History YMMV / Civilization

* TheScrappy: Several, for a variety of reasons.
** The biggest is by far Maria I, primarily for being chosen as Portugal's leader. The only highlights of her rule were fleeing with the rest of the royal family to Brazil during the Napoleonic invasions (which ironically makes her a more revered figure in ''Brazil'', since the family taking residence there led to the country's independence a few decades later) and descending into literal screaming insanity during her last 21 years of life (which led the aforementioned Brazilians to dub her "Maria the Mad"). Needless to say, almost the entire fanbase agrees the developers ''probably'' could've selected a less embarrassing and incompetent ruler for Portugal.
** Queen Elizabeth of England is often regarded as a miserable enemy, just for her personality. Her CatchPhrase, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utk-v_eIcUk "Would you be interested in a trade agreement with England?"]], has become a MemeticMutation for ''just'' how annoying it is (in addition to the fact that Elizabeth's AI is notorious for making exceptionally absurd trade agreements). She herself suffers from ChronicBackstabbingDisorder and is extremely hostile and difficult to befriend, and will often denounce the player for no discernible reason. And to top it all off, unlike other leaders of similar, aggressive, dominant personalities (such as [[MsFanservice Catherine the Great]] or [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy Shaka]]), she is [[TooDumbToLive woefully incompetent]] and will almost always end up utterly decimated by the other AI in any game she's in. This is especially bad, since her civ is [[GameBreaker exceptionally powerful]] in the hands of a competent player.

* BrokenAesop: The ''Gathering Storm'' expansion aims for a GreenAesop by reintroducing climate change and focusing the expansion around its importance but the moral gets undermined by the game mechanics. First, consequences for climate change are mild and abstract compared to the real world and can be easily mitigated by the point in the game they begin to appear in earnest. Second, only Diplomatic victory (itself a ScrappyMechanic) is advanced by being green while all others, especially Science and Domination, are hindered by it. Third, climate change is a global PrisonersDilemma and the AI will always choose to ignore it, rendering the player's own choice almost meaningless. When all taken together, the intended GreenAesop comes off as a SelfImposedChallenge by way of HonorBeforeReason.

* ObviousBeta: * ObviousBeta: When ''V'' first came out, it had a lot of bugs and balance issues, routinely crashed to desktop for many machines, and had obtuse, sociopathic [=AIs=] in an over-reaching effort to make them more like human players. Patches fixed many of the crashes, fan-made mods such as [=VEM=] took care of the balance issues and bugs (and much of [=VEM=] was later implemented into official patches), and the [=AI=] has found a balance between the above and the manipulable point-based relations of ''IV''.

* BaseBreakingCharacter: Gandhi's become this to a degree; he's one of the most famous characters in the series and one of the most memetic, to the point that many players say it's not a ''Civ'' game without Nuclear Gandhi. At the same time, though, veterans of the series dislike him for his relatively passive strategies of peacemaking and religion focus without much variance between games, and ask for a different leader from India's very long history (especially since Gandhi, though important, technically never ruled India). ''IV'' and ''VI'' alleviated this a bit by including the concept of alternate leaders, and sure enough, Chandragupta was added as an alternate in ''Rise and Fall.''

* MisaimedMarketing: In ''V'', you will have a choice to train ''Videogame/{{XCOM}}'' units as infantry squadron. Problem is that at no point in the game you fight aliens and they're under command of a single country instead of being multinational, contrasting to everything XCOM stands for.

*** This is somewhat [[InvertedTrope inverted]] in ''Civilization V''. Although the reputation hits for warfare are about the same as previous games, warfare is made far, far easier than any Civilization game to date by the removal of the AI's ability to use "Stacks of Doom" to mess with you, plus now the requirements for a Domination victory only require you to take the opponent's capital city, not demolish them entirely.[[note]]This feature [[OlderThanTheyThink was also in]] the side-game ''Civilization Revolution''.[[/note]] Unless the capital city is far from the border, it's relatively trivial to declare war and Annex their capital within a few turns. It's even easier if the capital city is on the coast, as borders won't typically extend further than the distance a ship can travel in a turn. As a result, war is often the easiest and earliest way of achieving victory.
*** Zig-zagged in ''VI'' with ''Rise and Fall'' or ''The Gathering Storm'' enabled. On one hand, capturing cities far away from your borders results in a massive drop in Loyalty, which may cause said cities to revolt against you. If the enemy capital is not very close to your own cities (which is likely), it will be a pain to keep it without wiping out everything nearby. On the other hand, if you ''can'' keep captured cities because they're close to you or you smartly deploy governors, war is nearly always beneficial as it gives you more yields, more districts, more era score, and more of everything in general, making it a fantastic investment and usually propelling the victor into a Golden Age.

