Civilization 7 Is in Development
polygon.com
polygon.com
Another huge problem is the extremely questionable affordances in free form speech. Here's an NPC, go talk to them. But about what? Maybe they drop clues. But what if the player doesn't pick them up, or they're distracted and aren't paying attention, or it's been 2 weeks between play sessions and what was this guy's deal again?
[clap emoji]x3
idk know why this keeps getting repeated, it is NOT a statistical analysis of past data and a prompt. It is not just pattern matching. It is building models to predict patterns, which is a very different statement. And the fact of the matter is, is that is mostly still an unknown blackbox. It is an area of active research to understand the mechanisms of this blackbox.
I suspect that our brains are so profoundly hardwired to recognize certain signal patterns as proof of conscious intent that soon, even experts who should know better are doomed to be fooled. The layman has no chance.
The dirty secret is that we don't know if we want that. So far we don't have technology to make Civ AI play remotely like a reasonable human (at least not on a consumer grade PC). So we have absolute zero data point on how players will react to that.
I don't necessarily want an AI that tries to play like a human, though it would be a fun option, I want an AI that isn't just straight up terrible given the same starting resources and rules as the player.
Part of the problem, I think, is that each iteration of Civ, they make the game more complicated in a way that makes it even harder for the AI to do as well as a good player, but probably most players don't care and there isn't a lot of reason to become good at the game anyway.
In particular, humans are very good at reasoning based on limited information. We can form hypotheses about where resources or objectives might be, or if an enemy unit goes out if the visible map, estimating where it could be on a later turn, or what it’s presence indicates about its home civilisation’s disposition out of sigh. That sort of thing is extremely hard to program, so the only way to compensate for the AIs inability to intuit information is by actually giving it the information.
Which is why the parent of the entire chain mentioned the advances in AI.
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/cicero-ai-negotiates-persuades-...
I'd love God mode AI to put up any sort of half decent fight without needing to have so many more units that just go through an endless meat grinder because they can't coordinate or figure out how to back off and heal.
1) Break the problem down into strategic goals and tactical actions, and then group the tactical actions into areas (e.g. diplomacy, resourcing, combat, research).
2) Process recorded online games of human players into streams of relevant events / choices.
3) Continually retrain your models on the output of 2.
You should thus have an AI that approximates the meta approaches of humans, which is really what we're talking about.
New players look exactly like bad AI: making poor choices, oblivious to things "the players community" already knows are always optimal, etc.
So really the problem is "How do we build a model that already knows what most of our players do, at this stage of the game's lifecycle?"
Which is essentially what one of the recent fighting games(?) did with their AI.
Is it that players hate good AI or that flagrant cheating breaks immersion? I think the latter would be an interesting AI target: can you make something which plays well but doesn’t do things which are obviously impossible for the player to do in-game - e.g. helping the AI with some extra resources isn’t glaring but having attacks perfectly target things the AI shouldn’t be able to see, or instantly repair damaged units, etc. is something you could never duplicate even if you were the best player in the world.
The problem is AI for complex games like that is absurdly hard to develop. The combinatorial complexity of a game like Axis & Allies is something like a hundred orders of magnitude greater than chess. It’s probably similar with Civ, probably a lot more so.
But aside from just competency, what makes playing humans so compelling is personality. Human players range the full spectrum from terrible to excellent, but even beyond that they vary massively in the ways they are terrible, and the ways in which they are excellent. With A&AOL there are top tiered players that employ radically different strategies, to great effect.
In the context of Civ, you could have each civ leader have unique personality, and that would add a lot of color to the game.
"Nuclear Gandhi" being the prime example.
The lack of choice in buildings, reasonably inconsequential bonus tile yields, minimalist tech tree where you have to research everything, lack of synergies between buildings-resources-terrains, etc. all make a lot more sense when you see what horrendous decisions the AI makes even on hardest difficulties.
Also, it feels _really_ good when you get to a new ship tier faster than your neighbors. The reverse is, however, very frustrating, as you are forced to play catch.
In SMAC you could make a single proposal per turn. If it was good, they would accept it, if it was almost good, they would counter your offer, if it wasn't good enough, they would actually get madder at you and stop talking for the rest of the turn (or for a few turns if you relations were that bad). That was the only feedback you'd get.
