As I've said before, I asked for Civ IV for Christmas when it came out because I had a friend who loved Civ II, but then I learned it wouldn't play on my computer. My little brother let me use his computer to play it if I let him also play it, which in practice meant I got to play it for a couple hours for the first two days and then never got to play it again. I played FreeCiv a lot though: a little bit in high school, where I got crushed by the AI, and then a lot in college as I gradually learned the AI's strategy and then learned how to tweak the settings to cripple it, since the AI's strategy is based on a strategy called "smallpoxing," a highly-specific form of "playing wide," and if you tweak the settings to make that weaker you break the AI.
Civ V penalizes playing wide, which took me some getting used to, but at least on lower difficulty levels it still helps to play wide to some degree. As I go up levels though I find myself with fewer and fewer cities at the end, and the AI also plays tall which means lots of good land goes unclaimed just because you can't afford cities. There's also a lot of interesting-looking mods I may try. But for now I wanted to start this thread and talk about civilizations that have, with one exception, never made it into any vanilla commercial Civ games but should have:
- Hittites. Starting with the one exception, the Hittites were in Civ III. But like the Sumerians, inventors of writing (who were in two Civ titles), I feel that the inventors of ironworking should be in every game.
- Tarascans. A highly unusual Mesoamerican civilization which didn't practice human sacrifice and had an organization more akin to Rome than to any of their neighbors, the Tarascans had an empire almost as large as the Aztecs' and tried to conquer it twice. They submitted peacefully to the Spanish, then the Princess Erendira led a doomed rebellion when the Spanish killed her father anyways.
- Carib. There's a lot of groups in the Americas I think would be better candidates for civs than the Shoshone, but the Carib and Arawak, who had a decent level of agriculture and metal-working and represented the most sophisticated seagoing cultures in the Americas, seem like worthy candidates.
- Inuit. The Thule Culture isn't a civilization, precisely, but the adaptations they developed to live in the High Arctic were ingenious. None of the other indigenous peoples of the Arctic could approach their technological sophistication.
- Merina. The Zulus are very popular likely in part because all the names ( "Zulu," "Shaka," "Impi") are fun to say. But they weren't a civilization, and compared to the kingdom of Mutapa in the same area they were in fact rather backwards. The Merina of Madagascar, however, developed a fairly sophisticated civilization in relative isolation, and then when the Europeans came modernized more rapidly than any other sub-Saharan native state. Unfortunately, they were still black people, and so got conquered by the French.
- Swahili/Zanj. The maritime city states of East Africa in their coral cities were like nothing the world has seen before or since, which is why Zanzibar is still such a popular tourist destination.
- Cholas. Honestly, I think that there should be at least three Indian civs in any civ game: the Mughals, a Hindu North Indian civ, and a Hindu South Indian civ. However the Cholas, with their maritime empire in Southeast Asia, are unusual enough that even with "India" in every game I still think they should be added.
- Tibet. The world's highest-altitude civilization, practicing a strain of Buddhism which before the Mongols adopted it was unique in the world, Tibet even more than the Incas should be able to take advantage of mountains and hills.
There's a lot of civs that I'd like to see (I'm glad Civ VI finally added Nubia), but those are just the ones that I think are really glaring omissions. It's striking that while "Civilization" seems descriptive for the rest of the world, in Europe each major country is its own civilization, and even a few minor countries. And it's also striking that when it comes to the Americas, you have the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas, and then a few token North American Indians. While the Iroquois are a good choice, the Chinook, Publoans and/or Hopi, Mapuche, Tupi and Muisica are just a few groups which are more interesting than the Shoshone, and "Native American" as a civ just smacks of ill-considered tokenism.
Also, while I like the efforts to diversify civs in Civs V and VI, some civs are clearly better than others, and unlike in EUIV where unbalance is a goal, this is a bit of a problem. Plus, it's funny that the Inca and Poland are among the strongest civs in Civ V (and Poland can into Civ VI from what I hear), while Spain and the Ottomans are among the weakest. When it comes to the unique units/buildings/improvements, improvements are probably the best because they help otherwise weak tiles, buildings are second-best because they give a permanent boost to all your cities, and units are clearly the weakest, because they're time-sensitive and usually limit your strategy to conquest. I don't have a rule for unique abilities, but playing an Inca game I was amazed at how quickly I explored the map and how much gold I was making thanks to the Incas' two hill-related abilities.