** "WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN A TRADE AGREEMENT WITH ENGLAND?" As trade quotes are often reused whenever a player asks what the AI is offering, Queen Elizabeth's quote has become one of the more recognizable and memetic quotes from ''Civ V''. Doesn't help that she's one of the few leaders to speak English.

** '''V''': In the early game, almost every single player, even those who played Wide picks Tradition over Liberty. This is due to the fact that they provide substantial boosts to their starting Capital and in ''BNW'', Wide play overall has been severely nerfed due to the increase in Science threshold with each city. Even after it was nerfed by making Oligorachy (The policy that gives their City a defensive boost and it's placed in a separate tree where it's almost always picked as the last) required before the rest of the policies, it still didn't sway their preference one bit.

** Not too far behind Genghis Khan in ''V'' is King Kamehameha of Polynesia. He's [[NiceGuy very easy easy to get along with]], often making Declarations of Friendship very quickly, which, combined with his resemblance to Wrestling/DwayneJohnson and his serene, calming diplomacy music, makes him one of the more popular leaders from ''V''.

* FanNickname: As might be expected, fans like to shorten the names of the world's legendary leaders when typing them out, so Alexander the Great becomes "Alex", Catherine the Great becomes "Cathy", Montezuma becomes "Monty", etc.

*** ButWaitTheresMore - in ''Conquests'' expansion the technology granting this unit also provided new government, Feudalism, was a variation of Monarchy, which was particularly beneficial for civilisations consisting of numerous, yet low population cities. It provides insane military support rating in such configuration, being reverse of Monarchy, which struggles with small towns. And at this point of the game, you are going to have nothing but small towns. Consider this: Monarchy is a non-mandatory techs to advance to Medieval. Feudalism is one of the opening technologies of Medieval era. If you are playing as Scientific civ, you might get this technology for free on era advancement. Monarchy suddenly got redundant.

** Live Yongle Reaction [[labelnote:Explanation]]The fact that Yongle is frequently mispronounced by English-speakers as rhyming with "[[InherentlyFunnyWords dongle]]", combined with his [[GameBreaker extremely powerful abilities]] when first introduced in VI, has made Yongle an extremely popular and memetic leader. Expect [[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fqj4dnSX0AAXIlK?format=jpg&name=large this]] image to be spammed in the comments of any social media post about Yongle.[[/labelnote]]

*** The trope is played straight in ''VI'' with ''Rise and Fall'' or ''The Gathering Storm'' enabled: capturing cities far away from your borders results in a ''massive'' drop in Loyalty, which may cause said cities to revolt against you. If the enemy capital is not ''very'' close to your own cities (which is unlikely), it will be a pain to keep it.

*** Even among the plantation luxury resources, Sugar is notable for being one of the absolute worst luxury in the whole game, due to the fact that most of the time, they're covered in marshes which meant that they only provide 1 food in contrast to the 2 food that a grassland gives unless one research 4 techs before being finally improve them for a tile that isn't any better than any other plantations in the game and by that time, the opponent would likely already outpaced the player just before the latter finally began to rise from the mud.

* UnderusedGameMechanic: Making a Defensive Pact between two civilizations in ''V'' allows them to form an alliance where if an enemy civilization has declared war, then the other side will join alongside the war as well. However the AI ''never'' used this function and to make things worse, it's possible for said declaration of war to screw you over if said opponent is someone that you have a Declaration of Friendship with at which point you'll get a permanent diplomatic penalty of "breaking a promise" which will turn even the one you made a Defensive Pact against you. Even in multiplayer, this function isn't really seen that often as players can simply chat with one another and form their own teams not to mention that it is very unlikely that one will even want to accept your deal in the first place.