This small change made parlaying with AI leaders feel more realistic. Instead of going "Hm, you won't give me Zaragoza and all your money, because 'we are losing' is only at +15, I'll come next turn when it should be at +17" you start building a mental model of each leader and proposing deals you think they should accept.
Every one gets a challenge (or not if they chose so). We are probably not quite there yet.
And that was 10 or so years ago.
Which is more constrained than your average 4X, but not fundamentally different (resource + research + movement + combat).
We want AI that is capable to never miss, and then is tuned down in a controllable matter. We want smart AI that are dumbed down in precise ways to create illusion of dumb AI, not dumb AI boosted by resources and damage modifiers to give illusion of a smart one.
You can make smart AI look dumb (thus weaker), but hardly ever you can make dumb AI look smart, thus now the strong AI is just dumb AI with advantage
The issue is that a lot of things a computer controlled player does is entirely too easy to implement with just a few random rolls. This starts to fall apart if you want to vary the difficulty. So you can get a credible if disdained "AI" in a lot less effort that say training a Neural net to predict what action a human would likely take next.
There simply is no "GPT-1" AI of playing a game yet much less a "GPT-3" level one and I do not think that it would be entirely easy at all to "tune" it in any way to get a consistent difficulty scale.
The neighbour saw this and sent me a message saying "If this were a harder difficulty mode, I would think you were planning to attack me!"
Let the AI know everything, in the way that a father knows everything when teaching chess to his kid. But instead of just nurturing an independent chess player, feed the player with dopamine experiences that keeps him playing. Early victories, the joy of discovery, interesting diplomatic situations. Once they can play better, stretch it out a bit, more intricate setups.
No idea how to code this up.
Meanwhile an AI better at roleplaying now seems to be a low investment for a decent reward situation ?
AI doesn't come free, GalCiv2 has been built around the AI being competent, but is IMHO a boring game as a result.
I guess I would agree with you for Civ 5 (and 6 ?) where the decision to switch to the 1 unit par tile system has crippled the AI... (while being pushed by Firaxis wanting to make the game more friendly to those sub-median-experience players !) But then I would argue that this system is bad for Civ itself, and this is an outlier.
(There's also the example of both AI Wars being built around embracing that the AI plays a different game, which from I hear works very well. It's questionable how applicable that is to your average 4X.)
Nah, I mean everybody as in pretty much anybody I see talking about AI in these games, it's almost always negatively. And honestly, I don't care how experienced players are. If your average player is complaining about your AI, then you've failed.
Experienced players are just better at quantifying and identifying how AI fails and how it affects the gameplay.
Honestly, I struggle to see what your point is. That devs just shouldn't bother with AI?
My point, trying to restate it in a different way, is that these language models might be low-hanging fruit to make an AI interacting with whom feels more like a head of state (and a specific historic one too !)
Though I'll note that Alpha Centauri has already achieved something like this using a very simple dialog AI (in a specific context).
3 starter cities compared to your 1. That can be brutal to overcome. Top players like potato mcwhisky basically have to know every little thing possible to win.
E.g. you could start an "interesting" conversation with a random NPC in GTA or Hitman instead of getting the same pre-canned reactions over and over.
The downside then however is that the scripted characters which are important for driving the story forward will feel like pre-programmed robots compared to any 'unpredictable' random NPC ;)
If AI was playing rationally then you would actually be able to understand it’s decisions and it wouldn’t do random shit or block deals because of RNG
If the diplomacy mechanic cannot survive with players playing to win, then it’s clearly the diplomacy mechanic that’s wrong — diplomacy in reality is an inevitable result of multiple players playing to win; you don’t do diplomacy for fun, but to shift the world-state slightly in your favor by unifying against common threats.
Something must be fundamentally wrong with the model if it cannot encourage the most basic action within that model, without a player acting completely against his own interest
Or if it does break, make it correctable. My friends all care more about continuing the game than about perfect fairness.
Big plus for continuing to work like that while supporting modding.
We have played every civ a bunch, and none of them seem to support a 3-4 player "comp stomp" that hits the balance of hard late game, no cheap kills in the first 50 turns.
In fact since this is a common request, I keep seeing people implementing it in all kinds of games, I would be surprised if nobody in the Civ community had never set this up and shared across the whole 6+2 games franchise ?
* Which one of my industrial zones has no workshops yet? * What luxury resources am I receiving via trade? And with which players? * What bonuses am I getting from the wonders I've built?
