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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

I love the Civilization series, but I'll be honest: it really bothers me that certain companies have one or two franchises and they keep churning out new iterations of them every year or every other year. It just feels like a money grab after a while (especially with franchises like Call of Duty or Madden, which, from my perspective, don't improve appreciably in between iterations).

I'd like to see them taking some risks and innovating new franchises, and perhaps even new genres.

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> I love the Civilization series, but I'll be honest: it really bothers me that certain companies have one or two franchises and they keep churning out new iterations of them every year or every other year.

The main Civ series has had a new base-game release every 4-6 years, not every year or every other year.

Civ I: 1990 Civ II: 1996 (6 years) Civ III: 2001 (5 years) Civ IV: 2005 (4 years) Civ V: 2010 (5 years) Civ VI: 2016 (6 years)

Ouch. This makes me feel old. I remember playing Civ I on my Amiga, on it's four floppy disks.

It's been around for a quarter of a century...

Not to forget:

Civilization: Call to Power (1999)

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (continuing where Civilization II ended) (1999)

Call to Power II (2000)

Civilization: Beyond Earth (2014): Spiritual sequel to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

There are of course other PC games that are related to the Civilization series but those are IMHO further away from the "main Civilization series".

SMAC and the Call to Power series were made by different companies than the main Civ series, even though, through the process of the various sales and mergers since, all the rights related to them are, I think, in the same place now.

SMAC was the same people, though you're correct about CtP.

> SMAC was the same people,

SMAC was made by the same people (at least, some of the key people) that made Civ I-II, at a different company (Firaxis) from the one then producing and controlling the IP for the main Civ series (MicroProse) who had, IIRC, laid them off.

Several acquisitions and spinoffs of everyone involved, and all the rights are now with Take-Two, of which Firaxis is now a studio under the 2K games umbrella.

Apart from Alpha Centauri, most Civ fans (me included) prefer to pretend these games do not exist.

I loved Call to Power II and Ages of Man

But I can't play those any more because I'm addicted to hex maps now. And pie menus. I hope Civ 6 has pie menus.

>>The main Civ series has had a new base-game release every 4-6 years, not every year or every other year.

I think my point still stands.

I got downvoted for it though, so it's probably not very popular. :)

I suggest you read these two articles that gives you some of the reason behind the yearly release of franchises: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/115152/Analysis_Koticks_R...

http://www.wired.com/2007/12/call-of-duty-gu/

They did make Beyond Earth, which is more different than Civ than you might expect. That said, I didn't find Beyond Earth to be much fun...

Beyond Earth is essentially a sequel to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (both of which are in the same genre as the main Civilization series, though quite distinct from it.)

(They also recently made Sid Meier's Starships, which is a completely different genre, though IIRC it can integrate with Beyond Earth.)

In contrast, I found it far more compelling than Civ. And yeah, they play surprisingly differently.

On the flip side, I'd love to see other companies take on the historical strategy genre. I know there's Paradox, but nobody else seems to want to make a game that spans the entirety of human history.

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