that thread is quite nuts, as his main complaint is some sort of 'you can no longer take over the world as easily' thing, while civilization always had anti-snowballing mechanics. (He also doesn't mention the spinoffs like alpha centauri, colonization and call to power, which (apart from call to power I think) should be part of the conversation as they were created by the same teams/software houses as the civs at the time. But the changes in those games would undermine his message of 'ruling class (?? Firaxis ruling class really??) cultural decline'. And not just a higher focus on different game mechanics because they want every game to have a distinct different felling to try and get new people involved, the market has changed and pure 1991 style civilization games don't do as well and don't recoup your budget. The problem also seems to be that he is a 'conquerer' type player while civ tries to also appeal to the 'builder' type players, and I think more modern civs also try to appeal to the 'multiplayer' type player which is in conflict with the 'conquerer' type. (I made the specific types up here, but there are general types of players, and somebody interested in a 'clash of civilizations I want to take over the world' type of game is going to want a different type of game than a 'clash of civilizations I want to build the best civ' game or a 'clash of civilizations, I want to play a game with my friends' game).

This thread feels like a shapiro, and I have only glanced at game design theory as an amateur.

Edit: sorry my comment is obviously bad as I didn't first replay all the civ games before making this comment. ;) But if I had, I would remember that in the first game you could 'win' the game by building a spaceship to alpha centauri, as the game was score based (I think a successful big spaceship gave a massive score boost), not 'win by taking out all other empires' based (which iirc just ends the game, aka he confused completing a game with winning a game). In civ1 you don't play against others, you play against your earlier self via the high score system.