Rating: 
Summary: A game tries to reinvent it self and miserably fails at that
Review: I awaited this game as much as Christmas and after some playing, I have to say I am disappointed. Especially if you were expecting a souped up version of Civ II that adds on to what was there, I would suggest to hardly think before buying this game. If you never had a Civ game and you want graphics instead of gameplay go ahead. Don't get me wrong. The game is good it just does not live up to a Sid Meier Civilization. They changed a lot of things that were good and did not make the improvements one would have expected. Diplomacy, yes has been widened but unless you are willing to make deals where you pay three times and more of what you get you will as always end up at war. Appearantly fair deals are still not part of the Civ repartoire. The biggest set back are military units. Remember when in Civ I you were almost going crazy whan a knight had just ripped your tank apart. Well get used to it gain. Instead of a continuos health bar that was used in Civ II you now get a certain set of points (5 max.) so don't be surprised if that 13th century Pikeman just hacked your Paratrooper to pieces. How real is that??? Another weird thing is that you cannot utilise roads anymore that are not within your influence. So forget a fast advance because now your troops appear to be to stupid to find a road in a square controlled by your enemy so they cut through the forrest instead of using the streets..really smart! Positive is the boarder concept which works reasonably well. There are a few glitches to it but they are minor. The other thing that is bothersome is that somehow you always end up having 2 to 3 civs right next to you to start. So if the computer had the grace to start you in a corner you will be boxed in after a few moves and doomed to failure. Because the computer still alots himself an awesome amount of units so forget early victories especially if you are not technologically superior (see Paratrooper vs. Pikeman example).I am sriously considering putting this title on the shelf and go back to Civ II. To date the improvements don't outweigh the at times the severe setbacks for me. I'd be cautious with this game. When I saw that Infogrames released the game my alarm sounded because ever since I had a 286 Infogrames always manged to flush a good game or concept down the toilet..and they did it again. Too bad that it was Civ this time. If you have not bought the game yet I would suggest you closely look at Call to Power II as an alternative. I did not like CTP I but the second one can't be much worse than Civ III. Sorry guys. I don't mean to bust the fun but I highly anticipated this game and so far I've gotten only frustration out of it. Shame on them for bringing this on the market and selling it as a Civ game. Any other name and this would have made its way into the ranks of high average low good but if you claim to be third in a generation of games that each revolutionized gaming, it just does not meet that high mark it set itself and that the Civ team sowed into the Civ Community when they developed the game.
Rating:
Summary: The More You Play, the Worse it Gets
Review: After about a week of playing, I'm getting more and more upset with Civ 3. Here are some of my latest gripes:- The Culture Effect seems to have problems. In one game, even though I'd built 16 out of 24 Great Wonders and 7 out of 10 Small Wonder, and my Culture, at over 40,000, was almost 3 times that of any other player (according to the Histograph), I no longer took over cities right next to me. Plus, in a war, I kept losing cities that I'd taken over even though they were filled with MY troops, all rebels had been eliminated, I was running under a Democracy (thus immune to Propaganda), and all the people were happy (w/ some as entertainers). Plus, when those cities deposed my Governor, my own national military units just disappeared. This is very upsetting. - The inability (or more precisely, poor ability) to make actual armies is horrible. First, you can't produce leaders, they just appear (if you're lucky). Secondly, once you have a leader, you can only stack 3 units with him. So, for the majority of the time, you're stuck building individual units and just sending them in a stream to wherever you need to fight. Combined arms is totally missing. - Corruption makes an empire-building game impossible. I took over another continent. I was ruling under a Diplomacy (From the manual: "One of Democracy's greatest advantages is its ability to squelch corruption and waste. Both are minimal in your cities."). I had Courthouses in every city (it's the second thing I build, right after the Temple). I'd built the Forbidden Palace (which is supposed to lower corruption, though my Capitol was still on my first continent). Upon checking one of my new cities, I found that corruption was eating up 12 out of the 13 shields the city produced. That's a 92% corruption rate. With that kind of corruption, there's no point in ever owning more than a dozen cities. - Units from previous Eras can still damage more modern units. I can't count the number of times a single enemy spearman has killed my tanks. This is totally unacceptable. - Diplomacy seems to be brain