Rating: 
Summary: Better than I thought
Review: This is better than I thought it would be. The extra automation features makes the game play so much better, but would agree with some that they should have built it into the original game. I did see a few elements of Call to Power creep in here, if anyone noticed? Haven't tried multiplayer yet, but would probably pass on that. Too many 13 year olds playing stupidly, or cheaters using hacks out here in gameland. If I find they made it cheatproof, then I'll gladly play some online games.
Rating: 
Summary: Say after me "Medievil: Total War" - No competition!
Review: Am I the only one that thought that Civ3 outright sucked? Civilization and Civ2 were Earth-shattering for me. Then "Call to Power1 & 2" became favorites. Civ3 just seemed like a huge step backwards. Anyway, along comes Medievil: Total War. MTW is actually two games in one. It is a military/dictatorship strategy game on the one hand. Expect intuitive city management and troop creation menus. However, it is also an awesome combat engine. You can lead your troops DURING a battle. You can decide if it makes more since to have your longbowman fight melee style or leave that to your spearmen (which I strongly suggest). Everything about MTW is polished and intuitive. Comparing MTW to Civ3 would be like comparing Halo (the coolest game ever for those of you that haven't played Halo - drop what you are doing and get it) to Quake1 - they are both "first person shooters" but Halo has taken it to a whole new galaxy. Do not waste your hard earned money on Civ3. MTW is an intuitive addictive strategy game that won't let you go.
Rating:
Summary: This Game is Awful ( minus 5 stars)
Review: Simply put this Expansion pack doesn't work. "Multiplayer" is totally unplayable. Lag times are terrible. Not to mention the "crashes", "drops", etc. I have yet to talk to one person that has totally played a reasonable online game. The extra features - most of which can be found for free, or should have been made availalbe for free. Keep in mind there was a "Patch" for this game before the game even was released. One professional reviewer called it "an Unneccesary Add On" Take my advice - unless you can purchase this for about..., spend your money on something worthwhile. I've already sent mine back. Thanks for your time.
Rating:
Summary: REDEFINES MULTIPLAYER FUN as...no fun at all!
Review: To be brief, the additions (to civs, units, techs, structures, interface and editing features) are generally welcome, but in an ... expansion called the Play the World the multiplayer is the key to its value - and in this case next to worthless. With tweaking and patience you can get multiplayer to work, but so slowly that if I had an ant farm on my desk it would surely breed and expand more speedily than my multiplayer civ. I cannot say the computer crawls along in multiplayer, for that would imply continuous visible movement. Its more like trying to follow the conversation of a stuttering narcoleptic napping between each syllable. A pity, really, for Civ 3 is a fun game and it would be thrilling to clash with a truly sentient other (read: a friend you'd love to whoop).
Rating:
Summary: Do not buy this expansion
Review: This expansion pack is horrible. The multiplayer part is a disaster and the little additions that were added are not worth the 30 dollars the game costs. I have a cable modem and the game still does not work. I have had over 100 crashes and have not been able to play the game online yet!! I was a huge civilization fan until now, this could turn me off to their future games due to the fact that i feel like i threw my 30 bucks down the toilet bowl....
Rating: 
Summary: 5 Star Potential
Review: First off, Civ 3 or any of the Civ series is probably the best stragegy game I've ever played. PTW is extremely buggy. I have had luck finding games to play. But sorry for you 56kers out there it will be extremely slow. Its a shame that a game company is allowed to release a game that hardly works for alot of people, you have read the other reviews about the problems so im not going to address them. I only hope they have a patch soon to fix the problems.....THIS GAME IS A 5 STAR GAME IF THEY FIX THE PROBLEMS, So if u own it already if u dont like it take it back, but at least wait for a patch! If you dont have it, buy it if u want but be ready to know its gonna be a pain to play.
Rating: 
Summary: The Title of the Game isnt there yet
Review: I do have the game. The "single Player" new aspects are exceptional. The Artifical Intelligence that controls the enemies seem even smarter than before. That said, the reason I bought this game was to have the chance to play with some friends. I even talked them into buying it. Well, Multiplayer ( the game is called play the world) doesnt yet function at 100% or even half that. It works on a LAN. It works via PBEM (play by email) and some have had a little bit of success using the in game player matching.
