Civilization 3-4-5 Comparison

Civ IV is my favorite of the series. The decisions are hard, the enemies strong and the mechanics complex. The game wont hold your hand like Civ V, but you should be able to deal with it having played Civ V.
There is no real point in playing Civ III unless you totally hate XP systems for units.

I like the barbarians in 4 and hate the ai in 5, other than that and the hex grid they seem pretty similar(at the begining 5 sucked, but they've added some things back with the dlc) i like 4 better but whatever i guess, did you grab the bundle with 3 and 4 in it?

in 4 you wont have single unit in single tile system, stacking armies! hell yeah.

Civ IV has a Colonization expansion. So by definition, it wins :P

I own thwm all and CivIII is my favorite. I find it more deep and better looking

I've never played any of the Civ games, which one is easiest to pick up and play?

After i saw that an archer take my two helicopters, took a dislike to Civ IV. I wouldn't recommend. Otherwise, it's better than Civ V.

I played a lot Civ III and IV. I think III was my fave.

My favorites in order - 4, 2, 1, 5, 3.
Even though I've played 5 a lot and just started a new game today, I hate how it just turns into a wargame at some point for no valid reason. "Oh, you built that wonder that I covet? Fine, I declare war on you."

This new game I just started, within 20-25 turns of meeting Montezuma, we're at war, go figure. As soon as we met, I knew war was inevitable so I setup a couple of bowmen on hills around my city and picked off his units as they came into view one by one. He brings in his trebuchet 4th and it didn't even get a shot off on my city before being killed. He offered all his gold and luxuries for peace and I accepted. But we will be at war again soon after peace expires.
I like the new features in BNW and it has honestly improved a lot more from Civ 5 vanilla so I can accept its flaws for now.

I've played the original Civ, Civ III, Civ IV with all expansions and Civ V with all expansions. I'd say it's a tie between Civ III and Civ V with the expansions as my favorite. Civ V alone had many flaws and balance issues, but G&K made it better and BNW made it even better. There are concepts from Civ IV BTS that I like though. If they make Civ VI and mix in the good from Civ III and Civ IV BTS, it would be the ultimate Civ game.

Some of my most fond memories of past Civ games come from Civ III. I liked that in Civ III you could cross into another civ's border without open border treaties. Sometimes they wouldn't care, sometimes they would ask you to leave and you had to remove them the next turn or they would be booted out. This allowed you to cut corners of other civs borders to explore areas you don't have access to before open border treaties are available, or to cut through civ's borders that won't give you open borders. You could also move troops into a civ's borders and then declare war on them without your units being removed. It's a dick move, but the AI would use it too. This was removed in Civ IV, and any units in a civ's borders with an open border treaty are moved outside their borders upon declaring war.

The things from Civ IV I liked the most were vassal states and being able to create colonies. Colonies were useful if there was a resource you needed that wasn't inside your borders. You could plop down cities to get those resources, then break them off as a colony so you didn't have to manage them. I always wished they would add something like this to Civ V. Nothing sucks more than to get a tech that reveals a resource only to find you have none and have to go put a city down in a crappy place just to get it.

Civ 3 - Almost perfect
Civ 4 - Not good
Civ 5 - something that looks liek civilization.

civilization 4 is my favourite

in terms of complexity and balancing Civ IV BTS with BASE mod is by far the best, but it still has the square tiles which screws the metric system. The 2 good things about Civ V are the hexagonal tiles and that citys now can defend themself. But nearly everything else is better in Civ IV BTS BASE and i really recommend this mod, its awesome.

I see, thanks for your opinions :) I'm gonna check out CivIV then ASAP

Civ 3 had some very interesting ideas, but it was a terrible game compared to Civ2 (the real masterpiece of its time) and Civ4 (with all expansion packs - back when they were real expansions, not just a collection of crappy skins costing more than the base game).

Civ5, well... the hex map was probably the best innovation, but the rest was pretty much screwed. They intentionally released the game without several features (religions, espionage) that has always been present in the Civ series just to add them later via paid DLCs. That is one thing I will never forgive.

Alpha Centauri, despite its balance/AI issues (probably fixed later by modders), was probably the second best "Civ" out there after Civ4, I suggest you take a look at that as well, if you don't mind the Sci-Fi setting :)