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.
Most people don’t know: There’s a multiplayer variant of Civilization 1: CivNet. Barely playable today, as it’s a Windows 3.1 game. I loved it till late in the 2000s.
Yup, CivNet seemed the most popular for a while. Somebody also put together a mod archive for WinCiv. I also found there’s an open-source decomp project that is “playable”, but I haven’t looked at how mature that one is.
I’ve been leaning more toward UnCiv and FreeCiv21 with a Civ 1 style tileset. Think I prefer the Civ 2 ruleset though.