yeah this has been a thing of mine too for a while, even though i do really enjoy the games. the original civ came out right around the same time as the end of history, and absolutely shows the internal workings of the mind of the sheltered 80s/90s "apolitical" american boomer frozen in time. and like yeah it is absolutely boardgamey (and honestly i think its at its best when its not trying too hard to be "realistic") so prioritises whats fun as a game over whats actually historical but damn so many ideological assumptions packed in.

your countrys level of development is determined by how many scientists you assigned because "technology" is linear and all technology through history is discovered entirely independently by every nation with no reference to any others, so if your country is technologically underdeveloped its really your own peoples fault for not being sufficiently stem-focused in 1500bc.

and the strength of the nation is more important than the happiness of the people, and the ideal strategy is to invest in bread and circuses for keeping people just at the level where they wont actively revolt, but no more because that would be a waste. the original actually was really mask off with class - your cities could have a certain number of clearly lower-class 'unhappy' people (coloured in black) and you could balance it out and avoid revolt by ensuring an equal or larger number of very bourgeois looking "happy" people so that the unhappiness of the lower classes didnt matter.

combined, the endpoint of history is right around 1990, and theres such a paucity of imagination about the future, like the greatest possible use of science is to be able to use your entire countrys productive capacity to build a big rocket for a pointless space colony impossibly distant from actual earth, fundamentally indistinguishable in both mechanics and intent to just building the pyramids in space to say ‘look on my works ye mighty and despair’

and not to use science to build a true post-scarcity society, to eradicate disease and hunger and suffering and want and establish falgsc or anything equivalent because the creators and the game cant even conceive of any societal progress beyond modern neoliberalism but with a bit more shiny shit

and its so american that if someone else is progressing further with their performative space rocket, you need to stop them by going and burning their capital down because its all zero sum and nobody is allowed to have more progress than you

our people are buying your blue jeans and listening to your pop music