I can get all that information myself, but it takes a lot of clicking around - provided that I remember where to source it. Make it a Q&A, and playing the game will feel much less like working with spreadsheets.
Next we’ll have a game where that’s the only interface for this information, and enemy spies makes it lie to you.
I would prefer more open games so that it's much easier to run queries like this myself.
Going to try and play a few rounds with these rules
Since then I've bought every new Civ as it came out and maybe played through two or three games before abandoning it. None of them capture the original, but rather just add more and different crap to micromanage. They're just not fun.
The big exception is Alpha Centauri, which is essentially a Civ 2 remake with good automation of the boring stuff. Over the years I've probably played that even more than the original.
The other surprising exception is Civilization Revolution 1 for the iPad. It stripped out manual terrain improvement entirely and left a really fun game behind. Sadly because it's in the apple ecosystem you can't get it anymore. It only runs on iOS 8 and below, and has been replaced in the store by Version 2 With Microtransactions and Pay To Win. I keep an old ipad on life support just to play it.
But yeah, the mainline Civ games have been (for me) a chance to pay $60 every few years, get excited, and be disappointed.
I think I might finally break out of my cycle with this one.
The ideal sequel would be "Civ 1, with new graphics and better automation". Then iterate on that every few years.
I'm not sure the civ guys can come up with something to compete with it. The recent games were so bloated and everything dragged on to the to point you'd just lose interest mid game, or quit before an inevitable victory/loss in the late game.
Also I'm not sure what you could do to improve Polytopia to make it a better game, except adding multiplayer team games.
Just because new players didn't know how to scout and/or that artillery does collateral damage to stacks...
Other sequels were meh, the only good feature is borders creep that prevents other players from building cities on your territory.
Literally the only turn based strategy I like
There are very, very few games out there that have something to say about philosophy. Alpha Centauri is a tour de force. It lets you explore many different philosophies of government and societal ethics. It continues the conversation that began with Plato's Republic, a multi-millennia-old debate about what constitutes an ideal society. It lets you experiment and build your own vision of utopia, while clashing with other visionary founders and their competing ideas.
It's absolutely fascinating and addictive stuff! I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys thinking about philosophy, as well as anyone who enjoys 4X games.
Same for me, though I couldn't exactly pinpoint why - maybe its the simplicity?
On the contrary, they add a whole new strategic dimensions to the game. In Civ I you had what, two victory conditions (Domination and Science)? In Civ V, you have also Cultural Victory (producing much more tourism than every other civilization's culture) and Diplomatic (getting most of the city states on your side). This is not "crap to micromanage", but more like changing the game from 2D chess to 3d chess.
Not to mention, the one unit per tile limit in Civ V makes combat much more tactical and interesting (combat is no longer just about quantity).
Those "crap" to micromenege are the different aspects brought in that form essential context of a civilization left out before, all thing like commerce, culture, religion are of an essence normally but left out due to simplifications before. Yes, they make the game complex for some and takes time learning how those affect the outcome and how to find the balance in a particular situation (geography, civ characteristics, opponents, mistakes made earlier, etc.) but it very well worths the effor in each, it is a good game tinkering with aspects other than how to hit opponents hard, leveraging other characteristings than pure power.
Not all changes are welcome by me either throughout the years, the top view of 1 is well enough for this game, the video card eating cirlcling seagulls over fishing boats in 3D are a bad joke, laughable, and all such like animated time delaying combats, waste of efforts for superficial nothings bloating the game unnecessarily. Not all aspects work too well either, like spying in 5, could use some improvements.
All changes brought in some good and interesting. And it is good if can turn off some if you feel so (and one can).
I stopped at 5. The 6 I found just weird (probably feeling the same like you did with all after the 1). Going back to 1 is sooo booring now!
Will be curious what the 7 brings, but cautiously, first looking at gameplay of others, not buying if it is obviously not my cup of tea.
Since owning lots of cities essentially comes at relatively little cost in the older Civ games, towards the end the AI will have spammed cities in just about every nook and cranny. (The addition of sea bases in SMAC seems like an interesting addition at first but accentuates this problem.) In SMAC the relationships with some of the AI leaders also tend towards more or less perpetual war which, with the high number of cities, I find frustrating since striking down or conquering a chronically belligerent neighbour requires capturing (or razing) a ridiculous number of individually insignificant cities.
Shifting the maintenance costs of units from individual cities to gold paid from the treasury also reduces micromanagement of those unit costs. Having cities defend themselves at some level without having units stationed also reduces the need to micromanage their defences in some cases.
