Sid Meier's Civilization® III Complete

I've been playing this game for 25 years. I was 11 when my mom got it for me at Costco. I have played 1237 hours just in the time I've had it on Steam, maybe 2-3 years. So yeah, it's pretty good. I mostly play for the exploration/settlement aspect, or to conquer everyone on Chieftain mode. Sometimes it's fun to play a huge Pangaea map with 0 other civs, and make two cities really far from each other. Then try to protect the road between them from raging barbarians. Ha ha. I had no idea this game has mods, time to try some out.

Pick it up when it goes on sale. Overall not bad for an older game.

This, IMHO, is the best of the civ games. The rest have been continuingly dumbed down to the point of where they are no longer fun to play, Civ 7 takes control away from you and makes you play in Ages whether you are ready to start again or not. With civ 3 with some excellent mods, the game takes on awesome proportions allowing hundreds of cities and thousands of troops and STACKS! you can stack your troops! they took that away in the later games and just killed conflict. As a gamer in my 60's who has played this game from the begining, I keep coming back to 3 because it lets me have fun

One of my all time favorite games. Well worth the cost of a latte! Seriously wish it was supported on Mac-IOS!!

Very addictive "one more turn" gameplay burned through many hours. Still find myself regularly going back for another run.

The newer Civilization games have more complexity and sophisticated features. However, I feel Civ3 has the best overall gameplay and fun.

Gameplay didn't age well, and takes a lot of tinkering to get running on a modern system. The claims that Civ 3 has the best gameplay of the series are flat out wrong. There are several arbitrary and needlessly punishing mechanics, like stacks of 8x barbarian horsemen that can spawn right in front of your settlers that can essentially put you in an unrecoverable state. UI is old but serviceable once you get the hang of it. Moving units can be a little clunky, it's easy to forget a unit making a multi-turn move or a fortified/sleeping unit. This game is also quite difficult to get running on a modern system. Unless you played this when you were 10y/o and really have the rose colored glasses for it the later games in the series are better in basically every way. Not worth the hassle in 2026.

Peak Civ3 experience is looking through old forums from 20 years ago trying to figure out how to add custom music. Also playing a 2 year-long send-by-email game with your cousin who got called up to the National Guard halfway through the game and had to take an 8 month break.

Game is years old and I still keep coming back to play it. Its probably my Favorite Civ, even though I love the later editions as well.

Great game, really enjoyed it, Challenging but very addictive, when you lose you just want to jump straight back in and try again.