Civ Sequels

Of course, a game as successful as Civ is going to be followed by a lot of hangers-on (both products from the original designers, and imitators).

There was the natural progression: Civ-Net, Civ 2 (with a lot of variants, like Test of Time), Civ 3, and Civ 4.

There were clones: Civ Call to Power and Free Civ.

And in-spirit successors: Master of Orion (were you start with one planet and one colony ship), and Alpha Centauri (where you play the descendants of the original colony ship from Civ). Also, Colonization: a Civ-like specialized to a particular time.

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The natural sequels were actually very disappointing.

Civ-Net: largely a Windows port (there may have been a Civ-Win). The network play had sequential (basically, hot-seat on different computers), or simultaneous. This really didn't work out, as a battle between two catapults could be decided by who was quickest with the keys.

Civ 2: Civ plus-plus. More of everything. More tech, more units, even more for settlers to do (double irrigation, anyone?). Of course, more is not necessarily better. The micro-management hassle of Civ became that much more in Civ 2. With more city improvements and more engineers needed, you built more cities. And the tedium of terraforming became just that much more. I largely play Civ 2 now, only because the old DOS Civ is a little buggy (some sort of weird memory corruption).

Civ 3: A good disaster. Introduced a lot of new concepts (culture, armies, a focus on fewer/better cities). I'm not sure what went wrong, had to be not enough play testing. Armies were way to powerful, culture didn't work quite right, the corruption in big empires was just crippling and small empires couldn't win.

Civ 4: Another hit. Largely made possible by the failures of Civ 3. Now culture is working right, the combat model is a lot better, and small empires really work. They also managed to fix the terraforming problem, where there is an actual choice to be made (not just, road-irrigate-railroad / next!). I'd play this more, except the graphics requirements are really steep.