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Very disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: November 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Civilization II and Alpha Centari are my favorite games bar none, other games come and go but these two remain on my hard drive. Civilization III will not be joining them. The company's focus seems to have been on making Civilization II look brand new and high tech but the result was that it made the game unplayable. The printing in text and on graphics is eye straining; I ended up trying a magnifying glass to help me read what was on the screen. This didn't help much when text was superimposed on existing text. The unit types look basically identical to each other and are difficult to differentiate (scout? worker? settler? Your guess is as good as mine) Asking what a particular unit is tends to make the system lock up though not as bad as trying to look at a city screen. I doubt that there was enough play testing done on this monster. My advice for anyone wishing to play Civilization III, get yourself a good book, you will have tons of free time.

Civ III a failure

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: November 22, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The game has some great additions, but the play has bugs or has been changed so much you never finish. This is due mostly to changes in waste and curruption, but the book does not spell out the great changes made in trade and negotations well. This led me to many hours reading the book and then trying to find the screen they were talking about. It seems clunky and with the waste and curruption problem, unplayable!

You should cheat too!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 01, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Civilization III has all of the aspects that made CIV II and the original huge, time-guzzling monsters. Every turn involves the micromanagement of every possible aspect of running a society. You have to decide what to research, what each city should build, if all of your citizens are happy enough not to revolt, what terrain squares to upgrade, and endless other options. The time system in this game is ridiculous. You have generally from 4000 BC to 2050 AD or less to achieve a victory. While over 6000 years may seem like a very long time, when the game clicks off 50, 20, 10, and/or 5 years a game turn, that time runs out quickly. Even at the lowest difficulty level, your adversaries are given huge advantages over your civilization. They can seemingly create super units with little or no build time, supporting dozens more units than your civilization (even if they're the same size.) The enemy's units are harder to destroy, always seeming to win even fights. Their units can move across terrain features that would take your same units multiple moves in a single move, and they can even run away twice when your units can run away only once. The diplomatic AI, supposedly more advanced than the previous versions, still demands ridiculous deals and the game never allows you to make similar demands or respond in the same way to those demands. Game balancing is almost non-existent, in so much as a battleship (of the World War II type) can be easily destroyed by Iron Clads and Frigates (of the American Civil War era.) Submarines that are supposed to be invisible to enemy units (with the exception of a VERY select few according to in-game help info) will always be attacked by ships supposedly incapable of seeing them. Your units are always forced to fight to the death if they are the most powerful (but not healthiest) unit in a given stack, while their units are allowed to change their defense to always defend with the healthiest unit in a stack. I could go on for hours about the excessive, abusive, intolerable, demoralizing, shameful cheating that the computer opponent is allowed to commit in the name of "BETTER AI."

On the technical side of the game, the interface is unintuitive and generally ugly. Menus are in strange places, and your advisor screens are nearly impossible to get useful information from. The graphics are a warmed over version of the Civilization II game, and the sound and music are embarrassingly poor quality. Response time is a major issue, with late game enemy turns taking 30 seconds to 1 minute per enemy. Start up time for the game itself is good, and I have not experienced any crashes with this game (patched version 1.16f). Also, the game manual is large, but uninformative, and the index and table of contents are almost useless in aiding you in your search for some obscure game quirk.

Overall, this game is not worth your substantial amount of time and money. If you must purchase it, try to save as much money getting it as possible, and find all the trainers and cheat codes you can get, because this game DOES NOT PLAY FAIR.

Still too many programming bugs

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 23, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I love the Civilization games. I have spent far too much of my life playing Civ2 and so I really looked forward to Civ3. I got it, installed it, and was disappointed. It's slow (even on my Pentium3 600MHz system). It also crashes way too often. The crash seems to be in the way the players are positioned, since backing up and re-starting from there does not avoid the crash. ...

Worthless

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 11
Date: July 14, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is a joke. There simply is no AI. The only thing that keeps you from winning is the "AI" deciding beforehand what will happen. enemy units appear from nowhere, city enhancements do not work. Buying this game amounts to throwing your money away.

Don't waste your time or your money.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: December 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

It's hard to believe what a piece of crap this game really is. Recently got a used version to try out before I spent a small fortune on Civ 4. I was a huge Civ 2 fan, great game, just blessed enough to have never bought this game before now. TONS of bugs. This game should never even have been released. One of the patches is 29 MB, that should have told me something, and is based on "tester feedback". How about testing the game BEFORE you release it!?!? HUGE movement lag times, 2 minutes rounds can easily take 5 or 10. TOTALLY unrealistic battles. Lowly enemy archers defeating your veteran tanks behind your city walls is just one of hundreds. Constant MAJOR corruptuion, no matter what you do, and under any form of government. Researching advances that lead to resources that don't even exist for many, MANY turns. At best about a 60% bombardment failure rate for land, water and air units, and they don't get better with experience. They'll suck at the end of the game just like they sucked when you first built them. The huge thrill of discovering deserted villages. And on and on and on. This was obviouls nothing but a MONEY thang. Again, Civ 2 was great. This was just an extremely poor imitation quickly released to profit on it's coattails. I paid $5 for my used one, but in excellent condition, with manual, box, etc. That was waaaaaaaaaay too much. I wouldn't play Civ 3 if you paid me $5 per round. I quickly gave it to Goodwill, but now feel guilty that someone else will have to play this piece of junk for themselves before they find out how horrible it is. I should have just thrown it in the trash where it belongs. $40 or $50 for Civ 4? Yeah, right. I think not.

Nothing but problems

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: November 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Beware, this game is a tech nightmare. I spent 6 hours trying to get my system back together after the havock unleashed by Civiliation 3.

confusing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 12
Date: December 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game looks great and I was happy to get it but it makes no sense wansoever. far to hard to find out and the reason the box weighs more than an average video game is because of its HUGE instruction manual! dont get this game unless u hav a lot of time and your good with stradegy.

Don't waste your money or time

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: December 04, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is inferior to Alpha Centauri in every way. In addition to step back from advances in AC, this game is just downright boring! Impossible to expand away from your central cities due to exagerated corruption - and to build the required city structures to set on growth path can take hundreds of years - no lie! Your central cities quickly build all improvement options and have nothing to do but build troops which are used to conquer lands which you have no ability to grow into. Trading is a joke. I can go on and on but don't want to. I feel cheated and the game makers don't seem to have a clue. This game is simply horrible.

Civ 3 not as good as its forerunners

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: February 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Why did they have to do that? Why take out the strategic rules that make the game such a playable masterpiece? And the A.I. is sooo slow. Go and play Civilisation Alpha Centauri instead, its is at least 5 times better. For more civ reviews: http://www.otterit.co.nz/games/games.htm

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