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A great game I don't normally play video games, but I'm a huge fan of Civilization 3. Too huge in fact - it's a real problem for me. I find myself skipping meals when I play this game. Civilization 3 is my favorite of the Civilization series. I think the zone of controls concept is natural to the gameplay, and the ability to have cultural takeovers of other cities is fun. Some of the oddities and cheapness of the previous versions have been removed - it's not really possible to build every single wonder, for instance. I hadn't played the game in a while, so I decided to get this complete package when I saw it at the store. However, the several years of updates have really hurt this game. The problems haven't been addressed - most notably, the diplomacy AI is terrible, and the endgame, with its emphasis on large amounts of indivisual military units, is so ridiculously slow that I can still only rarely make it through without quitting, frustrated. Instead, the main change is that resources are much more scarce. These recourses are essential to the progress of your game. However you have no way of knowing if you'll have, say, a coal resource somewhere in your map, until you've already been playing for 5 hours. If the scarcity was a matter of instigating small military attacks on your neighbors, or heavy diplomacy, that would be fine. However, this weakness plays off the game's other weakenesses. Often the necessary resource will only be available halfway around the world. Launching a military attack is so ridiculously slow that it isn't worth the time even for the most addictive player (that being: me). And the diplomacy AI is so worthless that other empires won't trade their essential resources even when you throw ridiculous sums of money and technology at them. Anyway, it's no fun to play for hours and hours before you find that your game is a lost cause due to the map you were given. Also, the expansion disks are (to my mind) worthless. So I'd strongly recommend just buying the earlier editions of Civilization 3, which are much cheaper.