I don't know Civ, but for practising the kind of strategizing you're describing I'd recommend Neptune's Pride.
and I've known people for whom the opposite was tragically true.
Heh. I'm one of those people. I practically fell in love with my first ally. I'm lucky they were really nice when they broke my lines, essentially throwing me a sword and telling me to defend myself before starting the invasion. I'd have been heartbroken otherwise. I guess to an extent I thought they were damning us both to death by zombie bot rush by breaking our alliance, but their judgement was apt, after crippling me they proceeded to conquer the galaxy, barely worse for wear.
It was from this game that I learned the reason I have an intermittent habit of falling head over heels in love with friends probably has more to do with diplomacy than anything else. I can rapidly build unreasonably strong alliances from nothing this way, at the cost of forming a few confusing, inconvenient bonds when I hit the wrong target. It's always nice to learn that the quirks of your mechanism serve a purpose.
Many of us enjoy expressing ourselves through electronic games. As such, I feel that this aspect of our lives should be shared among our fellow gamers in the LessWrong community.
Video games are a great way to reduce compartmentalization and learn real-world rationality skills. Indeed, what brings us together at LessWrong can often be our love of games; someone in the LessWrong community without this advantage might find learning rationality difficult. In this light, outreach into the transhumanist/rationalist community to promote gaming is low-hanging fruit for serving the future of humanity.
Please consider this post a unique opportunity to begin discussion of this important issue and facilitate further debate in the near future.