dead. My opponents don't seem to pay any attention to my past behavior in determining what they're going to do to me. I spend the whole game sharing technology, resources, luxuries, maps, etc with these people and all of a sudden, out of the blue, they declare war on me. I'm not sure how to phrase this. But, they act without any moral feeling (just like computers, I suppose [g]). - Resource distribution is horrible. In one game, only one player in the entire world had rubber. Plus, because Trade has been "simplified" to the point of disappearance, there's no real insight into how much you've got or when it will dry up. So far, it doesn't even look like the amount you have has anything to do with production. If you have it, it seems you can make as much of something as you want at a time until the resource dries up. In a game I just finished, I was the only one in the entire world to have Saltpeter, Iron and Aluminum (and the Iron didn't show up until late in the game). Also, even though I could see Rubber, Oil and Coal on the map in other nations, none of these showed up for trade until late in the game. All of those resources appeared linked via roads to cities on the coast. Is the AI so brain-dead that it doesn't ever build itself some Harbors for trade? - The times when resources show up need to be modified. In my last game, apparently, I was one or two Ages ahead of everyone else. I needed things like Aluminum, Rubber, and Oil but they were nowhere to be found. In a frustrating episode, I had Aluminum long enough to complete all but three parts for my Alpha Centauri ship. But, while I was researching my last advance, my Aluminum "mine" dried up. There was no Aluminum anywhere on the planet. I finally figured out that if I gifted a nation with all the technology it needed to advance one or two ages up to, and including, the Rocketry advance, the would finally see Aluminum and put it on the market (I ended up giving that nation 12 to 15 technologies). This is dumb. There needs to be some mechanism to allow me to tell some relatively primitive society that I'll buy that shiney rock from it. Of course, the best way would be to just show ALL resources ALL the time. - Espionage is WAY too expensive. Doing anything worthwhile, correctly, usually costs thousands of dollars. I rarely have more than 1,000 available. Also, it doesn't make sense. I tried finding a mole in one of MY cities. I failed and a nation declared war on me. Why should my trying to clean up MY ranks bother anyone else? Plus, why should I have to specifically say to do this, and pay for it? Once I build the Spy Agency, this should be standard operating procedure. I've got another 1,000 words or so of complaints. But, I'm out of space.
Rating: 
Summary: Beware of this game - Overwhelmingly addictive !
Review: Sid Meier is back and this time his got his "Civilization" name on his game. For those who've never played Sid's games, be ready for a completely engrossing experience. If you enjoy the challenge of actually having to THINK when you play...this game is definitely for you. You are totally free to adopt an agressive or passive method to achieve world dominance or become the UN's Secretary-General or be the 1st to take your civilization to Alpha Centauri. Diplomacy is but an option ! If you liked Age of Empires or Sim City and the like, this game takes their basic gaming elements but enhances and builds on them (resource management, city building etc.) and the gameplay is just unsurpassed. Be ready to spend all you free waking hours playing this game. Once you've installed it...it will become an obsession, beware.
Rating:
Summary: Kinda disappointing...
Review: In purchasing Civ 3, I was hoping for something far advanced over Civ 2. Simply, computers and computer games now are significantly better than they were 5 or 6 years ago. However, this game is extremely similar to Civ 2 in a lot of ways. So, then, I hoped, at least the game would be refined, completly without annoyances. Again, not so. 1) For whatever reason, it took me until around 1990 to discover evolution, and by 2050, I was the only civilization that even had planes. In Civ 2, I advanced too quickly. In Civ 3, now, I advance too slowly. Perhaps I need to practice more, or perhaps the creators overadjusted that aspect of the game. 2) As my cities grew, there were no technological advances I could make in order to increase my food production, so I started having a lot of starvation towards the end of the game. 3) Extremely slow towards the end of the game. 4) Silly that one does not have the option of moving all pieces from one space to another. 5) Dude with a spear should not be killing guy with tank. 6) In real life, people typically rally behind their countries in war...In Civ 3, they refuse to produce anything and destroy city improvements. 7) Commodity trading needs to be far improved. Occupying half a continent and having no access to oil whatsoever isn't much fun. 8) When a plane attacks an army in the open, the army isn't typically left nearly unscathed.
These are all minor points, but there are several more like them, and they really add up to quite a bit of irritation. The replay value of this game isn't very high for me....I'm more annoyed than anything.
