Interesting game, but can get repetitive

I bought Civilization III Gold Edition at Best Buy for 30 bucks. I have played it for several months and have begun to tire of it a bit. However, I did enjoy learning it and it is a novel approach to this type of game. Civ III never crashed and seemed very stable.

Controls: Controls are pretty simple, just point and click. There is an inset map window that I found very useful and helped to cut down on scrolling around the world. Menus were sometimes confusing, Figuring out how to build an embassy if you don't do it when the game suggests is a bit of a chore. Click on the star on your capital.

Manual: Civ III comes with a thick manual and I needed it. Luckily it is pretty comprehensive and fairly straight forward.

The Basic Game: It took me a while to understand how strategically to play the game, but I got the hang of it pretty quick. Essentially you must balance the happiness of your society with scientific advances, defense and conquering others in order to win. If you don't keep your citizens happy they may rebel or defect. In the end you can win several ways including non-aggressively through diplomacy. However, the most satisfying way has got to be rolling your army into an opponents city. There is little strategy to the battles and it really comes down to who is strongest. There is an RPG element so you may not win every battle you are strongest in, but you will win most of the time.

Graphics and sound effects: Graphics are good in Civilization III. The animation is big enough to see what the various characters are doing and still see a large area of your country. Sound makes the game more enjoyable and Civ III has plenty of sound effects from booming guns to water splashing off a ship’s bow.

Requirements: Minimum system requirements are Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Pentium II 400 MHZ chip, 64 MB RAM, 1.2 GIG of HD Space. I was way over minimum requirements with an AMD2200 chip; 512MB RAM and loads of disk space, plus high end graphics and sound cards. This is not a particularly demanding game from a graphics point of view.

I enjoyed this game for several months. I enjoyed building up my cities and conquering neighboring countries. You must learn a fine balance (just like the real world) depending on what your form of government is and how happy your people are. I found it easiest to be a communist and move up the technology ladder as fast as I could. However, in the end once you conquer the world a few times this game begins to get a little dull. I found that I had selected particular units or cities so often I knew exactly what they wanted and where they were on the map. This is my chief complaint with this game. There are other items that seem a bit rigid in the game. In the research mode the web to get to a particular technology is linear and really should not be. I will agree that building a nuclear submarine without knowing how to sail is unreasonable but there should be more flexibility and more technologies in general. In the end I recommend it. It was fun but it didn’t last.