Ah... civ3... i read reviews on gamespot.. apparently its split into 2 groups... those that say its excellent, or those that say its pathetic.. =)

i think overall, its not bad, definitely an improvement over civ 1 and 2...
i think the biggest change is in the art... the stuff look nice and theres actually animation as they move around and fight..
quite fun to see the first couple of times...

then of course there'r the new features, like resources and culture...

resources r a new thing (which i havent seen in civ-like turn-based games much) where to build a say, swordsman, u need iron..
so u need to find iron on the map and then build a road from it to a town.. then _that_ town can build swordsmen...
one funny thing is that if u link all ur towns together with roads, one source of iron allows every town to build swordsmen...
perhaps thats y resources can run out after some time... but i think its quite random...
then of course there'r luxuries too... if u link silk to ur town(s), they'll have more happy ppl...
the same weird thing happens.. one source of silk can make all ur towns get 1 extra happy person...
and luxuries dont run out...
the thing bout strategic resources like iron and oil is that they dont show u where u can find them until u actually research it..
like if u research iron working, then iron appears on the map...
some ppl complained that they cant plan their cities' locations becos of it, but i think its actually quite good...
cos it creates a need to build cities in weird positions like deserts just in case saltpeter (for gunpowder) is there, since saltpeter forms on deserts and some other terrain piece...


diplomacy is quite weird... u have an advisor whos _very_ accurate..
he'll say "they'll be insulted by our proposal" and stuff if they wont accept, to "we're getting closer to a deal" until finally "i think this proposal is acceptable"..
so u can keep experimenting with deals (w/o actually offering to the comp player yet) and reduce the amount of gold u offer until its just nice...
supposedly, the comp remembers stuff u did and will not trust u if u betrayed them in the past..
but i havent really noticed much difference from alpha centauri, other than the fact that comps dont go around boasting "we've just developed so-and-so tech, and have begun production on a X-X-X, so we're practically invulnerable"
when u actually have a X^2/X^2/X^2 unit for example =) they dont boast at all anymore =)

culture is another new thing they added... as u build "cultural" stuff like temples, colloseums and stuff, u generate culture each turn, and when u reach cultures of 10, 100, 1000 etc, ur country borders increase...
and if ur town is close to an enemy's, and ur culture is very high, the enemy town may convert... when i played my first few games, i kept converting computing towns...
so fun... but when i played at the 3rd or 4th difficulty (avg difficulty), it was irritating, cos after i conquered a town, there would be resistance..
then if during resistance u have civil unrest (when # unhappy ppl > # happy ppl) there's a _very_ high chance they'll convert...
and the worst part is all the soldiers in the town will just disappear! i had to load many autosaves just cos of that...
and also the weird fact that if i removed all my soldiers from the town that was gonna convert the next turn, it wouldnt convert... weird!

another very weird thing is that combat is unbalanced... a 1/1/1 warrior can kill a 5/3/1 knight if hes lucky enuf...
of a 5/3/1 knight with 5 hp can win a 1/2/1 unit with 3 hp, with only 1 hp left at the end... if its a 5/3/1 with 5 hp against a 1/2/1 with 4 hp, u can lose! its weird...
[Ed: It's called probability. It's possible I can get D for Economics S without studying, but very improbable.]

besides all the negative points, i think overall its still very fun... all the need to do is tweak corruption rate (its _really_ bad now)
and make combat a little more balanced perhaps... julian sez combat probly wont be tweaked cos civ has always been like that... but i dunno...

another thing bout civ3 is the requirements! they say a 300mhz is enuf, but on my 550mhz, it crawls quite a bit (scrolling takes ages)
and i check my task manager, my processor was running at 90+%!!!
i never had a game take up so much cpu b4... and theres no big gfx, not much apparent thinking done either... i really wonder wat civ3 is doing with my processor...
moving a unit (during my turn) from one square to another takes 3-5s sometimes... but instant at other times, so its really weird...

on julian's 900mhz, it runs _very_ well.. so again its quite funny... everything else bout our comps is more or less the same...
besides the slow speed, i think overall its not bad =)

Fuzzy rating: 3.5 Rats out of 5...