Zombie Age III has 10m downloads.
Deep Town: Idle Mining Tycoon has 10+m downloads (updated this year).
Space Haven is from 2020 with over 6k reviews on Steam.
(Open Source) Unciv has 6k stars: https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
I've played a terrifying number of hours of it in bed on my phone.
edit: on AI, since I'm rate-limited:|
I think it gives higher AI difficulties a massive productivity boost so they just crush you under a flood of units.
I've played VI 6 after it was free on Epic store.
It is the worst game experience i have ever had!
You can play in full 3D (lame as hell) map, or strategic (2d map). Both of them give you a really bad view of the map, no matter what.
The UI is full of bugs and things you need to click twice, and full of pitfalls (pressed space but an event was just jumping on the screen? too bad now your worker just moved next to that barbarian and will be lost next turn)
The graphics completely destroy your GPU even though it is a freaking Civ game! no matter if you play on 2D view, your GPU will smoke just the same. no idea how they screwed that up.
Then, even without considering graphics performance, my i5 top of the line was taking a whole 30s between unit moves in the later rounds of the game, and a full 3+ minutes for the CPU players turns.
Avoid that game like the plague! unless you have a multi thousand dollars gaming PC. then just play it to laugh at all the times Gandhi will declare war on you on first contact.
Edit: oh and i tried to play on the Surface. Despite being impossible because of performance, the UI is unusable without mouse over, and there's no way to show the mouse overs windows with the touch mode. Complete disaster of a game. I'd be ashamed to have my name on the credits.
edit 2: I actually had lots of fun with https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv on the surface.
and for newcomers to the series, play the original ones or even the Nes one on an emulator.