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Not as addictive as ...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: August 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

However, it's kind of like ...-you do it a whole lot cuz it's so novel and fun but one day, you're done and don't feel the need to do it again because it was as exciting as it was going to get. This is how I felt after winning the space race. Having gotten acquainted well with the temperament of the AI(which does not vary from nationality to nationality much) during several marathon attempts to find the winning strategy, I hit on the right ideas to win, and it wouldn't be any fun to do again. They are:

1. Be a ... before the others get a chance. Everyone will turn on you eventually, especially when you are doing well.
2. Space your cities out. The idea here is size of territory, not volume of cities. Three blocks between each will do it.

Thats really it. So what fun is that? Alpha Centauri is the crown jewel in Meier's Civ canon. In that game, the factions all have disparate temperaments, and choices you make will endear you to one faction and make you the villain of another. Any rash success or failure will cause your neighbors to cut you down.
Some cool aspects of the game before I continue kvetching:cultural influence-improved cities next door to rival cities with lesser development can cause upheavals and defections to the better-improved empire;Golden Ages triggered by Wonders that increase revenue(et tu, Alpha Centauri?);war time economies and drafts speed building of military units;leaders who create armies;units and philosophies unique to each empire that affect production and happiness; small wonders which each empire can build;and strategic resources like oil, rubber, aluminum and uranium that permit the building of new war machines that you'll need desperately if you are going to be any good at this game at all. Hint: the bigger and more successful your empire, the better your chances are to get resources inside your territory. If you are a hesitant player at all, the computer will deposit few or none of these resources in your territory. It's supposed to be a random scattering of the resources, but I've noted a correlation between aggressive play and the amount of resources in your locale. Sounds logical to me.
Things that will annoy you: Wonders of the World have notably less effect on your empire than previous incarnations of Civ. They're also impossible to complete as you cannot hurry them and cannot have more than one city producing it. Realistic yes, but frustrating.They increase your culture, but often are extraneous. Units and developments sometimes overlap each other in usefulness and therefore are not built. This is due to the poor set up of the technology discovery. The ironclad, for example, is available one advance ahead of the frigate, and the only difference is an increase in offense and defense, so whats the use in the existence of the frigate? This happens with other units as well. You can develop a republic before a monarchy, in fact, its easier. Why? Cant go straight to republic without a loss in production, you know. Too many developments in the end of the game, when production is light speed and you've vanquished most of your opponents. War:nearly impossible to wage unless you have approximately 5 times the strength of the enemy. Pollution is waaay overbearing. No finale for the space race, no film, no nothing. You just win. Inexcusable in the shadow of Alpha Centauri.
All in all, a vain attempt to be more realistic, which is checked by tedium. It's not worth its high initial purchase price. Wait til it goes down a bit.

A complete waste of money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 24
Date: December 13, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Having played Civilization and Civilization II since 1993, I was looking forward to Civ III. It was surely time to replace Civ II, but not with this.

Always prefering to begin with the positive, they finally got one thing right: the "go to" feature.

The graphics aren't better, unless you like the 1980s Japanese animation-style "battles". The game itself is not improved or made more realistic. It's simply more difficult. If you're successful, any city not near your capital (or capitals) takes a century or more to build an improvement. I suppose someone at Firaxis thought this was realistic, but I'd bet our friends in the Yukon (far from Ottawa) or Seattle (far from DC) would beg to differ that their production levels are lower than in or near their nations' capitals. Also, if successful, you'll encounter tons of pollution (each turn) about a century before you've the technology to do anything about it. And pollution can never be eliminated, or brought to acceptable levels. Not very realistic.

It's inferior to Civ II in nearly every way imaginable, except the "go to" feature. It's tedious when doing "well". You're left wishing the other civilizations would come kill you off. Some might think it's more challenging. I thought it was both frustrating and a waste of money.

This is NOT civ 2 - and it shouldn't be confused with it

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: November 23, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I've read dozens of reviews by computer gamers saying things like "they got rid of this" and "it's so much worse than civ II." Why are they even mentioning the predecessor? This game is Civ 3 - a new game with new strategies to win. Don't get me wrong - this game is not perfect. It's probably not as much of a leap forward over the second civ than civ II was over the original civilization. This game is very similar, but emphasis has been placed on diplomacy, resources and culture rather than being able to produce 100 armor units and take over the world rather quickly. The AI is much smarter here, and I would say more aggressive as well. The deals you make may seem a little unfair, but it seems more realistic than the first two civ games. Also, city placement and access to resources are so very important. Since you must have certain resources to make certain units, the realism is maintained, even though it can be rather difficult to find what you need.
I believe that all this makes the third installment a different game. Not so different that longtime civ fans will be confused, but enough to keep them fans of the series. I also had no problems with installation, and the game has not frozen once (On a 733MHz, 128 RAM pentium III). If you play the game with your old civ and civII strategies in mind, you will be disappointed. Instead, realize that there is more to this game in building wonders and trade agreements than in total military conquest. Admittedly, I was first troubled that the enemy almost always has more military units that always seem equal or better than yours, but then I discovered that diplomacy actually WORKS in this game. The graphics are good - considering that this is a strategy game, and graphics are not all that important. I actually find the units and terrain to be much improved graphics-wise. I would say that this seems like a more cerebral game than the second civ. Like I said, those looking for pure military domination need not apply. All in all, I find this a very balanced strategy game, with military, diplomacy, culture (a very cool addition, making it important to build all those improvements!) and trade all being equally important. I say give it a shot - It's been a blast to play, and I can't find anything to really complain about.