I haven't played the first Civ that much but I played a lot of Civ II, and I think it suffered from some of those issues as well.
It's true that some of the changes in later Civs do also add further micromanagement. The archaeologists added in Civilization V: Brave New World require going all over the world (and generally hand-holding them), and the entire mechanic seems like a bit of an odd but more or less compulsory detour in the game. And optimizing the great works stuff in general quickly turns into micromanagement. Dealing with e.g. city-states and their quests also introduces some of it, although they also add another (potentially interesting) strategical conduit to the game.
With that said, I still find SMAC to be one of the best games in the series, and there will always be a place in my heart for Civ II.
I really didn't like that about Civ V. It totally destroyed the mood of the game. No longer was it about building a great empire. It essentially became turn-based Warcraft.
I want a game that lets me build even larger empires with more cities than Civ 1. To cut down on micromanagement the game needs smart tools for automation and delegation.
It seems like with Civ V onward they pushed the game farther and farther away from SimCity and toward The Sims. That's fine. Lots of people love The Sims. But I prefer SimCity.
See also: Victoria 3
Also the late game needs to be more meaningful. A lot of players never make it to the later ages because victory is achievable quite a bit sooner unless you're plating for science victory.
https://www.filfre.net/2023/01/sequels-in-strategy-gaming-pa...
Civ5 is what is used for multiplayer in my group. The mechanics are simpler and there are far fewer decisions to make as you get into the end game.
If I was going to make a 4x, I would make multiplayer the #1 priority and I would focus on the turn length. There are plenty of 4x titles out there if you and a buddy want to burn an entire afternoon playing through one turn each.
Civ games usually only beat their predecessors once the last expansion comes out. I stopped playing 6 after the climate change DLC. Was pretty underwhelmed. Has it matured now like 5 did?
Another big source of imbalance is of course the AI's inability to use any of the secret society powers effectively.
Couple that with an incredibly hostile UX for new/non-expert players and the massive time commitment, and the experience is one of frustration rather thay joy & escapism.
It's like work, but you just get the pain of failures and none of the rewards.
Mostly I just want the same game, made by a different company that's run by people who are less interesting in churning out DLC for $ and leaving all the quality-of-life stuff to modders.
The "4 cities" may be easiest and most obvious strategy, but there's plenty of people who beat the game on Deity via Warmongering or spamming cities all over the map as well. The game has plenty of depth.
I should have probably clarified anyway. There are other viable strategies that people have found, but I just find it very annoying how much the game shoehorns you into the 4-city strategy through the very-unfun and just... dumb?... happiness mechanic. Imo Civilization-building should be about finding optimal exponential growth based on what you have to work with in your particular game, not about optimizing against arbitrary breakpoints in the rules and/or exploiting degenerate and counterintuitive strategies (such as the mysteriously viable warrior spam).
I guess I just wanted a simpler game.
The biggest difference is that civilizations in 6 feel distinct. In 5, all of them felt generic with cosmetic differences between them - except for Venice. In 6, with each civilization (and leader) it's like playing a different game. Preserving nature with Maori, settling tundra with Canada, cramming cities and districts with Japan, pillaging with Norway, eurekas with Babylon. I can pick the game again after two months and have a fun evening, without getting bored.
Speaking of districts, I love this mechanic. It makes sense and I like the extra puzzle and planning. I see how it gives board game vibes and I'm ok with it. Seeing the Civ series as simulation games is a mistake. They never were and they can't be. The reason for that is scale - both in size and time. The map is a grid of either squares or hexagons. Each tile has one feature and units move between them. If I zoom in, I don't get sub-tiles where I can do micro decisions. This constrains how realistic the simulation can be. On a world map, a peninsula of the size of Europe can have only a handful of cities.
Time have similar problems. Bronze Age passes quicker than the Modern Era. As a consequence, building the Sydney Opera House can take a hundred of years. And that's fine, because I pick gameplay over realism any time. Even the cartoonish art style doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I find it charming and unique compared to a boring, faux-realistic style of Civ5 which steps into an uncanny valley.
If you want a simulation approach, pick Paradox games. I tried them and I didn't like them, but I understand why they have a cult following. They still have board game elements, but the games are designed with constraints in mind. The gameplay takes a couple of centuries at most. The map isn't randomly generated, but it's scalable. The kingdoms and nations have fixed place. These decisions are consistent and make for a fun gameplay because Paradox games don't try to do everything.
