Civilization 3

Rating:
Summary: Great Game
Review: This game has kept me up all night sooo many times....its crazy. This really a great game. I must quote another reviewer "If you have to buy just one strategy game this decade, I have no hesitation in recomending this one."

I have played this game many times, and I disagree with reviewers who exagerate the AI cheating. It does in a couple ways mentioned, but the rest are just misunderstanding that can be answered by reading an online FAQ. The AI is tough and its very difficult past medium difficulty...I mean a lot! But on easy...its easy and fun...

I like the cultural boundries. My startegy is to always build cultural structures and I expand my civ by "sucking in" those computer cities around me. The graphics are great for this type of game, an the charcters are entertaining.

The only bad thing is at the end of the game when everyone that has survived has a huge/powerful civ and their armies take forever to move/attack, and it takes a while to defeat. I don't even think I have won that way. Still, I highly recommend. It takes days to get to the end! its realistic, sometimes you get lucky and start in an area with many natural resources...if ou don't..u need some allies!!!

Rating:
Summary: Great Game!
Review: I think I have wasted more hours of my life playing one or other incarnation of the Civ series than anything else, and I was very eager for Civ3. Crashing disappointment. In the previous games, your borders were defined by the land you owned, and you felt that there was genuine separation between nations based on obstacles or fortresses that you built, and you moved out of there to fight. In the latest incarnation, one of the other "Characters"(Bad, HEAVILY cheating AI) just plops a settler down two squares away from you and because it's outside your "culture" you can't do a thing about it. My galleys sink if the helmsman as much as inches off land, yet I've watched a Roman one sail the oceans blue for 200 years without mishap...did I mention the cheating AI? Classic example, WITHOUT EXCEPTION they will not accept a deal that is even equitable unless you've kicked their butt first. Offer a luxury for one of theirs? Apparently its sufficiently insulting to declare war against you on occasion.
The big spoiler, though, despite the Miracle-Gro(tm) that appears to be at work on enemy cities, wonders and technologies, (a rival civilization with no money, half of the populace and undeveloped land manages to throw together JS Bach's Cathedral five turns before your production-maxed metropolis) is that once you figure out how to beat the AI it is a genuine grind to achieve it. It's slow, and dull, and quite frankly, we deserve better.
List of demands to Firaxis follows:
Bring out Alpha Centauri 2. Make us think. Don't cheat.
Stomping back huffily towards those badly coloured but infinitely more replayable Centauri hills now......

Rating:
Summary: Civ 3 would make a great strategy game
Review: Civ 3 would make a great strategy game. What I like best about the game is the concept of it. The idea is fabulous. The graphics are good and the sound affects are fine.
The problems are in the gameplay. How can you make an effective strategy with an "AI" (roll eyes) that not only plays according to its own (more favorable) rules but also leaves you with no way to know what those amended rules are?
Intelligence is not merely a subroutine that adjusts how much the game cheats according to how much it needs in order to to survive, it is largely the ability to play ahead. The computer that beat the world chess champion did not turn its knight into a queen when convenient, it beat them by using bona fide artificial intelligence.
Expect plenty of suprises. While passing by an enemy city, you may see a terrain space suddenly become developed without a worker anywhere nearby. Or notice that the "AI" always knows which of your cities is poorest defended without needing an embassy or spy. Or early in the game enemy units may make a wartime b-line to your civilization when it shouldn't even know where it is yet. Etc etc etc. I beleive but can't prove, that your military units are made less effective than equivelent ai ones too during battle.
Later in the game, your active unit cursor will jump place to place all over the world instead of going to the next nearest unit (like it did in civ 2) as if in an effort to try to make you lose track of what you are doing, I suppose this is to "make the game more challenging" or something. Very anoying.
The new features (culture, diplomacy etc.) are great ideas largely gone wrong too. Same problem, basically: the game makes the human player a protagonist instead of just an undesciminated player creating the illusion of playing against 15 others when in reality the only thing your playing against is one ai player with a slight case of multiple personality disorder.
I find that almost every strategy I make with this game is defeated by unexpected, uncalculatable and unanticipatable adjustments to the rules by the AI. I have heard others say they win the game and I have too, but I don't beleive without repeated reloadings. Civ 3, like civ 2, is an action game that would make a great strategy game. But the idea of the game is so great that it is addictive anyway.