There was a time when "strategy", unadorned, was the only genre descriptor available for Civilization.
The same genre, considered at the time, also included games like Empire, which is more of a 3X game. I was interested, rereading the manual to Empire Deluxe recently, to see that it obviously considered itself to be competing with Civilization - I never considered the two games all that similar.
Abandonware Dos right now also includes board games under the "strategy" category. (RTSes are in there too.)
> There was a time when "strategy", unadorned, was the only genre descriptor available for Civilization.
Sure, there was a time before 4X was a term when games that would now get that label would not have a narrower subgenre label than “strategy”, that doesn't mean that what strategy meant then was what 4X means now, it means that there weren't enough 4X games to distinguish them within strategy (nor enough turn-based strategy and overlapping label to 4X -- but not all TBS are 4X, and there have been realtime 4X games -- to segregate those out.)
RTS wasn't coined to distinguish StarCraft, etc., from “strategy” which label later evolved into 4X, it was to distinguish it within “strategy” from TBS, which also didn't need a label until RTS was common enough to distinguish the two.
I haven't played those, so I'm going off what I can learn about them in a reasonable time frame.
A contemporary review of the first Fire Emblem game to release outside Japan shows one reviewer referring to it as "turn-based strategy" at the same time that another reviewer (writing in the same magazine, possibly cooperating on the same review?) says it's a "tactical RPG". That second description matches the uninformed impression I had of the series and also matches how it's described on Wikipedia. Plus, this isn't exactly an early usage - Fire Emblem first released in 2003.
Nobunaga's Ambition seems like it would fit perfectly in a genre defined by Civilization and Empire; I'm not sure why you're saying it's not a 3X game? And the same appears to be true of North and South.
Fire Emblem was first released in 1990, the first western release was in 2003. Tactical RPG and Strategy RPG are the same thing and the two terms are used interchangeably.
4X games like Civ have exploration as a key element with players starting off on the same foot. Grand Strategy games like Nobunaga don't. I guess it could be "3X" but it depends what X you remove.
The same genre, considered at the time, also included games like Empire, which is more of a 3X game. I was interested, rereading the manual to Empire Deluxe recently, to see that it obviously considered itself to be competing with Civilization - I never considered the two games all that similar.
Abandonware Dos right now also includes board games under the "strategy" category. (RTSes are in there too.)