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Yes, obviously fun and turnbased, and addictive as h-e-double-hockey-sticks. And it must follow the progression of civilizations from a relatively primitive to a relatively more advanced state by means of technological, military and infrastructure development. It must involve exploration and discovery, and the proper use of resources. There needs to be Wonders, or Projects, or whatever you choose to call them, because without them the game loses a huge part of the Civ flavor. I do not feel it must be historical, as I feel SMAC was definitely a Civ game. There must be multiple paths to victory -- peaceful and warlike, at a minimum, although SMAC raised the bar on that expectation as well. Further, in the Civ games there are almost always multiple solutions to any given problem, allowing for different play styles to be equally successful in the long run. That may be the key point: different players can approach the game in fundamentally different ways and still meet success, so that for everybody who says "You must do such and such to win," there's somebody else who won without ever thinking of doing that.
Now that you put it out there like that, it turns out that Civ is pretty hard to define. I guess it's like art and porn: "I know it when I see it."
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Better living through tyranny
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