I love this game! The AI isn't all that smart... up until you make a stupid mistake, like leave your capital open to attack, and then it's all over you. One thing it does know, though, is when you're about to have a runaway victory, and then it gangs up on you to stop you before you can pull it off. The key is to not piss everyone off for long enough to get everything into place before they all turn on you. It may seem annoying to have all of the AI players gang up on you, but that's totally reasonable! The only problem is, wars are usually all or nothing; they rarely wind down into stalemates that create peace. Once they start, they probably won't stop until they've conquered you. This game has it all. A multi-faceted economy that can be expanded meaningfully, technological research choices, battlefield tactics that, when mastered, provide substantial power on the field, diplomacy by monetary incentive, development of infrastructure, cutting off enemy supply lines, and even winning by vote. My favored tactic is to become an economic juggernaut; I do my best to monopolize the trade and stare off the AI players, peacefully annex the minors, and develop an economy capable of cranking out in a handful of turns what the rest of the world took the entire game to build because I starved them. Usually this leads to ALL the other players declaring war all at once, which gives the chance to put my economy and supply lines to the test. A hint: do not rely on naval supremacy to keep your economy going during war! Connect your resources by rail! Those clever bastards starved out my population by blockading my home port and I hadn't kept enough ships in defense of that because I needed them to conduct a massive invasion elsewhere. On top of the randomly generated maps, there are also several pregenerated scenarios that are very interesting to play.
Despite its flaws, it's still easily the best of the series, and still a game I enjoyed playing until I couldn't get it running on the new OSes. Everything that made the original good is multiplied here, without adding too much crap from the later games. It's manageable. It's digestible. It's uncomplicated. And it's got a lot going for it. I haven't played the newest one (the one where they left off the number), and though Sim City 4 came close to recreating the magic, even it and all its expansions didn't beat this one.