* ScrappyWeapon: Catapaults and Trebuchets in ''V'' can sometimes fall into this along with TooAwesomeToUse due to their general inferiority to regular ranged units at the same point in the game. Their damage is similar to those ranged units, but require a point of movement to set up for fire. This means that, by definition, they cannot shoot at a city in the same round that they enter the city's defense radius, which makes them easy targets. After gaining a few levels, they do get sizeable damage bonuses to attacking cities, but getting there requires attacking enemy units (again, hard to do when they have to set up before firing) or successfully pulling off a few sieges without being destroyed first. It's usually preferable to just use regular ranged units instead, as they can move and shoot, making it easier to build up their levels and attack cities. This becomes averted later in the game, as Cannons start to do significantly more damage than the equivalent ranged unit of the same era (Crossbowmen), and Artillery ''really'' start ramping up in usefulness due to having range that exceeds that of the city defenses.

** Many players in ''VI'' dislike the World Congress. Complaints about it vary widely, ranging from it starting too early in the Medieval Era to its generally inconsequential decisions and competitions to the fact leaders you haven't met yet aren't identified to wondering why their civilization is bound by something they never agreed to join. The most common criticism is how ''disruptive'' it is, pulling you out of the game every few turns to pop up in its own window that demands resolution before anything else. Further, you must vote on every issue [[ButThouMust with no choice to abstain]], so there's no quick way to skip through it and get back to what you were doing.
** Connected to the above, a lot of players also disable Diplomatic Victory because it's considered far too easy to achieve due to its low requirements and lack of scaling for difficulty or map size. It's also seen as lazily-implemented or outright mislabeled since it doesn't require any actual diplomacy, instead requiring the player to reach 20 Diplomatic Victory points which can be gained by being in the majority in a World Congress vote, completing competitions at high tiers, or building certain things. This also means it's possible to achieve Diplomatic Victory by accident by voting with the crowd enough times then building the Statue of Liberty (which gives 20% of the points needed immediately) or, in defiance of all logic, while ''at war with everyone''.

* BrokenAesop: The ''Gathering Storm'' expansion for ''VI'' brings in climate change mechanics, which the game treats as a serious threat to all civilizations that only intensifies as a result of player actions and prods you into managing the environment and [=CO2=] levels if possible... except that the effects of climate change aren't actually all that severe compared to the potential for biosphere collapse in real life. The worst that it does in-game is cause flooding of coastal tiles, which can destroy any improvements built on those tiles and turn them into water tiles. Otherwise, it makes disasters more common and frequent... but this is not too hard to mitigate, as the worst that can happen is that you lose some improvements. A later patch made it so that storms and other disasters lose their potential for fertility bonuses and even start stripping away earlier bonuses, but this is a far cry from what happened in ''II'' and ''IV'', where it could transform some tiles into outright deserts or swamps. Perhaps most jarringly, climate change has little to no bearing on any victory other than Diplomatic, where pollution incurs diplomatic penalties. You could be responsible for more [=CO2=] emissions than the rest of the world combined, but so long as you manage to launch your exoplanetary expedition (which, given its Production demands, is likely to produce a ton of pollution), make your capital the tourist centre of the world, or crush all others through military might (which also produces considerable pollution), your civilization is considered to have "won".

*** ''V'': "Montezuma's peace theme doesn't actually play in-game."[[labelnote:Explanation]]A tongue-in-cheek "bug report" based on the same phenomenon as the above.[[/labelnote]]

** In the early game, almost every single player, even those who played Wide picks Tradition over Liberty. This is due to the fact that they provide substantial boosts to their starting Capital and in ''BNW'', Wide play overall has been severely nerfed due to the increase in Science threshold with each city. Even after it was nerfed by making Oligorachy (The policy that gives their City a defensive boost and it's placed in a separate tree where it's almost always picked as the last) required before the rest of the policies, it still didn't sway their preference one bit.