It's better if Civ stays with a board-game approach. Having a clear identity is better than trying to be both "gamey" and realistic. It won't be for everyone and that's ok. For me, Civ6 is a good foundation. I'd like for Civ7 to use some ideas from Humankind, like elevated terrain, stackable armies with zoomed-in combat phase, the fame victory, and traits of a civilization that evolve over time. I'd also like to delegate parts of the game if I choose to. It would help with tedious parts and let me focus on things I find interesting.
Paradox decided to release CK3 on console, but it lags so far behind the PC version (which itself already lacks content) and I haven’t bothered to try it.
Now I hear that AoE2 is being ported to consoles and it just doesn’t make sense at all unless you’re planning on requiring the player to hook up a keyboard and mouse. I don’t see any way a controller can provide a good RTS experience.
I agree with you on the cartoonish leaders though.
Of course I like digging my own roads. I get to decide exactly where they go. That's the game.
You can however hope that, just like with Civ1 (=> Civ2) => SMAC(X), someone will be inspired enough to take some of the best aspects of it in a somewhat different game :
It would be great to see some of the recent advances in AI text generation enrich the game. It would make the games more varied.
Hmm, then you might enjoy this !
Surprisingly good soundtrack : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bqCz5wd_T0
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/magic-story/episode-1-home...
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Streets_of_New_Capenna#Magic_Sto...
- You can’t automate many tasks. This is especially true in Civ 6 where you have to re-select everything. I’m not certain who thought this is a good idea.
- As you progress in the game, the turn time become ridiculously long.
- For it to be reasonably fast, you are limited in term of map size and the number of opponents.
- The AI is dumb. After a few plays, the game is pretty much predictable.
Europa Universalis covers all of these shortcomings and more. However, it’s not turn-based and it’s still stuck in the 1700s, so no new technologies. Climate change, for example, is an interesting addition and adds spice to the game.
Still looking forward to Civ 6. Will be playing at least a couple times to see their progress.
Usually its the need for mocromanaging everything on huge scales in longer games.
Im hooked on Crusader Kings 3 for a year now, and want to get into Europa Universalis and Victoria 3 afterwards
I tried EU4 but graphics/text-rendering issues meant I just couldn't play it. I look forward to an EU5 with a CK3 quality make over. Sounds like we might have to wait a year or so Vic3 iron out all it's issues.
To use a metaphor, in the «slow strategy video games» sector, Firaxis/TakeTwo are akin to the creators of Avatar for movies, while PDS/Paradox are Marvel/Disney.
(note, high funding & popular ≠ good)
They don’t have any AI or any mechanics. It’s all just shallow and designed for maximum DLC.
Combat is literally whoever has the biggest number under the guise of “strategy”
What Civ needs is challenges and leaderboards. Pre-configure scenarios that everyone can play and compare their experiences together. Score each play on a number of criteria (cities built, fastest tech, army size, etc), and maybe even have custom achievements for that particular scenario - like how fast you fully explored the particular valley the scenario starts you in, or how quickly you defeated the aggressive city state that starts next to you.
Not only should randomly generated maps be shareable, but Sid Meier should have weekly scenarios that involve hand crafted challenges. Not just normal games with the AI trying to act like a human, but the AI existing as part of the map. Example: at turn 50, an aggressive hoard comes down off the mountain attacks your civ. When you reach the other side of the mountain, there will be a Civ with 4 cities and an advanced army. You have certain diplomatic options available (like a quest to fulfill) or you can try and challenge them. How you handle these various challenges will impact future scenarios.
The important thing is that the AI isn't trying to play the same game. It's just there as part of the map to give the player an interesting experience.
Want to replay your favorite old map from Civ 7? Sorry, the servers have been turned off, back to Civ 17 and the Season 3 Persons Wonders and Specialists pack for $79.95...
Not everything has to have "multiplayer elements".
Keep great single player games offline.
And as an aficionado of sandboxes and software toys who's been playing Civ since Civ I, it would feel far emptier to me to turn Civ into yet another PvP/meta/challenge oriented snoozefest.
By empty, I simply meant that the game stopped being interesting after a while. The single player game was only so replay-able, and multi-player is a very different game that doesn't suit me.
What Civ has is a great community, but that community had no way to experience content together.
