Sid Meier's Civilization® III Complete

I will rate all games 1 star, when confronted with unavoidable "rate this game" pop ups in the GOG client.

Move on, nothing to see here. AI is not balanced yet. I hear IV onwards is worth our time, maybe I'll check them out. It's so tantalising, it NEARLY works... oh well.

It's from that weird time in gaming history during the early 2000's where game developers thought "no one will every want to play this in a window, fullscreen all the way baby" That's it, my only complaint, there is no windowed mode, but 'tis a big one, as I'm confined to a laptop with no second monitor for the next forseeable future, and I need to be able to do other stuff during the day. Civ I (DosBox), II (Test of Time patched), IV (GoG) and V (steam) all have proper "windowed-mode" options While you can hack this into a "not totally fullscreen" mode, you can't move or minimize the windows I know this probably isn't something GoG can or would fix, it's not built into the game, it was a feature of the previous game but was deliberately removed for this game by its developers, which strikes me as "odd" for lack of a more polite term

Civ I's greatest flaw was that diplomacy was designed to be against the player, and all AI factions took full advantage of it. Civ II balanced diplomacy somewhat, but added an unnecessary explosion of unit types with overlapping purposes. All Civ III needed to do was thin out that herd a little. Instead they made diplomacy even more predatory towards the player than in Civ I, locked all AI factions in an unbreakable alliance against the player on the very first turn, and gave the AI free reign to cheat like all get out EVEN ON THE EASIEST SETTING. No matter how large you make the world and how few factions you allow it, it is guaranteed that all AI factions will be within two turns movement of wherever you build your first city. The AI is allowed to cross your borders anytime, build cities in adjacent squares to yours, and steal your resources with outposts without declaring war. If you complain, send a single unit over their borders, or try the same predatory tactics, it's instant eternal war to the death and all AI factions instantly have an infinitely renewable number of troops right on your border ready to steamroller over your empire. No defense will keep them out, and any attempt to assault their cities results in the instant destruction of all your troops. Any time you come within two turns of completing a wonder, the city building it instantly goes into unrest, giving any or all of the AI factions two turns in which to start AND COMPLETE the same wonder before order is restored. AI factions will always be richer, happier, larger and stronger, and there is nothing you can do about it. Barbarians are "Rampaging" regardless of what difficulty setting you choose for them, and are capable of creating infinite stacks of troops to slam your cities literally hundreds of times per turn until they are destroyed. I loved the Civ series until this one. I will never touch another Civ game again after this one. What a waste of time, money and goodwill.

GOG is garbage. B.S. site advertise game for $0.92 on sale from #3.69 regular price. Yet game is $5.99?!?! Explain that one to me. It's NOT on sale and is 50% higher than full list price!! GOG is garbage and on principle will NEVER spend even a dollar here EVER