Rating: 
Summary: Civilization III disappointment
Review: Civilization III has been getting a large number of negative reviews on amazon, which is understandable but in many ways unwarranted. I will admit that when I started playing civilization III I was disappointed. My heart sank. I had looked forward to the release of the game for months. When I heard they were developing civilization III I could not believe it. It was like my favorite band had reformed to make another album as good as their first. But after I opened the box and started my first game, as the turns progressed I was thinking, "this is not right' this is not fun' my god, they blew it on civilization III." The reason I didn't like the game was I didn't understand it. I went in playing civilization II and it wasn't working. It seems like most of the negative reviews are in the spirit of 'this is not as good as civilization II." As I played through more and more games I began to realize the game is more complicated than it would seem to a civilization II veteran. I am sure as many of the reviewers play the game more, they will recant their initial negative reviews. I like the culture rating. I love that our civilizations now have borders. That was terribly annoying in civ II. You would be in your city peacefully building your university and cranking up your science production as enemy forces surrounded your cities across your nation. Now they cannot sit right outside your city during peacetime and randomly declare war when they are all in position. When they enter your cultural border, you can demand that they leave or declare war, giving you some a turn or two while they march across your border and towards the city they intend to attack. I like the resources. You don't know if you have iron in your nation until you discover iron working. You don't know if you have the rubber needed to make infantry until you discover replaceable parts. This is very cool and very realistic. My last game I had a great civilization' until I realized I had no aluminum, rubber, or coal and a few hundred years later my civilization was reduced to ash as my riflemen were rolled over by the modern armor of the once minor civilization of the Romans. Where is the oil in the real world? Much of it is in nations where if they did not have it would be the poorest on earth, instead they are the richest with modern military hardware built by the US. This is one of the finest aspects of the new game. The computer AI is 1000% better in civilization III. I think this is a major factor in many player negative perception of the game. You cannot play on deity or king anymore. Start on the second level and work to the third level. The AI is that good. I am sure I will work my way up to the higher levels but the computer players are far smarter in this game. You cannot expect the enemy troops to attack cities with one unit at a time with no prayer of ever taking you over. They will take your workers, they will pillage your land, and then they will attack your least defended city with every unit in their military and reduce it to rubble, pyramids and all. That makes for great game play. Sure, beating civ II on deity every game was a great ego boost, but I would rather take a good beating from a well designed game any day. The more I play civilization III the more I enjoy it. Give it a chance, you won't regret it.
Rating: 
Summary: Not ready for prime time
Review: If you have never played anything in the series, buy after the first round of patches. It is fundamentally a great game and a classic of the genre. My main problem is that it is only marginally better than Civ II. The graphics are definitely better. Wonders, units, and improvements have been tweaked mostly for the better. Generally the game is more playable now because dominant effects like Leonardo's Workshop have been tempered. But there is very, very little that is actually new. [Alas, they only partially fixed goody boxes. Saving doesn't do any good within a turn, but if you restore and wait a turn the random number generator is reset and you get a different result.] The interface has been tweaked but, unfortunately inconsistently. Some interface actions (e.g., moving units) are much better. But others actually decrease playability. For example, the pre-turn processing may display several quick messages for indiviudal cities. If you have a lot of cities it is hard to remember which ones and it can be a bear to find the right one later. Try finding the new Iron resource it announced on a huge map! The new features like resources and culture add to the game overall. They just don't add up to the same sorts of change as, say, Alpha Centauri. One playability problem is that there tend not to be enough resources. As a result you can be prevented from making certain units simply because a critical resource isn't in your area and the other nations won't trade with you. To fix that you need to make your own map with the map editor, which is kind of tedious for larger world sizes. As usual, initial location brings an unfortunate luck aspect at any difficulty level above Warlord so making your own map is still key to dealing with the higher levels. Especially since the AI is tougher now. I was also disapointed in the reliability. It has crashed a couple of times. This seems to be due to typing hotkeys too quickly in combination with mouse clicks. I have also found that about 1 out of 3 times after I shut down the game normally I cannot connect to my DSL vendor without restarting WinPoET; this game is the only thing I run where this happens. Bottom line: it is a great game that realizes much of the potential of turn-based strategy games but it just doesn't add enough to Civ II to justfy full retail pricing. The above was written after about 20 hrs of play. I have since added another 30 or so. Just enough to uncover a lot more problems. On large games (huge map w/ > ~50 cities) it crashes with annoying regularity; it even trashes its own implementation so that I had to reinstall it twice. I have yet to complete a large game. I don't see any way to play this game except through quick conquest without building one's own map. On computer constructed worlds the luck factor in resource distribution is absolutely dominant. Also corruption is punitively high when the number of cities is large -- the strategy guide says it increases exponentially with number of cities, which seems to be the case. The city count threshold supposedly can be edited, but all the menu choices for changing rules in the map editor are grayed out!
