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Got Practiced on CIV III? Now Play the World!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 26
Date: October 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

With the incredible community out there all sharing info about one of the greatest god games to hit the shelves to date, it will be hard to maintain an edge in Play the World based on priviledged knowledge. The War Academy at CivFanatics alone contains so many volumes of data on best practice that it would take one several days to ingest it all.

Many are whining that a multiplayer edition should have been released with the original Civ III. I wholeheartedly disagree. These people misunderstand the basics of this series at its core. The community as it stands participates in succession games, games of the month, a democracy game where there is a hierarchy of leaders that decide the next moves in a single game and one person actualize these moves. It is incredible the amount of sharing and creativity people have involved themselves in to participate together in playing this single-player version. Now that we all know eachother and have gone through the arduous learning process together, we're ready to butt heads.

It is all with great comeraderie that we now wrestle on a multiplayer playing field. Those who gripe about the lack of multiplayer from day one are missing some of the most wonderful community in the current game and no doubt will be those most annoying to play in multiplayer. This multiplayer game is about to be dropped into one of the most amazing game communities and I for one look forward to crack heads with my friends from the forums.

Play the world. Take a clean well designed game and welcome it to the multiplayer world. I for one am very happy that I have played a relatively bug free - very stable game from the day it was released, rather than have to wait an extra 6 months for them to get multiplayer in the first edition and then have it crash every 5 minutes. I think that Firaxis and folks have done very well in their development and I look forward to their consistent stable performance in the Play the World edition to be released this week.

REDEFINES MULTIPLAYER FUN as...no fun at all!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: November 13, 2002
Author: Amazon User

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).

Great addition to an already great game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: February 23, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Play the World is an excellent addition to Civilization III. It adds 8 extra civilizations - the Ottomans, Arabs, Spanish, Vikings, Celts, Mongols, Carthaginians, and Koreans, bringing the grand total to 25. The multiplayer is great - I don't know what the other reviewers were complaining about. The editor is far better than the old one. Definitely buy this expansion pack!

A disappointment

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: June 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Well I must say I was expecting much more. I was never a very hard core civ fan, but do enjoy playing from time to time, so I decided I might as well check out the expansion pack. But after reading the manual and playing for a few hours I began to think, "I just wasted 30 bucks". Generally the problem was, it just didn't add enough, sure it has plenty of new civilizations, but what I really wanted was lots of new wonders and units. Instead it only had the new special civ units, one normal new unit, and one new wonder, with a few extra small gameplay features thrown in such as the ability to move units in a stack. However I still was not satisfied with judging my buy as a failure so I decide to try out the main focus of the expansion pack, online play. I entered to find only about 10 games, all of which were in progress except for one. I joined and it turned out to be one of those game types were everyone finishes turns at different times. I was quite unhappy with the way it turned out, everyone just rushing to finish their turns. After words I tried a normal turn based game, which took about 8 hours until I decided to quit.
Overall, the problem was, I just don't think civ 3 was meant to be online, and they just didn't add enough other features to make it interesting enough.

Heir to the throne

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: January 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The Expansion pack brings Civ III up to par with the fantastic titles that have gone before it. Finally, we are provided with some historical scenarios with "real world" starting positions. An amazing 30+ civilizations can vie for control in a single scenario. I have only begun to play with the editor that comes with the program, but it seems to allow for the kind of expansion and creativity that kept me playing Civ II when I bought it all those years ago until a few weeks ago when I bought the expansion pack to go along with Civ III.

Admittedly, I was not thrilled with Civ III by itself, but the expansion pack makes it a worthy successor to the Civ throne.

Better than I thought

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 13
Date: November 15, 2002
Author: Amazon User

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.

A Love Affair Ends Badly

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 12, 2002
Author: Amazon User

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.

Nice addition to Civ3, but it could have been better

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: August 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I was excited to hear that Civ3 would be expanding with 'Play the World'. I loved the fact that there would be more civilizations to take on, new advancements and the like. They've streamlined some of the features, including alphabetizing your city list within the advisers.

My only complaint is that they really could have done more for this. I miss the ability to play as either a male or female leader from each civilization's history. That was a feature of Civ2 that is really missing here, and I hoped would be addressed with the expansion pack. The new advancements...well there aren't many. I was hoping to tackle some new challenges with this, but it didn't happen.

Really, this expansion seems to have been made almost solely for playing the multiplayer scenarios. I appreciate that a lot of people are into head-to-head competitions, but for those of us just trying to expand our personal best and explore scenarios on our own, it's lacking.

I only recommend this if you're REALLY into the CIV games and just have to see what other options are out there, and only then as long as you pay [cheap] for it. It's just not worth it for more. I give it 4 stars simply because it is fun, and I am REALLY into the CIV games. :-)

Not what it was supposed to be!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 10
Date: November 03, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game expansion as soon as it was released and now I'm sorry I did, for it turned out to be a total waste of time and I have already uninstalled the game from my computer and returned it...OK, the single player mode works perfectly and it was nice seeing some new faces (eight to be exact) among the world leaders, though I would have expected the Celts to be listed amoung the barbarians, not as a new civilization. Also, if you are a Muslim, you might have been offended to find the Arabs and their holy cities (Mecca and Medina) represented, since only Muslims are allowed in those cities and the idea that they may be subject to conquest or destruction by enemies would thus be blasphemous to any Muslim. But the most troublesome aspect of the game is that the multiplayer mode simply DOES NOT WORK!!! Every time I tried to join a game online, the game crashed, and every time I tried to host a game, I found that I was the only player that got in, with not even any AI opponents to fight! How could Firaxis have screwed up so badly when the original Civilization III was such a great hit???...

Great addition to a very good game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: November 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

First off, I really liked civ3, If you didn't like that you won't like the expansion.

The expansion as a some nice new elements to the game, a few new improvements, great worker automation, multiplayer, some game tweaks, and some new civilizations.

My favorite improvement is the increased build rate. Now you can finish a full game in a day versus a week. Makes it much more enjoyable.

The multiplayer doesn't really interest me. To many cheaters out there and basically I just am not good enough to beat the good players (can beat warlord but no higher)

Definately a great addition to a very good game

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