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For those wondering which version to buy...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 35 / 59
Date: September 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I was curious what the differences were, so I popped over to the official FAQ from Firaxis:

"Is Civ III: Play the World needed in order to play Civ III: Conquests?
No! You will not need Civilization III: Play the World in order to play Civilization III: Conquests since it will contain all content including: Civs, leaders, special units, and features from the Civilization III: Play the World™ expansion."

The FAQ also notes that Conquests contains full multiplayer support over the Internet.

Conclusion? The original Civ3 plus the Conquests expansion contains everything included here in 'Civilization III: Complete'. Buy these seperately on Amazon and save money over this package.

Civ 3 Conquests fixes many gameplay problems in earlier versions, and should have been the first to see the light of day. Rather than continue issuing 'expansions' Fireaxis should have fixed these issues before the first release. Is it fair to pay extra to fix an incomplete program? You decide.

Amazon, please don't rip us off!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 22 / 37
Date: July 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Amazon, you're telling people who are interested in buying Civilization III: Complete to consider purchasing it together with Civilization III: Conquests expansion pack, and possibly offering them a discount if they buy the two together.

Civilization III: Complete INCLUDES the Conquests expansion pack! People who buy Complete should NOT buy Conquests as well!

Improvement?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 26 / 69
Date: March 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

If you loved previous Civilizations, and would love to play the newer, more improved version, then please don't buy this game.

I have beat this collection on the Emperor difficulty level. (I play CIV II on Deity difficulty every time, and I always win) But I am not pleased with my accomplishment on the Emperor level of this game, especially when considering my experiences on the next highest difficulty level.

The most important thing to consider when buying this game is this: Do you want the game to be challenging strategically? Or do you want the game to be pure number of units vs. number of units?

I recently played a few games on the difficulty level above Emperor. I noticed a consistent streak of my units, when attacking computer units in the beginning era of the game, to suffer loss after loss, regardless of unit variables. The streak was so completely biased in favor of the AI, that I decided to check it, by reloading the game a few times, with the random, or should I say "random", seed retained. In the three tests I did, I had archers going against the spearman of their one city. In the three tests I undertook, I lost these many units: 7 archers in Test 1, 9 archers in Test 2, 9 archers in Test 3, before I won a SINGLE BATTLE, and furthermore, the AI had CLEAN SWEEPS of my attackers, measured by hitpoints, at a ratio of 8 to 1.

The Archer unit has an attack value of 2.
The Spearman unit has a defense value of 2.

I witnessed ridiculous streaks of 15-20 hitpoint battles won in a row by the AI.
I have rarely seen such streaks of success by my defenders, upon being attacked by the AI, when I had the HIGHER defense values, including "bonuses". I have NEVER witnessed such streaks when my units had the same defense values as the AI attacking units, INCLUDING the situations where I had defensive "bonuses", and all of my observations were on the difficulty levels of Emperor and below, which discounts the theory that what I have experienced was because of the higher "difficulty" level.

In other words, their defenders, on supposedly defense-free grasslands, in supposedly defense-free towns, without the defensive bonus of city walls, beat my attackers, in three separate reloads, 25 to 0, with me scoring a few hit points, and with their defenders clean-sweeping my attackers (the AI winning battles without losing a hitpoint), at a ration of 8 to 1, before I took out their FIRST defender, who had the same defense value as my attack value.

This game is a fraud.

The designers of the game, in response to several message boards, presenting similar studies as above, posted on the longest running Civilizations fan-sites that exist, such as Apolyton and CivFanatics, swear that the AI does not gain any battle advantage on any difficulty level, much less the higher ones.

Guess what?

Their lying.

Test if for yourself.
Waste whatever money you have on this collection, or the other previous incarnations of this game.

Go right ahead.

TURN-BASED ANCIENT-WARE!!! BEWARE!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 251
Date: October 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Before PCs had the horsepower to deliver a real gaming experience, turn-based games were a handicapped alternative.

Sure, it's more like a board game such as Risk. If you want THAT, play a board game with friends. This is frustrating, boring, and lacks everything modern gamers expect. Don't waste your money. Buy instead: Age of Mythology (Titans), Age of Empires II (Conquests), Warcraft III, or even the fun-ware Medieval Conquest, which is brand new, glorious 3D rendered, and only $20 bucks, or Sim City 4 for an alternative experience. In comparison, I wonder why anyone would finance a turn-based game nowadays.

Since it has gotten such rave reviews, I thought I would give Civ 3 a try, although I turned down the original Civilization for the same reason. Turn-based games are like 5.25 floppy disks. So yesterday, totally like Q-Bert or Pac-Man.

I installed Civ 3 one night, removed it the next. I'll either give it away, or throw it in the trash as money wasted.

Get with the times, Sid. Turn-based is like a *real* modern game in stop motion, with little interest. BORING!!!!

Very disappointed gamer. Beware!!!

Saturday Night Live skit.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 94
Date: May 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

GOD: Hello.
SETTLER: Hi.
GOD: Settle a city.
SETTLER: I wanna move another turn.
GOD: Well, then you'll have to wait for another 250 years.

EMPEROR: Oh, I'm in debt. Let me go to cheat mode.
GOD: Cheaters never prosper.
EMPEROR: But I have to sell another of my city's improvements every 25 years!
GOD: Cheaters never prosper.

