I played a bit SMAC (AoW too but I'll comment another day or in another post).
First steps in SMAC are rude because of ugly colors and not very clear graphics, it is outdated for its time (1999). The series of civ is I, I Mac redo among many other redo, II, Call To Power, SMAC, Call to Power II, III, IV, Colonization (engine of IV), Revolution (engine of IV), V.
My preference would be : IV, I Mac redo, II & III, Colonization. Still need play (or more) SMAC, Call To Power 1&2, Revolution and V.
I suspect the V could become my favorite because of its approach more oriented to light wargame and the design efforts to add spice and more options in first phases through multiple elements added. But there's flaws I feel coming from few hours played:
- Too complex management to be fun and not enough detailed to build a sim pleasure, and it's stuff to let the AI manage for you.
- The movements seems be a failure of the game. First that there's no preview of movements is an awful design error, seems like newbies that designed and tested the game. The idea of no stack and more wargame approach is good but doesn't work with the maps types and movements as small than 1 to 3, but most often just 1 or 2. They should use a system allowing stack for movements but limiting a lot stack attacks, or even allow only one element of the stack to attack.
- The lack of clarity of the map and stuff on it is a rather awful element. It's designed to be very nice and cute but lost the focus on clarity. So as soon as you zoom out a bit it becomes rather pointless.
From the few I played, SMAC is definitely a transposition of Civ. But default setup is making it more different, for example you don't choose a research topic but only one or multiple research domain, but a setup allows choose and make it more civ like. First steps seems put a focus on management including micromanagement but you have auto setup not by default. Instead of telling a civilization and historical elements it seems try build a story, it seems very spread but still that's different, but clearly it works only from the campaign point of view, in my opinion scenario and campaign aren't the core of the civ series.
From the point of view of scenario, then among what I played it's the WW2 mods of Civ4 that are the best achievement. But they change quite a lot the spirit of the game, and when you dig them, they show their weaknesses by trying make fit in an engine an approach not fully adapted to this engine. I wouldn't be surprised if for the V more wargame oriented they have planned a pure ww2 extension.
The IV in fact failed a bit because it becomes pale in comparison with some of its best scenario. Moreover some scenario allow choose among multiple opponents this increasing their replay value. But I played the IV multiple time before any scenario, and they definitely solved many problems with the IV. But once you start the best scenario it's hard to come back to civ 4 core, that's its paradoxical weakness.
EDIT:
Added in list of civ series, Call To Power 1&2, Civ 1 Mac redo (among many redo of the 1).
I changed the post to add the precision about Civ 1 to specify Civ 1 Mac Redo. It's weird I couldn't find a single snapshot on the net, and I have the box with floppies but the box is the DOS packaging.
Anyway after PC DOS version of Civ1 they made many updates of the game for different platforms. For the Mac they totally changed the interface to make it with multiple windows and with crispy graphics and a larger map. They redo all graphics because they had to make a Black&White version. But the result is crispy graphics and I think they redo also the color versions to have a match between B&W and colors. For the interface it's perhaps a bit like later Windows Civ2 version, but a lot more crispy. It's not a pure detail, because larger map and better clarity are clear influences on the the gameplay of such game.