Age Of Empires series is the best of war-strategy games.
AOE is an RTS not a TBS, so technically they're two different genres. Civilization is by far the best of it's genre as far as I can tell.
Good to hear Civ. V is coming out, I just hope it hasn't continued focussing on graphics. I was not really impressed by Civilization IV - I just liked the gameplay elements in III more. Hopefully I enjoy this one a bit more.
I have only heard of Civ 1, 2, 3, 4 and revolution.
They're the 5 Civilization games, and then there are a few modifications and overhauls, like Beyond The Sword that puts Civ. IV into a fantasy setting with things like ogres and dragons. I think I had more fun with Beyond the Sword than vanilla Civ. IV, lol.
And to clear things up, Alpha Centauri is kind of like a continuation of the space victory in Civ. III (possibly IV) where you had to build all of the Spaceship Parts. The story is your rockets launches but it crashes or some damn thing and lands fragmented on another planet. From then on it's basically Civilization in the future, on another planet, but with a bit more strategy required (for example you have to take weather into account).
And GammaRayZ, probably Amazon now that I think about it.
Civilization 4 was ok but I prefer games with more action. The only fun was declaring war and ranged had no advantages. I don't know if #5 will come out.
well hopefully they focus on their combat system in #5, it was pretty simple to beat most units, just get tech and get stronger units...Civ 4 was pretty easy to do some mods, like custom stats/traits, anyways the Civ 5 screens don't look much different from 4, sure the units are bigger but the question for me does range matter?...can catapults and archers kill from a distance...
When I played, throughout the entire game I never declared war. I would slowly build my culture until countries surrendered to me. I can remember one game where I'd only missed two wonders.