I mean the above monologue to be PROPHETIC of the game.

disappointing at the least

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 77
Date: March 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

after all the reviews, i was looking forward to a good graphics game. i though i was back in the early 80's. i kept waiting for a space invader to pop out. premise is good, build and conquer, but thats where it stops. have been playing rome:total war and was looking for its equal or better. this ain't it.. not even close. also after playing railroad tycoon 3 vs locomotion, ill never buy another sid meier game. thought about buying pirates, ill stay with port royale. the 1 star rating is only because i had to put at least 1 in for the review. save your money.

Seriously terrible

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: January 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

First things first:

First, as Mr. Dusel pointed out, this is just Civ III plus Civ III: Conquests. Conquests includes Play The World, so in a sense there is only one expansion. I myself posess Conquests and the Civ III Game of the Year edition or some such nonsense, which has a few extra maps and the map editor.

Second, as someone else pointed out, the computer cheats to a ridiculous degree on even the moderate difficulty levels, and it is the worst kind of cheating, because the computer will turn away numerically and statistically superior units in preposterous streaks of wins while your own units infuriatingly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory time after time. This is the game's single biggest flaw, and it is, in my mind, unforgivable. In short, the Civilization I problem of phalanxes turning away battleships is back, (although as ships can no longer attack land units in the normal fashion, that's not literally true).

Pros versus Civilization II:
More units (slightly)
More logical tech tree
Settlers auto-management improved (though still annoying in that the computer has a particular way of management which isn't always the most efficient)
Unit animation is cute the first time you play
Bombardment was a good idea, though it's been implemented in too many units and is a time-consuming process with large numbers of units, and is too hard to do effectively
Easier to move unit groups, pathfinding improved somewhat
Resources are a smart idea
More sophisticated diplomacy options
Civilization-specific units
Cultural value a good metric and asset
Detailed scenarios

Cons:
Flagrant computer combat cheating to the point of ruining the game
Geographically large states still almost invariably win (personal issue, but I think this should not always be the case)
Unit animation quickly becomes annoying and useless
Time consuming end-game armies
Corruption plagues all states regardless of government. While some corruption is understandable there is no reason for a state to become unmanageably large in the late game
Bombardment wastes time and does nearly nothing (cheating computer again?)- on a related note the single most aggravating bug is the non-functional coastal fortresses, which only attack during the player who owns the fortress's turn; the computer consistently circumvents this by bombarding and retreating, acknowledging the bug and rendering the fortresses useless.
As mentioned by others, resource placements often screw the player over from the get-go. Furthermore there is little motivation to trade an opponent strategic resources like iron and oil, so the unfortunate player is doomed to defending against battleships with arrows because there is no iron or oil on his entire continent.
Computer sees resources (indeed, the entire map before it is explored) before it gets the tech to do so, further tipping the scales against the player
Diplomatic AI is miserable
No way to force the computer to respect borders (computer players will build pointless, obstructive cities in isolated places within your territory and constantly cross over your borders and will declare war if you ask them to remove their units, yet regard your units crossing into their territory as cause for war.)

Do not listen to the cheerleaders writing reviews here. The computer DOES cheat (and I don't understand how anybody could not see this), the odds are frequently stacked overwhelmingly one way or the other, and the computer cannot negotiate in anything like a rational way. This is a truly awful game, because it can suck you in for hours only to crush you when you realize that you had no chance to begin with. Deeply flawed and pointless. Civilization II is much better.

Complete waste of time...almost.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 22 / 55
Date: November 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I tried this game when it was first released with many bugs and found it almost unplayable. Then I downloaded the patch and things worked fine, but it seemed that the game was biased against me.

So I sold that copy and forgot about this game until this version came out. I figured that after all this time and feedback they must have fixed this game or tweaked it a bit at least in the gameplay area, but I was wrong.

This time I played the game very well only to get to the modern age and find that the only pool of oil is halfway around the world and one of the other "superpowers" has it. The opponent then builds tanks, which I can't, and destroys me after I've wasted (oops, I mean invested) many hours of gameplay.

It seems that you either:

1. Become a complete fanatic and study the fan sites and discussion boards and learn the specific peculiarities of the various civs and wind up playing it for years. (In other words, put in the time required to complete a law degree at night but rather than a new career you've got civ geeks you can chat with.)

2. Realize after playing for so many hours that the whole soundtrack is playing and looping in your head that the game is still flawed. It could have been tweaked a bit just to make it reasonably winnable. (Like, maybe distribute resources something like they are in the real Earth, with oil in a number of different continents.) But, the people behind the game didn't, and they got your money again, and you sell the game used and recover most of your money before the next version of this game comes out -- which it now has with apparently lots of bugs -- so I'll wait a year or two until it's fixed and buy a used copy and try again.

And, you correctly guessed that I chose option 2.

So, it's a five star fun game that could have been great with a little more fine tuning, but ends up being an exercise in futility.

can't play

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 89
Date: August 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Newly purchases CIV 3 Complete was installed on newely recieved exchange pc for my hp Oavillion on which ieasily played cciv3 Gold and Conquests.replacemen per warrantee from Best Buy is a Gateway 507 GR does not play Civ 3 and conquests. I gave Civ 3 and conqeest to my niece who now enjoys them on her emachine. I purchased Civ3 complete assuming as it was a newer product any dificulty wihth the cheap intel chipsets Best Buy and Gateway are providing woulld have been worked out. in stead I have a brand new product on a lemon of a pc and can get no satisfaction from Best Buy or Gateway or Atari.

How I have come to hate this game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 17
Date: February 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

It was not engaging and I often lost -confused and frustrated!

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