@AAKL@noc.social And I'm not really blaming Civ. I have had this issue with other games, like City of Heroes, Lineage II, and Quake III. Most of these games were not engineered with the psychological shenanigans seen in microtransaction-based freemium games, but they still produced this compulsion. While working on my PhD, I scaled back my gaming. Now that I've graduated I'm starting to game again. The break has helped me examine such behaviors with a fresher set of eyes.