Rating:
Summary: Glad to see Civ III, but I'm not deleting Civ II from my HD
Review: First of all, 90% of computer games are just not very good. Civilization clearly shows the signs of thoughtful design and, of course, it's Civilization after all! I write this review with all possible respect to the design team and with an eye towards improving the product. There are some characteristics (not exactly flaws) that the experienced Civ player should be aware of. First, the animations are beautifully done but in late game they slow down the engine to the point of unplayability. It can take over a minute for the AI to move, and it's a loooonnnnggg minute. Second, some of the "features" are nonintuitive; for example, since diplomacy is conducted on a menu (and not a unit), it was quite difficult to figure out how to conduct espionage. And on the subject of irritating changes, with Civ III we can no longer customize player and civilization names. You can't even pick the sex of the opponent or the player (I guess for animation reasons). This is a HUGE disappointment, as I just am not comfortable playing England as Elizabeth I, or Russia as Catherine the Great. Why was this feature deleted? For whatever reason, indirect fire units (catapults, cannon, bombers) can no longer attack by moving into the square of an opponent. Rather, there is a separate menu button where you separately target the city. This is NOT obvious in the manual, and took some experimenting to figure out. Another key difference is settlers....for whatever reason, there is no only one type of setter, but there is a worker that performs your terrain improvements at a very slow pace (engineers are nowhere to be found). What this boils down to is that the games moves incredibly slow...my first run-through (yes, I resorted to reading the manual) took almost 5 hours...and this was on a reduced map with few opponents. One missing feature that falls in the inexcusable category...in the standard edition, there are no quick reference cards or technology charts. Most of the documentation is in-game (doubtless a cost reduction ploy) but I grew very used to the docs in Civ I and Civ II gracing the wall next to my computer...hopefully something on the internet will become available to fill this gap, but this is just unacceptable. Now for the good news! Most of the menus are gone (remember the endless "we love the king" popu-up screens?") and are replaced with text messages accross the top of the city. Yes, this means that cities can go into chaos unless you notice the smoke animation...but we're all observant, this is ok. Second, the issue of managing fuel for planes is gone. I thought this was rather part of the fun, but I know this annoyed some people. Best of all of the improvements is that the AI and interaction with opponents is FAR more complex and feels more "real". It's a beautiful game...but somehow the fun was lost!! Worth buying on the basis of graphics and potential of the design team, though. I salute Sid Meier for a long-awaited sequel to a classic game. It's beautiful, it's complicated...and sometimes almost unplayable. A few tweaks and a Civ 3.5 should balance this game nicely. Recommended, since this is a great game by a great computer game designer.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit more complicated....
Review: I was (and still AM) a big fan of Sid Meier's games and I was anxiously awaiting Civ III. How can I describe it without being so partial? I'll do my best and try to focus on a few items.
The overall impression is that the complexity of the game has increased tremendously. You have to play the game several and several times to catch the essence of some functions, because you can't grasp them all in just two or three times. Good things:
- Culture (I love to acquire cities just for building libraries and temples)
- Diplomacy (you can bargain and exchange almost everything and if you keep yourself a loyal guy, the possibilities of being in peace all the time are big)
- Upgrade (good thing when you lacked Leonardo's) Bad things:
- Resources (I was well advanced of my competitors and couldnt build railroads due to my lack of coal!)
- Wonders (they take longer to build and have lesser effects)
- Complexity (you need plenty of time to get the basics) Overall opinion: more or less good... it could have been different and the graphics which are more complex suck most of the resources... the editor might help you customize a bit the game...
Rating:
Summary: More mature product than previous releases
Review: If you ask me, Civ3 is the best of the Civilization series, which in turn is the best game of all time. So I have no choice but to give it 5 stars! The AI is much improved, much has been rebalanced, some new new elements have been thrown in, and, compared to Alpha Centauri, it is much much less buggy. If you weren't too excited by the Civilization series to begin with, then you will probably find Civ3 to be mildly more appealing but not substantially different. If you're like me then all other computer games get boring after a couple days, while Civ is always fun. In that case Civ3 offers new challenges and a host of minor incremental improvements that make it a must-have.
Rating:
Summary: Increased power to graphics slows game play
Review: Not an improvement, only better graphics for Civ3. Civ2 is the best game and plays in a variety of ways. Civ3 has all of the problems and poor performance and slow processing that Alpha Centauri was plagued with. After playing for hours (and having thousands of hours of Civ2 experience) I found I was still struggling in doing basic movements and tasks with Civ3. The manual is very poor in relating the changes for experienced players and does not explain basic differences in concepts with Civ2 in a competent manner. I'm taking the game back for a refund.
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