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Notes -
I’ve played Civs 2-5, my first one was Civ 2.
Although playing Civ 2 was a revelation and at this point a core memory of my late childhood, I’ll agree with OP re: Civ 4
Civ 4 with all the expansions is absolutely peak Civ. The strategic and tactical complexity and intuitiveness is without equal. I still remember, years later, some of those individual game.
My personal best was a domination victory at 1792 AD on a Huge Tierra map on Marathon. I was the Ethiopians, I was going for a culture victory but kept getting sucked into defensive wars that ended up with me counterattacking and taking small bits of territory. I had to pivot to an all out military strategy when one of my Allies triggered a huge regional conflict and I ended up pulling a great khan and swallowing up everyone who opposed me. At some point I couldn’t handle any more new cities but still had such an overwhelming military advantage that I just kept going, burning and looting everything that stood in my way. Meanwhile I had found the new world and was pumping out settlers and seeding the continent with trading settlements. Game ended when my napoleonic style army had reached the southern tip of my home continent, with me holding the entire northern hemisphere in both the new and old worlds and every hostile power with their backs broken and the southern hemisphere only sparsely populated after dozens of wars of annihilation.
That was 2016.
To this day I start a new marathon game a year, and pick a new leader and map type and pick away at it for months until I win or lose.
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