7. Civilization IV
Firaxis | 2K Games | 2005
The latest and greatest incarnation of the ultimate empire-building strategy game. It's your job to take your tribe from a pre-historic hamlet to a space-faring superpower
What made it so great?
Apart from encapsulating the entirety of human history in one elegant game? Civ IV is compelling because of the very finely honed mechanics: scientific progress, diplomacy, industry and religion are all games in themselves, modeled simply but efficiently and honed to perfection over the series' 14 year history. Coaxing all of them to work in conjunction for you over a six-thousand year conquest keeps every neuron in your brain busy.
But that's not what makes it so thrilling. That comes from the significance of what you spend your clicks doing. You're not crushing some throwaway alien race or vanquishing the orcs yet again, you're defining the the very history of our species. You can lead the Mongols to take over the world, save the Aztecs and use them to conquer Rome, or find out what William Shakespeare would have done if he'd been born in India, 800BC. Even if you don't actively try, in any given game of Civ IV you're bound to end up doing something that would make a historian spit out his tea, and that's half the fun.
Get ready to play
Break out your old history textbooks, or just hit up Wikipedia for the basics. Every nation in Civ is carefully modelled after its historical counterpart, so knowing that your new neighbor Julius Caesar isn't just going to sit there contentedly in Italy for the rest of the decade definitely has its advantages.
Been there, done that?
Fourth time was also the charm for Maxis' juggernaut SimCity series: SimCity 4 put your town-building efforts into context by letting you form closer relationships with your neighboring cities - although it still stopped short of letting you crush them and take over the world.