Hand crafted scenarios that people can play simultaneously and share their experiences isn't a multiplayer element, it's a community element.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ4-game-of-the-month...
https://www.filfre.net/2023/01/sequels-in-strategy-gaming-pa...
(And leaderboards might be even older, dating back to Civ1, considering how Sid Meier with Civ (and his other games) emphasized roleplaying and surviving to the end of the game rather than «winning», whatever that means ?)
I can't imagine playing Civ now without murder, marriages, a dynasty to care for etc. Crusader Kings has prompted me to read dozens on history books due to how engages you with real historical events in a way that no Civ ever has beyond checking a wiki page on a world wonder or some such.
My perfect game would be Crusader Kings with a bit of Civ flavour: add the tech tree, world wonders, exploration and more freedom for where to found cities and I would be over the moon.
I remember being very disappointed in Civ 5 compared to Civ 4 but I can't now remember much about it. I think I liked the slime-mould like spread of culture/religion compared to the simplification in 5. Was there also unit stacking?
Civ 4: 94/8.2
Civ 5: 90/8.0
Civ 6: 88/7.0
Civ V and VI vanilla are so much more boring and incomplete without their expansions
I want an invention tree that's thousands of items long based on actual human history, not an invention tree that's optimized for what a 15 year old will find 'fun' within the first week of play.
Civ is an unfortunate lost opportunity to make educational content that'd make people want to go read a history book afterwards.
Or maybe it's just me :)
The UI to browse these mods is something out of a geocities website from the 1990s.
I should've been more specific, I meant modding that enables creators to actually make money and gets promoted by the game developer - not a dark corner that hasn't been updated in 30 years where you can click an image but can't get to the next image without zooming out. That's not modding, that's, I don't even know what to call it - a historical artifact by people who don't seem to be aware of what century we're in.
Is the Steam Workshop that bad for Civ?
The much more problematic DRM and other walled garden issues aside, Steam's interface seems to be designed to emphasize safety, which would be fitting for software aimed at pre-teens, but is actually harmful for the teenagers and older that are its target.
(Of course one reason Valve likely did it is because it makes the job of their moderators easier - compare with the old Steam phpBB forums - and company-paid moderators is also the easiest moderation system to set up and maybe more importantly, remain in control of.)
Scrolling the tech tree of the Caveman 2 Cosmos mod for Civ4 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxAn5gXb2A
(not sure what the exact count is these days, but it's on the order of a thousand techs)
Mod presentation : https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/caveman-2-cosmos.2885...
Latest major version released last month and Player's Guide : https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/caveman2cosmos-v43-pl...
Modding is kind of in tension with the concept of direct sales... for similar reasons that open source is in tension with it. It's even worse for games, since most games are closed source, and mods generally directly build up on them.
I could see total conversion mods perhaps separately selling their art assets like this (since the open source of the rest of the code already often is in tension with the level of ownership that artists tend to claim over them).
The closest we got to what you suggest is probably StarCraft 2's Arcade mode, and platforms like these are bad for reasons too obvious to state on HN.
But Civ4 is a great example in how you can create one of the biggest and longest lived modding communities out there : you just need to open up your game ! And this is something that dates to Brian Reynolds' Civ2 : https://www.filfre.net/2023/01/sequels-in-strategy-gaming-pa...
Sadly, Civ5 was a regression there, and looks like Civ6 even more so ?
Speaking of educational content, here too Civ4 seems to be unsurpassed in its Encarta-like Civilopedia, and mods have only improved on the depth and breadth (if maybe not accuracy) by often cribbing their descriptions from encyclopedias :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WveveonsHM&t=495s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WveveonsHM&t=1326s
https://youtu.be/-titvSZsurE?t=945
(this player ignores the historical descriptions, but spending minutes reading them is something that most viewers are not likely to be interested in)
Personally, the regression from Civ4 to Civ5 in their Civilopedias is for some reason what pained me the most...
Lately I've been playing Humankind and really enjoying it. You have epic battles involving land, air and sea units. You choose a wonder and have to finish it before choosing another.
(AFAIK, no, but it has been years since I last checked)
-but you might be interested in Shadow Empire :
I got stuck playing a few turns! it has many games including the Civ I for mac from my childhood. It has some file transfer capacity, not sure if it works well to save progress... mostly a curiosity!
Edit: This is objectively good news, given the creativity demonstrated throughout the game's history.