Hey assholes, stop determining "truth" for the rest of us. Projection like a motherfucker.
It is universal truth that graphics matter over anything else for a visual medium (and without visual representation the medium wouldn't be possible in the first place), the single most important factor in getting games to evolve and their increase in popularity as well as what one is able to do with the "gameplay" and "story" in the first place have been increasing technological jumps in computer graphics and the methods to display them over the years, from the very first "cathode ray tube" creations that a few scientists got to enjoy to today where Virtual Reality might finally become a possibility.
From being able to draw specific lines on a monitor, to monochrome representations, to the first colors, increase in bits, first possibilities of drawing out actual images and similar as backgrounds, the first animations, 3D graphics and so on...
Even the first CRPGs wouldn't have been possible without these improvements over times:
People who put anything else first are probably confused or have a highly different/very limited definition as to what "graphics" entails to something like "DirectX Versions" or "improved water effects" when "graphics" decide literally every single thing being rendered out to your display device, be it even
Cartoony/Animation style or
Isometric/Pre-Rendered 2D art. A lot of people on many forums are thinking solely in "console generations" or little incremental upgrades when that is a very small part of the bigger picture in regards to computer graphics and what they enable a game to be or be able to do.
Even the worst looking programmer art or even just a simple menu system can make for a very fun game if the dev behind it is autistic enough to give a game like that depth. Aurora and Dwarf Fortress are great, Uplink had no art to speak of and yet it was a good and atmospheric game. Starflight has minimal graphics by today's standards yet I enjoyed it much more than Mass Effect and Star Control 2 combined. ZAngband and ADOM are probably some of my most played games andI don't use any tilesets so that's pretty much no graphics there. Recently Prospector has been eating up my time instead of my untouched installations of Baldur's Gate 2 and Mars: War Logs that I intended to play. Heck, I also planned to get into Civ V but I just can't drop Civ II and III for the new one because they are just too much fun and Civ III can look pretty atrocious at times.
For you the visuals might be why you play but I can assure you that my outspoken preferences are very genuine.
And that's all great and comes in where game mechanics enter the picture. I love Civ II+III too, more than IV or V and played many of the games you listed (although I really need to catch up on Star Control 2), but as said above none of them would exist in the first place without improvements in graphics and processing power over time. Civilization would have been a thing of sheer impossibility even 5-10 years before its time without the inherent improvements (and that's likely also part of the reason why you are playing Civ II+III in the first place instead of the first). Just because a few Unreal Engine 4 games will inevitably end up sucking ass won't invalidate that basic truth.
It's all relative and perception changes over time though, for instance I can remember a time when still playing things like Cauldron on a ZX Spectrum:
And I came upon the depiction of Prince of Persia in a PC magazine:
It literally blew me away since I didn't know such a thing was possible and looked like the best thing I had ever seen, like put together by some sort of dark magic. I returned to said article many times the coming weeks dreaming of a time I'd be able to play something like that.
Also there's different cut-off points for different people.
