Civilization II played an enormous part in determining my future character. It sparked a love of history that would otherwise have had little chance to flourish. I never played Civ III and while I owned Civ IV and spent countless hundreds of hours on it, I very rarely actually 'played' the game as I spent the majority of my time in the map editor trying to recreate historical scenarios on a giant earth map that my system couldn't hope to handle. I just bought Civ V during the steam sale and I enjoy it quite a bit so far.

My experience with Civilization has been almost exclusively limited to earth maps of some variety and I seldom play on anything but the longest difficulty so despite having spent so much time playing I still don't really know what the average game of Civ is like.