A classic which holds up surprisingly well and avoids the Civ-style end game lag. The ability to select your level of play is nice going from a sandbox simulator to cut-throat economic competition depending on your mood. If you're a Mac or Linux user, it runs flawlessly under Wine. GOG hasn't packaged it up unfortunately so it's still some assembly required but I had only one inconvenience in the entire process: the GOG setup installer crashes *after* installing the game but the actual game ran great.
The design is nice with a modern feel - clearly inspired by the classic games but nicely polished and some of the more repetitive micromanagement removed. I didn't mind the combat changing as much as others, since a pausable real-time system moves faster than turn-based and avoids some of the cheesier abuse of a turn-based system. Unfortunately, I've hit multiple UI-locking crashes where the game got into an unresponsive state and never unlocked. In some cases it just hung in the map view when running a turn; in others a dialog partially rendered but appeared to have hit some sort of bug in the animation system where it didn't finish painting and there was no way to unlock it. In my longest game this appears to be irresolvable – reloading from the save causes different but similar hangs. (I'd give this game something in the 3-4 range if it worked; left it at 2 because there's a chance that this only affects the Mac port or low-end hardware)