How the mighty have fallen...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: June 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

When I first started playing Civilization, I was hooked. It was such a great game concept. World conquest, turn-based, strategy... it became my favorite game. I thought it couldn't be topped. Then came Civ II. With better graphics and AI, as well as new units and game concepts, it easily replaced the original. And I never looked back. I still play Civ II to this day.

But Civ III does not thrill me. I realize that I might be suffering from high expectations, but I was hoping that this game would follow the lead of Alpha Centauri with its new concepts and unit options. Instead, it made ordinary things unnecessarily difficult without much improvement anywhere else.

Example: in Civ II, I finally learned to be the infrastructure dynamo. I learned the best ways to connect my cities and improve the landscape so that I could out-produce, out-research, and just plain out-muscle my competition up to at least Emperor level. Unlike the original, where I just conquered like mad. But playing Civ III made me feel like I was learning all over again. Why in the world should an experienced Civ player have trouble connecting his oldest and most powerful cities with railroad well until the 1900's on Chieftain level?! It's not just that I had to learn the new game concepts (such as, rivers don't work the same way they used to), it's also that the workers themselves seem to improve too slowly. They seem to be just as slow in the modern age as they were in the beginning of the game. Maybe I'm just missing my Engineers from Civ II.

But other problems mentioned in these reviews also ring true. There's nothing quite so frustrating as watching an Elite Cavalry unit get KO'd by some conscript level axeman fighting for the barbarians. Unless maybe it's a tank I'm losing. And the lack of resource availability when I own 80 percent of a continent is outrageous! If I can go coast to coast with my roads, why can't I find coal or oil when I need it. Or worse yet, why is that one resource you need so desperately can only be found in your enemy's territory. And whoever set up the AI for trade and diplomacy deals should get a job doing hostile takeovers. Talk about unrealistic. Also this game suffers from what I call the "gang up on me" syndrome. Against all logic, AI civs will abandon long-standing rivalries with each other just to start cutting my civ out of trade deals and getting me into wars. It makes no sense, and it detracts from the game horribly.

Some of the new game features are cool, some are even overdue. But they don't make up for obvious flaws in the gameplay. Civ III has fallen way short of the mark set by its predecessors. My recommendation: stay with Civ II.

A huge disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: March 27, 2002
Author: Amazon User

You don't normally think of "Sid Meier" and "bad design" in the same sentence, but Civ III falls so flat on its face, we may need to rethink this.

"Corruption" is the raging cancer at the heart of this game's ills. Any city you start at even a very modest distance from your capital, isn't going to produce anything due to "corruption". Firaxis thinks this is "realistic", but 500 years to build a courthouse??? Which doesn't even help very much. God forbid you should capture an enemy city, it'll be too feeble to defend itself, ever.

Civ II was rightly condemned for its heavily pro-conquest bias -- your score was a lot higher for conquering the world than for winning peacefully -- and Civ III says it addresses this. It fails, utterly.

You'll be obliged to commit most of your economy to defense, because your city will be attacked by thirty to fourty units at a single turn. If you haven't defended it heavily enough, goodbye. Regardless of what sort of game you want to play, it will have to be military.

There is a huge, obvious flaw in the diplomacy setup, that should have been caught during playtesting: if a neighbor is letting an enemy through his territory to attack you, there is no diplomatic solution to get him to stop. The only thing you can do is attack him for it, which makes you the bad guy and costs you points for "breaking your word".

Each civilization now has a special unit for it alone -- an interesting idea, but badly out of balance. The French have musketeers, the Germans have the Panzer, the Americans have the F-16 (assuming you survive long enough to develop it) while the Iroquois have the mounted warrior. Others are equally out of time/scale.

Some civilizations have "scouts", which are available immediately in the game, and though unarmed, can cover territory much faster than other units. This gives these civilizations a tremendous, unbalanced early advantage in discovering technology, new cities, and money.

