Sid Meier's Civilization 3: Conquests

In my opinion, this is the best game in the genre of global strategies. And the best in the CIVILIZATION game series.

The game is very addictive, you can forget about everything in the world and be surprised to realize that it is already morning and it’s time to go to work. However, the gameplay is very slow and can take a couple of days or more to complete the campaign.

The quality of graphics for strategies is not very important, 2D graphics do not spoil the gameplay, and the isometric projection is very informative.

There is no plot in the game, you create the story yourself, so the replay value is high.

The game interface is intuitive, it doesn’t take long to get used to. There is a lot of micromanagement, the empire is growing, there are more units, more orders are given, the time of one turn increases noticeably. Unfortunately, you cannot combine units into a group and give them the same type of orders. It is possible to create an “army” of several soldiers, but this requires a “leader” unit, which appears randomly after the victory of the elite troops. An army can be created by a city, but slowly, very slowly and subject to many additional conditions.

It should be noted that the economic component is too simplified. The principles of strategy are violated, the balance is upset. You can build almost all city improvements, wonders of the world and some units without having any strategic resources. And no resources are wasted! They simply must exist, although sources of resources may disappear due to depletion! New sources of resources can be opened to replace exhausted ones. There is no production of any goods or services in the game! You can’t even redistribute food between your cities to avoid famine!

Sound effects and music are done averagely, but this is not important.

Playing online is not for global strategies, it's too slow.

In addition, some situations in the game may not be clear to beginners. Where to found the first city? Where to found other cities? How far apart are they? How to improve the landscape? Why are my soldiers losing the battle? Why is the AI ​​player annoyed? Why are AI players declaring war on me?