Sid Meier's Civilization III

Civilization III was the game that introduced me to strategy games. While its systems are basic compared to what came after, I almost like the simplicity more. QoL was definitely improved in later games though. Still, it's an all time classic.

The only game I have played in the series is Civilization Revolution. It's been a while since I've played it, but I remembered the general idea of forming cities, building an army, acquiring resources and expanding science and culture.

There's quite a lot of mechanics to learn, and this isn't very accessible. There is a "Tutorial" option in the menu, but this just has a few pop-ups but barely covers anything. There is a "Civipedia" which has information on all the concepts in the game, so you will need to keep going to this to read it.

This is a turn based game and you move over a grid. Your city can access the surrounding tiles to acquire the resources, and the range expands as your population grows. You need Food for growth, Production to produce units, Money for maintenance, and your city can grow in Culture which expands your borders. The border is your national boundary, so if opponents cross the line, you can threaten to declare war.

Tiles can be upgraded in some way such as building a road, mine, or irrigate it. You need to build lots of roads and make sure your towns are connected. Not only does this allow you to move troops quickly to help defend them, it allows you to share certain resources.

Although you would assume you will be fighting a lot, you are discouraged by the fact that your citizens can become happy and revolt; temporarily ceasing production. When you take over cities, the residents are partly from the original civilization, which means they will be unhappy whenever you are at war with their country. It seemed beneficial to steal a few towns, then offer a peace treaty, so you can grow in terms of the number of cities, but then keep your new cities growing further.

When negotiating peace, the stronger you are, the more negotiating power you have. So you can get them to throw in extra gold, technology or even small cities. The AI will offer to trade with you when you are at peace, usually wanting your better technology. I normally liked keeping the upper hand here, but sometimes I accepted if I can trade multiple technologies for one.

When fighting, there's some random elements involved plus stats of the units and extra bonuses based on the tile. Some units are designed for attack, defence or bombard. Shortly in the game, it is very helpful to have bombard units that weaken units (but don't kill them). When your unit is victorious, they acquire experience and can level up. Obtain enough levels and you get rewarded with a Hero who can form an Army, or "hurry production". The army lets you group together a few units for a triple attack.

You start off in BC, but as the turns progress, you go move through the ages like medieval times, industrial, up to the present day. It's interesting to have basic warriors and catapults, then several hours later have infantry and tanks.

This game is a lot like the Total War series. So be prepared to spend several hours on 1 game. There's lots of civilizations to take control of, but I'd imagine most people won't see many of them due to how long each game takes.