Civilization 3 had to do what Civilization 2 was not able to do and break into 3D world of strategy maps. I was more impresssed by Age of Wonders games that offered better terrain strategy and eventually they replaced my interest in Civilization games. That along with more pleasing fantasy visuals and music was something that took over up till Crusader Kings II came along(though it had a dark side of using toxic and not very deep enough interpretations of history).
>>One other hand if you take XCOM in its various incarnations, it does have a very compelling game play loop, with very consequential decisions to be made, and the combination of tactical decision making at battle level and the long term factors in the overworld is a very interesting one.
Hmm, this is interesting observation, but I have excatly the same feelings towards Civilization games that you are describing about XCOM games, because I felt that XCOM games did not offer very deep game and were very repetitive to the same grind. But then, I also have a dislike for any doom scenarious of future and probably that was one of the reasons why I was not impressed by XCOM games and also Civilization II with free range of scenarious as the first thing that map makers did was creation of doomsday scenarios and the ones that weren't doomsday scenarios were not as fun as other games.
>>In short, we do need to reassess if Civilization games are indeed great games, considering that they are unqualfyingly praised in much of the discussion.
Well, I feel that some of the "hate" or claims about greatness of some games in past is more on the meme level that over time have developed in myths, that some now are taking too seriously - even religiously... :))
It also has to be taken into the account, that any author that is riding the wave on someones else success has to praise object of the topic even more and that makes self fuelling cycle, but I would not go so far as to claim, that Civilization was not a great game. It stood test of time - my memories of first Civilization are of those times, when other very popular option was Wolfstein 3D and then Doom and Doom II and I still played first Civilization when I got bored of Civilization II. Of course I played later Civilizations as well and had fun, but my ground base memories are not about them all so there will be a bias about some of them.