I'll have some personal disagreement here.
I hated EU2 and I still don't like it. For some reason, I just can't dig it, though I've tried it multiple times. Same thing with HoI2 and Victoria (which I wanted to love, btw, but couldn't).
I also would have put Civilization II ahead of Civ. While I can understand the rationale behind Civ in terms of historical significance, Civ II was just so much better it's unreal.
But I'll get into why later on.