My wife and I play a lot of Civ 5 together. We recently got Old World on sale and have been enjoying it. It’s different from Civ in a lot of refreshing ways, but retains enough of the Civ vibe we really enjoy.

My friends and I really like Civ 5, but we didn’t get into 6 much and had some reservations about the changes in 7. I think we’ll get it at some point, but it will probably be during a sale after some more polish (and maybe some mods to adjust some of the controversial changes).

But I’ve had the itch from the hype and I’ve been wanting to try some other turn-based 4X games. Old World is 75% off on Steam at the moment so I pulled the trigger yesterday. I’ve seen gameplay but I’m eager to try it myself. The narrative choices seem like they add a lot of meaningful decision-making that I want to explore. I also played some Age of Wonders 4 and have enjoyed that too, but there’s a lot to learn with all the combat mechanics. It means there’s a lot of replayability though.

I was addicted to this game for awhile. I really like the events that come up, and they can chain into interesting situations. Thumbs up from me. The family aspect of it brings more history into the campaign than just picking Abraham Lincoln when you’re a caveman and he’s magically stil your leader when tossing nucks around.

Also the lead dev was one of the main guys for Civ 3 and 4, if I remember correctly.

Edit. Check out Endless Legend. It has a pretty cool combat system too. It’s a little like a jrpg in that when a battle starts it focuses on where you are and you duke it out in that area.

I might just be bad at it, but all my games ended up being either a boring cake walk, or ridiculously difficult.

Never really got into it.