civs

Even without FTL, if civs can travel across stars, they should have already colonized the galaxy.

Apart from clusters obviously, but then you need to sustain civilizations of brains, and civs do collapse every dozen generations.

There's no better story generators than those games though, even Civs don't quite compare.

More recently I read that they are going to update the game such that you don't have to switch civs.

Among other things, Shafer did the AI programming himself despite a lack of previous experience, leading him to make the computer Civs far too random.

I'd be surprised if alien civs didn't do at least a few things that are hard to imagine on 21st century Earth.

I tried 2 Civs after Civilization 2, but they both seemed to miss some...

If you announce your presence, even if 4 out of 5 civs that notice you don’t annihilate you immediately (but they probably should), the fifth might.

Apparently all of the leaders have their own personalities and respond differently, but to me, they do a poor job of getting the Civs to communicate that.

(A smaller, electric, rocket throwing gun...) Those civs won't be able to construct a space elevator.

Nethack, Civ (including older Civs now and then).

If there are 1000000 million advanced civs in our galaxy and 999999 of them decided not to expand, the 1 remaining will still colonize everything in a million years.

Though I find it frustrating when I feel like a game is "cheating" (like other Civs science advancing at a much higher rate than mine in Civilization games).

It's a big hit to their ego that all the other great "academic" civs of the world (Western European, Russian, Chinese, Indian, Jewish) have it except the Persians.

Freeciv's point of interest is that it's not trying to exactly replicate any one of the original Civs: it has its default ruleset plus others that are closer to the original games, but it's very easy to make your own.