FreeCiv covers civ 1 and 2 more or less.

Personally, I didn't play much of 2 or 3, so I don't have strong feelings either way.

I actually preferred Civ 3 to 2 and 4. It scratched a certain itch.

> with capabilities inspired by the best of the 4X genre and lessons learned from modding Civ3. Our vision is to make Civ3 as it could have been

Looks to not be a straight remake. I wonder whether 3 is a preferable target because things like graphical complexity in >= 4 is too much.

Is 3 the one with forced retirement?

Civ 1 and 2 have already been done, so if you want to play those, hit up freeciv.

3 is my favorite in the series, but maybe that's not a popular take.

I can definitely vouch for the 2 or 4 narrative, those have always been my favorites of the 'Modernish' civ games, but my favorite will always be CivNet (Civ 1 with multiplayer). There is some real simplicity in Civ 1 that makes it much better suited to a multiplayer experience than the later entries. It is a real pain to get any non-hoseat multiplayer working nowawdays, but well-worth it.

Because it was born out of the Civ3 modding community which has been wanting a remake for 20+ years.

Sounds like you've been listening to Civ4 fans. ;) 3 is just as active on steam and has a very active and loyal multiplayer league.

Here's a perspective on "why civ 3" by one of the best civ 3 players: https://youtu.be/IOvWgfZiHGo?si=uvTWTaRQsfxE_ffN

There's Freeciv [1] for IV, and Unciv [2] for V. I doesn't have many fans, VI is too recent, and VII, well... Let's not talk about VII.

> Civ fans tend to prefer [...]

I'd say, each entry in the series gets love. The saying goes: "Your favorite Civ game is the first one you ever played". In my experience, that's pretty true (Still stuck on V).

[1] https://www.freeciv.org/

[2] https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv

For me the most classic one is Civ III by a mile. 4 was way too modern/ flashy for me and 2 too old school. But maybe I was just born at the right time for 3.

Can I tangent on your question here and ask what others think of Civ 7 now? When I learned about it I thought it was a day 1 game purchase for me for sure, but I held off when I saw a stream of bad reviews. I figured I'd come back when they ironed the problems out (as they've done in every major Civ release to my memory). Haven't taken the plunge yet.

The key here is seeing this mentioned and not time traveling forward until 6 AM Saturday morning.

Not sure, when Civ2Civ3 is now the default ruleset in Freeciv.

https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Civ2civ3

Gameplay wise this is a straight remake of Civ3 as a baseline, while allowing much greater customization. Freeciv is definitely an inspiration, but it's kind of its own thing.

Any interesting insights about using Godot with C#? I love C# and I'm happy using it in Godot even though it's not as seamless as in Unity: in Godot 4 we still can't export to Web if the project is C#, and there's the whole conversion between C# types and Godot types that adds inefficiencies and extra allocations, etc.; it feels like it's a second-class language in Godot.

I'm always interested in seeing what people find when developing larger projects in C#.