Turn-Based 4X Empire

Play spans scales that other genres keep separate. Cities are founded and specialised, terrain is improved, research advances a technology tree, diplomacy and war run alongside trade, and a single turn may cover a decade. Victory conditions are plural, including conquest, science and culture, so one map supports incompatible strategies. Decisions compound slowly, which makes an early choice about where to settle unusually heavy.

Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley built Sid Meier's Civilization at MicroProse in 1991, drawing on board wargames, city-building software and earlier historical simulations. Turn-based structure was partly a practical necessity, since simulating a world in real time was out of reach, but it also matched the subject. History is a sequence of decisions with long consequences, and a turn is a reasonable unit for one of them.

History became something a player argues with rather than reads, and the genre's grip is famous enough to have generated its own vocabulary about lost evenings. Consequences are political too, because any model of civilisation encodes claims about progress, colonisation and violence that later designers have revisited deliberately. Late-game tedium remains the persistent design problem, since a won game still demands hours of administration.