Civilization is the most iconic turn-based series of all time, but Sid Meier considered making it an RTS: 'It could have easily gone in different directions'

I am 41 years old tomorrow, and for most of my life I've had a game of Civilization in rotation. The first Civ arrived in 1991, popularising the nascent 4X genre and quickly becoming a PC gaming icon. But Civ could have looked very different. Instead of a slow, deliberate turn-based game, it was almost Age of Empires.

Back in 2017, I interviewed every Civilization lead designer for a magazine feature, The complete history of Civilization, which was later published on the site. Until recently, each game had a different lead, starting with Sid Meier and the OG Civ. This tradition continued until Civ 7.

Civ was born out of Meier and Bruce Shelley's desire to push the boat out after the success of Railroad Tycoon. Instead of running a company, how about running a nation, and eventually the world?

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"We were young, and we had no fear," Meier told me.

But Meier started to worry that their ambitions were too grand. He needed to find a way to make this imposing challenge more accessible for would-be world conquerors. One of the accessibility solutions was ditching the popular hex-based map model for simple squares.

We were young, and we had no fear.

Sid Meier

"One of the reasons we used squares for mapping was we thought hexes were too geeky. We went with squares to make things accessible," Meier said.

That would continue until Civilization 5, which arrived in 2010.

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An even more impactful accessibility decision led to Civ becoming turn-based. But that came after prototyping other options, namely making it an RTS. While testing it, though, Meier realised that the RTS model wouldn't give players the space to get to grips with the game's complexity.

"Development is a journey in itself," said Meier, "and it could have easily gone in different directions. There were a number of things we considered that we didn’t end up doing. Real-time is one of them. I think it’s great to look at Age of Empires, for example, because that’s how the game would have probably progressed if we’d continued down that route."

In the end, we got both versions of Civilization. Six years after Civ launched, Age of Empires appeared, with Bruce Shelly serving as game director. Beyond being real-time, one key difference was that AoE wasn't interested in charting all of human history—it was focused on the ancient world.

An RTS with Civ's scope wouldn't appear until 2003. That game was the exceptional Rise of Nations, from another Civ veteran, Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri's Brian Reynolds.

So while Meier ended up going down a different route for Civ, it still spawned Age of Empires and Rise of Nations. We got to have our cake and eat it too.