Civ III has also made a huge step backwards. Civ I was heavily criticized for having spearmen blow up battleships, and Civ II was fixed to make this more realistic, but Civ III has returned to having swordsmen destroy tanks.

This game is barely playable as a military sim, and not a particularly good one. In contrast with what we'd hoped for and expected from this designer, Civ III is a complete flop and an embarrassment to its forerunners.

Stay with (or get) Civ II, it's a much better game in almost every respect.

Minor upgrade to an already amazing series.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The Civilization series is perhaps the best video series of all time, or at least is certainly up in the Top 2 or 3. If you haven't played any of them yet, prepared to get VERY addicted, as you lead your civilization through a grand sweep of time, from the stone age right all the way to the modern age and beyond. Casual gamers beware - you will become hard core after you buy this game.

That said, Civ 3 isn't much different from the previous games - it doesn't change much in an already great formula. So, if you still dig the Civ games, buy this now! However, I found myself wishing for improvements in the areas that have always hurt this series: The AI still mindlessly swarms all over the map; the difficult levels are still just a "cheating handicap" for the computer; the new diplomacy options are completely wasted on the moronic AI; the warfare model is still rather crude; blah, blah, blah. Also, the basic Civ playstyle has changed in small but important ways, enough that I still prefer Alpha Centauri.

More than Civilization, but less than Call To Power

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 15 / 23
Date: December 11, 2001
Author: Amazon User

My wife and I are both hard-core Civilization and Call To Power fans. In Civilization III, the graphics are good and the diplomacy and culture fix some problems with Civ I and II. However, Civilization III has some glaring play problems.

1. You can only irigate next to another irigation, a river or lake. I started a couple of games stranded on a continent with no rivers or lakes.

2. On both games that I played into the middle ages, I was on a continent with no saltpeter (so no riflemen). As a side note, riflemen have an attack of one (defense of four), so a shieldman beats a rifleman if the rifleman is attacking.

3. There is no way except for sacrificing a leader (creating an army) to creat a stack of units. You need to select each unit and have it move and or attack. Additionally, each combat is individually resolved. This makes combat (both movement and fighting) very tedious.

In short, this is Sim Civilization - lots of building and very little action.

Hardcore Fans Will Be Disappointed

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: November 07, 2001
Author: Amazon User

It's been a long wait for Civilization 3, (though one made shorter by the excellent Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) and my personal feelings about it are decidely mixed.

Despite the bold proclamation on the box that this is indeed Sid Meier's Civilization, it's not. Meier hasn't really touched the series since it's first incarnation. This time Jeff Briggs gets lead design credit, not Brian Reynolds who was responsible for Civ2 and SMAC. It shows. After the commercial failure that Alpha Centauri was, Firaxis has decided to take a step back and rexamine the series. Gone are the complicated menus and insanely complex tech tree found in Civ2 and Alpha Centauri, the whole package has been slimmed down and made simpler for mass consumption. On one hand, this is a plus, it makes the game much more accessible and lets you devote your thoughts to game decisions, not where a certain command is hidden. On the other hand, many of the great innovations from SMAC have been entirely abandoned. Some of the advances remain (such as national borders), but this has the feel that they left behind the Brian Reynolds design and went back to the drawing board. This plays much more like a sequel to Civilization than a sequel to Civ2.

That having been said, it's still a total blast. The new map generator is perfect (as it has to be, as Firaxis has eliminated the option to start a normal game on a predesigned map), generating the type of map you want to play on, and generally doing a pretty good job at distributing resources. The culture system is a great addition, though it makes winning through non-military means, which wasn't that difficult in earlier incarnations of the series, far easier. The unique aspects to each civilization could have used a little more thought however, as they don't really have the unique personality of the factions in Alpha Centauri. It grants nice bonuses, but hardly enough to alter the way you'd play the game. Thankfully you can turn them off, one of the few things you can tinker with, odd for a team that usually produces very customizable games (Civ2 even had a "Cheat" menu at the top for people who enjoy cheating). This is still overall a great package, though I wouldn't expect it to replace Alpha Centauri as my favorite game of all time.

I just can't get the hang of this one...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: November 15, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I played this game in all my spare time for 3 weeks straight, and I just couldn't get the hang of it. Granted, it took me the first 2 weeks to find all the features of the game - IF I've found all the features of the game. I wound up starting the game over and over again because I was dismally far behind the AI players. After 3 weeks of play, I now feel I can build a good solid starting civilization that isn't great, but won't get crunched by the first AI player I meet.

