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Great and Challenging Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: May 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you're looking for something simplistic, in which you're always assured of a win regardless of how pathetically you play, this isn't the game for you.

If you're looking for something that will leave you so enthralled that you can't think of anything but your next strategy, try this.

Good Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: June 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've played this game off and on for a little over a year. The addictability of this game is just as good as the previous games and ther have been times I simply didn't go to bed, even though I worked the next day.

I was a little disappointed that the ages stopped at the modern age. The futuristic cities, units, etc. in Call to Power is what really hooked me on that game. It also would've been nice for the Foreign Advisor screen to provide more information that just trade and treaties.

Civ III does compensate, though, with great graphics, the new culture concept, specific civilization advantages as well as all kinds of other little improvements that make the game that much more realistic and enjoyable.

Great Game!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: October 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is very fun. It too a long time to figure it out, but once I did, it was great. There are a few parts that are disappointing such as the difficulty of the other civilizations. However, other than this, this game keeps me entertained for hours and hours.

replay value up the buttocks

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: March 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

ok heres what you do. 1: you pick what type of map your gonna play on and if it has barabains and how the barbarians act, then you choose you civilization. 2:You the play the game, on tutorial mode to learn . 3:you play it agin 4:yous play it agin 5you play it again....U PLAY ALL THE TIME....this game is a classic, much like people still tetris, people will always play civilization.mainly the older people.

One star because I could not rate with zero.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 14
Date: February 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I remember a special part in the official civilization site where the fans were encouraged by the civilization team to write their ideas about Civ3. It seems to me that Civ3 is exactly that: A set of various ideas without any efford to combine them and work on them properly.

Some examples:
1)There are no zones of control because somebody suggested that it is not reliable for units like horseman to control a region of 1000Km (3 game squares if the whole terrain is as large as the earth, can you imagine such ideas in chess?). Result: It is useless to hold strong positions because the enemies can easily bypass them.

2)Strong attacking weapons (catapult, cannon, artillery etc.) now cannot destroy enemy units but only damage them. They can destroy terrain improvements, city buildings etc. but nobody would waste his resources to build them. The more that they are NEVER!!! destroyed but they can be only captured. Similarly naval units cannot destroy land units and the attack of air units is similar to this of catapults etc. Result: Too many important weapons are useless.

3)Resources: You can't build horsemen if you have not the resource of horses, infantry without rubber etc. You can trade them by a strange way and there is no warehouse to store them. If you have much you can either trade or waste it. To make matters worse: You do not know what resources you have until you discover the required advantage. Resources are of extreme importance for weapons and improvements (i.e. railroad requires coal) so there is an important (I would call it irritating)random factor in the game.

4)There are some new features in diplomacy but it is evident that the designers have not examined them properly in order to get the most of them. Many times I have found myself in a war when my ally got involved because I had not the option to betray my ally or demand from ally's enemy to make peace. Also in many situations war is the only way you can cancel an agreement.

Nevertheless the worst thing in diplomacy is that AI diplomats can take controversial decisions.
For instance in one of my tests:
i)Ask for A and get the answer that I have nothing to offer for that, then
ii)offer C+D and ask for A. The answer was NO
iii)Offer C and ask what the opponent had to offer for that and the answer was ... A+B!!!
Try that with A technology and C, D some of your cities.

Also there are no spies and caravans, wonders can be built solely by 1 city and no other city can help building the wonder, culture and many other new features. I dislike most of them but somebody else may like them. The most obvious and irritating thing is that the game has nothing new to give but simply some unexamined new features just to justify a new version of the great Civilization 2.

Frustratingly Shoddy

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: June 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Amazing, they had such a long time to work on this game since Civ2 came out and it's full of problems. Even the patches -- a year after the game's hastened release -- did not solve many of the problems.

The interface is poor, and if you're not really careful, one of your cities will riot and destroy everything (just because you have a fast computer and the screen glanced over the riot).

