Pic relevant. I’ve tried playing the new Civ games several times, and quickly end up quitting because I find them too overwhelming and find it hard to want to deal with the learning curve.
It occurred to me that part of the problem might be that I was jumping into a very old franchise that has been getting increasingly complicated over the years. Had a hunch I would have better luck with the original, so I went onto one of those play-dos-in-your-browser sites, dove in, and sure enough I am hooked!
Do I know what I’m doing? Not really, but stuff is happening and my civilization is growing, and it’s a good time.
I have vanilla Civ V on Steam and I was able to get Civ VI with a bunch of expansions for free through Epic. VI has some cool stuff, but I think I enjoy V more.
CIV VI really dives into board game-like qualities and while it’s a double edged sword, I think what it does, it does very well. There is room in the series for experimentation and trying new angles. The problem with VII is it doesn’t seem to even know what it wants to be or how it wants to do it. It’s unfortunately a mess that I don’t think they can fix.