Oddly, I think part of my problem is that you can't use the same strategies you used in Civ I or Civ II (not to mention CtP). I find this odd because the game is so similar to the old Civ games. A bit more complicated here and a bit simpler there, yes, but the same none the less. The changes basically are this:

--The interface is completely different. Try right-clicking a lot(Establish embassies with other civs by right-clicking on your capitol city, change production by right-clicking on a city, etc.).
--The tech tree has changed. It's interesting that you can't discover industrial age techs until you discover most of the middle age techs and so forth, but I think it was simplified a bit too much.
--You can't build armies unless you happen to get a leader during combat (or discover a certain advanced tech). I got a leader. Once.
--Culture is cool. Diplomacy seems to go better if you have more culture. Unfortunately, if you spend all your time on culture, you don't have the funds for anything else and you'll be crushed anyway. Culture causes cities to increase their borders, though, and that includes taking over enemy territory.
--The city governor is... interesting. I haven't decided if I like it yet or not (again, right-click on a city). It allows you to set the focus for your city (production, science, etc.) and if you click on Production at the top, you can tell it to produce Settlers, Workers, Wonders, etc. Often, Sometimes, or Never. And you can do this for This City or All Cities, so you don't have to go city to city to tell the governor to stop building Settlers. Unfortunately, you can only go so far to turning the governor off. He pops up and tells you what he wants to build (if Manage Production is turned OFF) next if you're building, say, a library, but woe is he who wants to stop producing military units as soon as the present warrior is done. It starts another unit automatically (not necessarily the same type it just finished).
--Build queues are dismally difficult. I only recently realized that if I was in the city screen and I held down the shift key I could add to the build queue instead of changing the present production. I have yet to figure out how to remove something from the build queue, nor move a thing up or down in the list, to say nothing of saving the build queue so I can use it in other cities.
--There are no settings to increase or decrease resolution.
--Trade is vague and difficult. Once you've discovered trade, found resources and then found EXTRAS of those same resources, and once you've built a road to civs on your continent or you AND the other civ have built a harbor, then you can go to the deplomacy screen and request or offer goods as a part of a trade proposal.
--Putting the workers (the ones who build roads, etc.) on automatic can be a bad idea. Some automated processes are good - +N will cause him to build a network of roads between all of your cities. +R will cause him to build a road to X. Fully automating them may be a bad thing, though. I've noticed that they tend to run around doing whatever they see fit - including irrigating areas that are not only not useful to your city, but not even inside of your cultural influence!
--Strategic resources is another thing I haven't decided if I like or not. They are realistic - one shouldn't be able to build swordsmen without iron for the swords. On the other hand, most of your military still winds up being spearmen because you have to discover the tech that lets you see the resource, then find the resource, then build a road to it, then build a colony there if it's outside your cultural influence. And even then, you can only build swordsmen in the cities that are connected by road to the resource.
--You can upgrade units! Maybe this was in Civ II and I just didn't see it, but I think it's infinitely cool that I can put a unit in a city with a barracks and then right-click to upgrade.

My final word of advice: Build settlers. Build lots of settlers. And somehow figure out a way to do that while making your cities bigger (in later governments, the bigger the city, the more military you can support). And most importantly: Don't throw out your copies of Civ II or Call to Power. You'll need them later when you get frustrated with this one.

Go back and play Civ 1 again

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: December 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I am a long time gamer, and Civ 1 is my absolute favorite game of all time. When I first got this game, I was very impressed with the new units, the new system of advisors, the improvements upon civ 2, so on, and so forth.

For a long time, I spent countless nights, as other gamers have, just playing, endlessly, rediculously, and for periods of 20 hours. Stay up all night playing, go get breakfast, sleep until 4pm. That was my day. However, there are a few complaints I have which lead me to the 3-star review.

1: The AI seems to get unfair advantages such as impossible unit victories (spearmen taking out armed calvary) at higher difficulty levels. Higher difficulty should be like playing against a more skilled opponent, not a godlike one.

2: The system of corruption makes world domination stupid and pointless. One facet of this game is the ability to conquer the world. In this game, however no matter what you do, your remote cities that are not on the same continent as your capital will practically NEVER produce ANYTHING. (Even if you are a democracy and the cities have courthouses.) In my opinion, this makes the game practically unplayable, for you must base every attack from your homeland.

3: The game "ends" at year 2050. Why? That is so stupid. I can't even say it enough. STUPID!

4: Automated Workers are NOT customizable, and they value food production over resource production.

5: Domestic advisor values building aqueducts and hospitals (expansionist) over building ANYTHING else (annoying, you can't turn this feature off, or customize it).

========================================

Now that you've read what I thought the weak points of the game were, I suggest you go play Civ 1. You can still find it available for download at some sites (search for "civwin").

You *will* find that Civ 3 is quite similar to civ 1. With some key differences, which I will not go into here. But, as a seasoned gamer familiar with all types of games from FPS to RPG, I suggest you try Civ 1. The graphics are entertainingly bad, and gameplay is much more fun.

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