BUT
going through the intended software Gamespy Arcade it simply crashes. NOT just for me. But for EVERY single person that tried it.
Most multiplayer games attempted by the in game multiplayer access failed or suffered massive lag.
This game was released when it was NOT ready for prime time. A patch was released when the game was, but it didnt solve any of the issues in multiplayer.
I am sure they will fix most of the multiplayer issues, but this game was released LONG before it should have.
Rating:
Summary: Play Nobody
Review: This expansion is entitle Play the World. The entire premise of the expansion is that you can play Civ 3 with other people. You can't. Plain and simple, attempting to play this game over the internet, as intended, will result in either high blood pressure or rediscovering the joys of reading. When it works at all, it works unbelievably slowly. I just don't understand how this game can run this slowly over the internet. I've played games of Starcraft, in the days before high speed connections, in which several players with hundreds of units each did battle simultaneously at perfectly acceptable speeds. So why, years and many tech advances later, is it impossible for Play the World to deliver even moderately acceptable gameplay in a game in which myelf and one other player have only 6 units on the map between us, all of which move one at a time? Its ridiculous. The lag is even bad when you aren't trying to move units. Just clicking on a menu button to make a selection will result in several seconds of lag before the menu appears. Making your choice results in similar lag, and trying to close the menu is even worse. It can take you 30 seconds to changes something as simple as your tax rate. Wait six months to see if they can make this piece of junk run at anything approaching a playable speed before you buy it. If you bought a car that was as badly made as this game it would explode the first time you turned on the radio.
Rating:
Summary: A Love Affair Ends Badly
Review: Civilization was one of the computer games which gave me my enthusiasm for gaming way back in computer gaming's Bronze Age. Civilization 2 was unquestionably an enormous leap forward with the core design of the original game. I also very much loved Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: in some ways, it is my favorite of the three games, and I still play it quite often. So of course I bought Civilization 3 the moment it was available. Oddly, I stopped playing it after two months. I told myself that it was because I was busy, or distracted by other games, or by events in my life. In preparation for the release of Play the World, I decided to start playing Civ 3 again. The first problem with Play the World, unfortunately, is Civilization 3 itself. It's just not a very good game. It has some good ideas--the effect of culture, for example--which are mostly badly implemented and lead to extremely frustrating or annoying gameplay. Does anyone enjoy conquering an enemy city, moving troops back out of the city, having it revert to its original holder no matter what you do, reconquering it, and so on until the city is reduced to size 1? The paradoxical effect of culture, designed to allow for peaceful absorption of other civilizations, is that it often leads to a much more genocidal approach to military conquest. There's a lot like that in Civ3: design elements that may be interesting ideas (or not) but that don't work well at all as implemented. Now I foolishly ventured into getting Play the World just to see whether that made a difference. I'm not sure whether multiplayer would make the game better because multiplayer in Play the World doesn't work unless you're on a LAN. Thank God I bought it from a store where I could return it. I'm disappointed because the one thing I have looked for from Firaxis is a certain degree of professional reliability. Play the World is in terms of basic bugginess and functionality one of the worst major releases in the past year.
Rating:
Summary: Multi-player doesn't work
Review: Works on LAN, but doesn't work over the Internet...which is really the only reason I bout it. I spend several hours turning off my firewall, forwarding my linksys etc. Never got it to work over my broadband connection. (btw, their gamespy network gave more then half a dozen different ports that had to be opened...). Not only did I not get it to work, it crashed at varrious points in the process of either hosting or joining a multiplayer game. The game is a pig too, so it takes a min or two to clean up the memory and another couple minutes to start it up again. ...Oh, and the play be email is a farce. You would have to save the game after each turn, switch over to your email client, then send an email with attachement. Your opponent would nead to recieve the email using their email client, save the attachement, and open up the game as if loading a saved game. HA! What a joke. Anyone who's played civ knows that it would take years to play such a game. I can't believe they shipped this game. What {poor quality}. It's not just buggy, it doesn't work whatsoever
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