A tile (called a "square" in the earliest games) is the basic unit of space in all of the games covered by this wiki. Each unit or city or colony sits within a single tile at any one time. Tiles are generally either land or water, but some games have undersea and stratosphere tiles too.
In most games tiles are square, but:
- Only the original Civilization, Civilization IV, the original Colonization, and portable/mobile versions of Civilization Revolution have a bird's eye view so that the squares appear square. Later games use isometric (slanting) views, where each tile looks like a diamond with 60-degree and 120-degree angles.
- Civilization V, Civilization: Beyond Earth, and Civilization VI use hexagons.
The "radius" of a city or colony is the set of tiles it can directly exploit (in addition to the tile it sits on): usually the nearest 20 in Civilization games and the nearest 8 in Colonization games.
Civilization II
Civilization IV
Civilization VI
Civilization: Beyond Earth
Civilization Revolution
Civilization Revolution 2
Other games
Tile is not present in (or the article has not been created for) the following games :
| Game | Article |
|---|---|
| Civilization | Tile (Civ1) |
| Civilization III | Tile (Civ3) |
| Civilization V | Tile (Civ5) |
| CivWorld | Tile (CivWorld) |
| Freeciv | Tile (Freeciv) |
| Civilization: Call to Power | Tile (CTP1) |
| Call to Power II | Tile (CTP2) |
| C-evo | Tile (C-evo) |
| Sid Meier's Colonization | Tile (Col) |
| FreeCol | Tile (FreeCol) |
| Civilization IV: Colonization | Tile (Civ4Col) |
| Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri | Tile (SMAC) |
| Starships | Tile (Starships) |
