What I didn’t see at the time is that imagination never diminishes reality; it only heightens it. Just like a fantasy can awaken you to new possibilities in the real world, letting the fans play in the sandbox with us only brought them closer to the universe we had created, the one that had made their fantasy possible. Every alteration, from the smallest AI tweak to the wildest comedic parody, functioned as a kind of tribute that kept Civ fresh, rather than pushing it aside. I’d thought they were tearing the house down, when in fact they were only remodeling because they liked the neighborhood
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