A different era.

Not really. Criteria do not change. The game has to look good, work well, and be interesting with addictive gameplay. It should not be too tedious or grindy and player must not lose track of what was going on in previous sessions. Some publishers make short action games these days. Like, 5 hours total gameplay time. In RPGs, usually, there is little problem of keeping track. And to be honest, Civ2 was published around 1996 and should be compared to something published around the same time. I'm talking maybe Baldur's Gate and Fallout 2. Neither of these are as primitive and both are way more enjoyable and have higher replayability. Which is surprising because Civ should have more replay value. Well, even Warcraft 2 is better and it was made in 1995.

Civ5 is just a laggy, buggy, glitchy mess of a game that neither looks good nor has enjoyable gameplay process. I'll take Fall from Heaven or even vanilla BTS anytime every time over it. It does not have good modding tools and does not have fixed assets mode. Lack of it means no real competitive play or real cheat-proof mutiplayer. Succession game are essentially impossible and not very popular because there is so much meaningless BS going on that players need to write up pages and pages of text just to describe what was going on during their sessions. It is hard to concentrate and I completely lose track of what I was doing two days ago and need half an hour just to force myself to continue the session. Endless aiming-clicking is just icing on the cake that kills it. Any modern phone runs more resource-consuming games 5-10 times faster due to sloppy programming and inadequate graphics. They should consider making it for android so I at least can use my finger instead of mouse.

I think I'm getting old and starting to rave and rant too much. But really, there are a lot of better, more manageable, and more realistic online MM strategies than that Civ 5 bs.

I always like the way civ2 took great use of windows enabling real easy moding and playing while in windows, unlike many other games of the time.

But for me civ2 stands out from the others by some adding epic events to the game. Wonders movies and the end movie were never equaled in any civ game.

Yet what actually "interesting" is changes over time. A reboot of civ2 in a civ6 engine wouldn't be as interesting as civ2 once was, because civ2 existed before. Nobody would play Pong nowadays. But in a different era, people have.

So I wonder if civ used to be interesting because it was "fresh", and current civs suck because, well, I've seen it before?

IMO, a new version should have something different in it. If the basics don't change, yes, it is what I've seen before. Considering how complex some modern games are and how well they generally work, Civ is something of a Pong type for me. But younger generation will always play it. It is also educational and fun.

However, I do hope I'm wrong and Civ6 turns out to be great and enjoyable.

Just so nobody can complain there's no civ6 content on this site: there's been a sudden influx of previews, like this one. Some sort of NDA has been expired I guess

I haven't found a negative one, but previews usually are nothing but hallelujah anyway. I'm not sure many game journalists can spot the flaws, or maybe they don't write about it because the majority (source: 1.9% of players have beaten deity) can't spot them either so who cares? Anyway, what's not in the previews (because of NDA I guess) is performance, late game interturns specifically.

Performance should be OK at least on my current PC. The main hiccups of previous versions were linked to 2Gb memory limit that was apparently draining for larger maps and memory leaks as well as broken pathfinding and interating optimization for the AI. Modern programming tools should automatically check for these. Graphics should be tunable down to some reasonable level. I'm mostly concerned by glitchy mouse which does not want to go or does not want to click as clearly seen in some of the movies.

I'm not sure it depends on NDA. It looks like some new marketing strategy. Aka let the people salivate and make sure they preorder. It is also a different version. The actual graphics will be probably substantially worse as these fancy things tend to be removed to make the final version. Even Witcher 3 people could not keep it all because it just won't start with all these nice graphics they had been advertising their betas.

For me Civ5 was hard to judge; I didn't had nearly as much time to invest in it as in Civ 1, 2, 3 or 4.

So, I haven't seen much of the depth or the flaws. It is possible that I have yet to finish the first game (a symptom I had with Civ2 as well that I started many games where the buildup was fun, but didn't continue until the end).
But probably this is due that if I have some hours as time window, it might be that the other game is months old and thus I'd rather start new.

Somehow all versions have their pros and cons and are worth playing because they are different enough from the version before, in my opinion.
Which one is the best is another question, but I'd rank III and IV above V (but V above I and II although both were great for their time)

Who else has pre-ordered? Couldn't resist to order the deluxe version. [jump]

Didn't pre-order: civ5 simplicity bummed me out enough not to buy into unreleased DLC. Did buy it though. Even installed and played it.