are the essential mods for 6?
So, the UI mods. I had a solid config for a while, but a few months ago aligned my list with Potato McWiskey in an effort to get better as he uses some I hadnt before. I made some adjustments, and I have many of the fun wonders available, but the UI mods are very helpful, and Id consider essential. Its nice theyre all in one link, and is a great place to start imo
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2470646711
Haha (not laughing at you, just funny the way you said it). Back when there was only 1 and 2, I thought I play 2 until the rest of my life too. :D I’m currently exploring the rest of the franchise.
lol yeah This thread might have me try civ 5, so thanks for posting!
Civ4 is A-tier.
Civ4: Fall from Heaven 2, Rise of Erebus, Fall Further, Mod Mods transcends S-Tier.Alpha Centauri is a distant 2nd. But still good.
I just saw the main menu of Civ4 has a Mod entry. Is this a thing with all Civ games (never checked this before, currently don’t want to download all games to check). I’m not modding Steam games usually, so not really familiar how this works. Is the ingame Mod menu compatible with Steam Workshop? Or is this its own thing maybe, to be compatible outside of Steam. I never put any emphasis on mods for Civ games, because they already offer so much, plus the DLCs. I usually think of mods either to fix an issue or to expand content, and none of this was ever an issue for me for Civ games (I’m probably more of a casual Civ player).
Since civ4 predates the steam workshop, I’m not aware of any compatibility between the mod menu and steam workshop. The mod menu is for more “simple” mods that make XML changes, but don’t need dll support. The mod menu may also support python changes, but i’m not an expert. Most mods however use their own launchers where they are able to use their own dll’s, python and scripting. Changes the purpose of the civ4 executable to simply be the game engine with much of the mechanical logic opened up to the imagination.
Fundamentally you have a single tile map and mechanics that compute on each turn along with a combat engine for the units. But despite those limitations, the breadth of mods is vast and hasn’t been matched in any of the future installments. (Cynically I think it’s a publisher decision to lock modding behind compiled binaries so that DLC can be sold, but technically I may wrong on that.)
The original “Fall from Heaven: Age of Ice” mod is actually an official mod of Civ4: Beyond the Sword. You can play it in the scenarios and that will give you a taste of what the vast world of “Erebus” modding looks like.
Thanks for explaining this. Makes sense that ingame mods are limited.
(Cynically I think it’s a publisher decision to lock modding behind compiled binaries so that DLC can be sold, but technically I may wrong on that.)
I don’t think you are wrong. I think lot of devs or publishers want to block mods, so their DLCs are more worth and can sell them better.
One vote per IP.
Only took two exit node refreshes to be able to answer XD
Hmm. You only need to vote once, so one vote per IP should be not a problem. I don’t understand what the problem is. Last time I did a Poll, I excluded by accident the VPN users and nobody mentioned an issue by IP. Don’t tell me I fucked it up again. :D
Nope,I run through a permanent VPN, so it can say “You already did this” when I did not. An exit refresh works, just need to get an IP nobldy else used.
Same, I prefer to use a VPN everywhere. It would be nice to get away from straw polls and use polls directly from the Fediverse. PieFed and Mastodon allow for polls like this, but Lemmy still doesn’t support it just yet: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/787
Native support for Polls would be amazing!
Ah, I see. I have this issue sometimes when I use VPN to access YouTube with third party apps. I saw there was a separate option to allow one vote per IP. I could change that to vote per browser session, but don’t know if this works well or has other quirks too. I’m sorry for this.
I haven’t played all of them but I would say Civilization III is my favorite. It has the classic elements in their most polished form. My dark horse, though, is Civilization Revolution for the Nintendo DS. While Revolution on the other platforms was basically a simplified version of Civilization IV, the DS couldn’t handle that and got an even more simplified 2D version. In simplifying it they really made the 4X gameplay crisper and more focused. They should release a version of that for mobile phones.
I mainly play on PC nowadays (well emulation is a thing, but for Civ I don’t need emus). Currently trying out Civ4 and Civ3 is on my todo list. Hmm if 3 is like a polished version of its predecessors, then I think that’s it, I will never touch 1 or 2 again probably.
I know four is a commonly referenced favourite, but I just couldn’t get into it. Beyond Earth on the other hand, was quite fun despite the hate, although didn’t have as much replayability or longevity.
Civ4 will always be on top.
A lot of it is nostalgia. It introduced me into the series, so I played a lot!
I even left my comfort zone and wrote after action reports and stories around running games in a forum.
The spinoff Colonization was strange, but fun too!
I am currently playing a play per mail game with a friend and I really miss this type of multiplayer in later titles.
My favorites have been Civ 2 Test of Time, Alpha Centauri, and 5. I also played a lot of 4 Colonies, but I would rank it a tier lower.
For the non mainline games, I’m interested into Beyond Earth. I completely forgot Test of Time being a Remake of the original second game.
Beyond Earth is good, it just has a big predecessor to live up to.
4 & 5 are pretty close, in my book, but 4 has a GOG release and 5 is still a cracked Steam copy rather than owned, so I pick the one they let me buy.
Well you can vote for 2 games if you want. Do you avoid buying on Steam entirely? Unfortunately 1 and 2 are not available on Steam, but there are other ways to play them anyway.
I’ve had a few “updates” forced on me by Steam that broke games, so I only buy DRM-Free with offline installers, now. I own Civ4 from GOG, Civ5 IIRC is a Tenoke pack I torrented.
Yes, that was one of the most terrible decisions of Steam to do forced updates. In old days it wasn’t forced, but someday they changed it to. I can understand this for online games, because they need to stay in sync. But for offline games, it shouldn’t be. Wish they differentiated that, its a really terrible thing. Probably the worst thing of Steam in my opinion.
I’m pretty sure you can rollback game versions on Steam too.
Some games have alternative versions, not necessarily old ones. In Steam game properties > Game Versions & Betas some games offer Beta versions, others a Nighly (meaning newest possible) versions, and some have older fixed versions. Most games don’t have it, and even if, you can’t just use any version you want.
Can’t you use Steam Depot to download older versions? It’s been a minute since I futzed with it.
I don’t know that. I thought that was for developers only. Edit: Found this relevant tool: https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader Note, I never tried this tool and have no experience. Ah yes, and the official documentation from Valve: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/depots
They all just kinda felt the same to me.
4 and 5. They were simple enough, but had deep strategy, 6 added too much, also the art style is worse.