The combat imbalance is worse than ever, worse than Civ, Civ2, etc. I cannot imagine how swordsmen routinely destroy tanks. It's not even tanks losing attacks against them, it's swordsmen winning attacks on tanks! Ridiculous! Plus there are movement problems with many units on improvements.

The pollution system is way out of control. It almost takes the fun out of the game when 90% of the round you're spending shifting the workers around to the pollution spots that pop out in a city with all the recycling/mass transit schemes and limited in size by no hospital.

They should have worked out the bugs and did MORE BETA TESTING before releasing this. I've gone back to Civ2, it's more fun and more fair.

3rd Try Better Then 1, not as Good as Number 2

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: October 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Civilization III takes enough from the older game that an experienced player will fill at home, but at a home where a lot of the furniture has been re-arranged. As you get to know the game better, most of the changes will be more irritating then interesting and anyone on a tight budget should probably avoid this version until the price breaks in a year or two. For those of you with extra time on hands, however, and a little bit more free cash, you probably could do worse.

Here are a few of the changes in this version:

World Conquest? Forget about it. Movement is slowed in enemy territory, corruption takes away about 90% (or more) of your new cities capacities, and your conquered cities often rebel and go back to the deposed rule. This, in particular can be very frustrating when all or most of your armies are there gathering for your next attack. On the plus each Civilization has unique units which reflect their historic strengths. As such, playing this game teaches you about history while requiring you to adjust your play according to which nation you lead.

Wonder Hog? Nope. If you are like me, in Civ II you would try to get as many of the Wonders as possible. In Civ III, there are no caravans to help with your wonders. You can not cheat the system by having a city over produce shields

I could go on, but part of the fun of these games is learning the quirks on your own. I can feel comfortable recommending Civ III, but is is wrong to to still look forward to number 4?

Recreate History

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: November 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The Civilization series has always been about starting with one city and expanding to build a great civilization. If Civ III had only built on the legacy of the first two games in the series, it would be a magnificent triumph well worth the money. However, Firaxis took a chance and built a new gaming engine mostly from the bottom up. It worked. The result is a game that is rich in the diplomatic, military scientific, economic, and cultural areas of civilization's development over time. This is an excellent strategy game in the turn-based tradition. You, the player determine the level of micromanagement you want to engage in, the decisions you want to make in groups or one step at a time, and the level of interaction you have with the computer-generated players. The more you discover, the deeper your understanding becomes. This is history looking forward, you are in the shoes of the great decision-makers. The AI in this game is much more capable than any other available, and the game is fun, even exhilarating. This is one of those life-disrupting, just-one-more-turn, I'll-just-see-how-this-goes, type of games that keeps full-grown adults up into the wee hours of the night while they play. Definitely buy it, definitely play it, but you've been warned.

Boring- right out of the box!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: November 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The eclipsing star of the computer gaming world, Sid Meyer, resurfaces to serve up a game that is every bit as exciting as watching lint accumulate. Basically a re-warnmed version of his earlier title, "Alpha Centauri" (a game now in re-release, which will put you back 9 bucks), but without all the cool movies that AC offered, Civilization 3 has all the action of glacial movement, the excitement of a six-hour monotonal history lecture, and all the visual appeal of a mid-80's DOS game.
After buying this game, I popped it into the drive, booted it up, and five minutes later, was wishing that I had bought something more exciting- like a program that would monitor the growth of my fingernails. I've played a lot of games- and over a game-playing hobby that has stretched over the past two decades, I cannot remember a title that was so underwhelming, so dissapointing, and so downright boring.

Looks fun but won't run

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 41
Date: November 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This program should've been through a few more rounds of testing. I've got a new system that runs plenty of hard-core programs (Think Half-Life, SC3000, Unreal) and has plenty of guts (1ghz/256mg ram/PIII/Gforce) but Civ 3 still freazes-up, errors out, and (this is the most frustratingly stupid) it layers words overtop of each other making important information impossible to read. I'm returning my copy tomorrow.

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