Sid Meier's Civilization® III Complete

Civ III has a few things that I loved and many things that I hated. For starters, the game always had resource balance issues and map seeding issues. If I played on a Pangea map, I would always get stuck on a small island by myself. If I played continents, I got stuck in a place that had no resources. I had no iron, no saltpeter, and no rubber, so I was always attacking with spearmen when they had swordsmen and musketmen, and had to wait to get riflemen before I could become competitive militarily, if only for a short while when the AI could build infantry. This just created an ultimate sense of frustration that any game I played was unbalanced in the AI's favor. The things I absolutely loved (that I wish they still did in modern Civ games) were palace building and leader portraits. Building your palace was amazing. Creating a single style or mix-and-matching was awesome. It was an improvement over the Throne Room of Civ II. I also loved that the leader portraits during diplomacy evolved with the tech age they were in. For example, if you were in the ancient era, all the leaders were wearing animal skins. In the classical age, they wore togas. In medieval era, they wore armor, and so on and so forth. It created a unique and immersive experience that Firaxis has not matched since, even with the "realistic" avatars in Civ V and the cartoony realism in Civ VI. I wish that Firaxis would take the time to put in little improvements like these into their newer Civ games. All in all, I don't give Civ III a high score, although I can see why many people liked it. On that very rare occasion when I did get a good starting spot with balanced resources, the game was a lot of fun, almost as much fun as my penultimate Civ game, Civ II.

Civ 3 is the best in the series, period. Civ 2 was great as well, but it didn't age well, and honestly Civ 3 made a lot of improvements over Civ 2 when it comes to some gameplay mechanics. All the Civ games that came after #3, however, got waaaaay too cartoony looking for my tastes. I think Civ 3 has the best "style" of graphics in the series. I've put thousands of hours into Civ 3, and it never gets old. The reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because there are a few annoying things about the AI. The trading system is unbalanced (as in, other countries will want you to give them like 5 things in exchange for one thing). Also, countries get mad at you for no reason, and the game doesn't tell you why. One other annoyance is the randomness to combat. I don't think a spearman or an archer should ever be able to defeat a tank... but it happens sometimes thanks to a random number generator. Besides those few complaints, it's still a very fun and addicting game, and I highly recommend it to anyone that likes 4X strategy games.

I never played this at the time of release despite loving the first two Civs. Coming to it almost 20 years following release I found an excellent base game, but with some balance issues. The default settings mean the first half of the game is far harder than the second half. All the AI's advantages are frontloaded to the start of the game. It is still entertaining, however.... The editor that comes with the game is simple to use and incredibly versitile. You can tweak settings to effectively make the strategy game that you want to play in terms of difficulty, game balance, game speed. Pretty much everything is customisable. That is without going into the full blown mod options with customised units, graphics, settings etc. Multiplayer is superb, but with a couple of minor bugs. GoG version with the basic download (not using Galaxy) works perfectly on XP despite being listed as needing Windows 7. Civ2 is possibly the best game I played growing up, but I will never play it again because Civ3 is that good.

I found on several forums that to play Civilization III on Windows 11, you had to edit the 'conquests.ini' file and add two values ​​(preferably before launching the game): KeepRes=1 PlayIntro=0 Good luck

Civ 3 improved so much over civ 2 and remains my favorite game of my all-time favorite series. Pros: Military upkeep is mostly in gold in this game, leading to larger centralized armies and less micromanagement than civ2 . Unlike later civ games, there is no happiness penalty for having too many cities, so you can have a huge empire in civ3, that is not possible in later civ games. Map editors allows you to write your perfect scenario. Cons: Diplomacy and trade sucks. Trade is one-sided and you need to sell all your techs or you quickly will fall behind. Other civs move through each others lands freely, but if one of your worker enters another civs territory, they act like it is a war crime. Strategic resources add a lot of fun, but are scarce in this game. If you don't play a balanced map or conquer your neighbors, you will be missing one or more necessary resources to build a competitive army. Overall I highly recommend this game, best of all turn based strategy games. Civ 4 and Civ 5 added some good features that this game doesn't have, but this game was more way more fun.