[Fyron]

Most can not be modified, as they are fundamental problems with the game code...

The AI cheats way too much. The various AI civs have no problem finding ways to trade their technologies with each other. As soon as one gets a new tech, most of them will have it within a turn or two... They will always demand far more from me than what a tech is worth. If the game was fair and they demanded the same things from AI civs, they wouldn't be able to get new techs to each other so very quickly. Additionally, it has happened maybe 50 times that when I am building a wonder, circumstances will have it that an AI civ completes the construction of that wonder exactly 1 turn before I would have completed it. There is no way this could just be coincidence, due to the fact that it happens with such regularity...

The entire nature of the combat system is just... wrong. They should have stuck with the Civ 2 system... 16 attack strength units should almost never lose against units with 3/4 defense, yet tanks frequently are destroyed by _pikemen_ and _musketeers_. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense... And don't bother with those absurd arguements that the units could have modernized weapons and whatnot. They do not. They are pikemen and musketmen. They have pikes or muskets. Further, the bombardment system is just absurd. 40 bombers bombing a city and doing maybe 2 or 3 points of damage to units in the city and not even destroying a single building or any population doesn't make any sense... Such problems can be ameliorated by increasing the values of more advanced units, yes, but they will still occur...

Spying is useless. It costs so much gold to perform that it is completely impractical. There was nothing wrong with spy units...

The idea of armies as stolen from Call to Power was nice, but very poorly implemented. Actually, the more I play CTP and CTP2, the more I realize that Civ 3 is very little more than ideas stolen from Activision... so much for the "genius" of Sid Meier...

The lack of anything added in Civ 2 Test of Time, other than animated units and terrain, is just appalling. Civ 2 ToT is the pinnacle of the Civ line (the "official" Civ games, not CTP). The expansions for Civ 3 didn't even add anything new, they just added features that should have been in the original but were cut due to marketering pressures... Yeah, let's charge 50 + 40 + 40 for the game, without adding anything new in those expansions... good idea.

One of the most glaring ommissions from the Civ 2 ToT features is the lack of a good events system. This greatly reduces the possibilities in creating mods and scenarios...

Another annoyance is the lack of the 4-map feature of Civ 2 ToT. It was really fun playing mods where you have up to 4 different "worlds" or "layers of the world" in a single game...

The use of resources in Civ 3 hurts the game more than it helps it. Sure, it might be realistic to not be able to progress past stone/bronze age units if you don't find any iron (aka North America pre-Columbian age), but it sure doesn't make the game any fun to play when you have no units available after spearmen for a huge portion of the game just because you have no iron... At least allow weakened Versions of the units that require special resources!

The necessity of building cultural facilities to establish a border of your empire is, quite frankly, absurd. It leads to the AI sending streams of settlers through the gaps to colonize cities in small pockets of "free land", which by all accounts should be within your borders, but are not due to not having enough "culture"... Because everyone knows that to claim territory you have to have plenty of religious organizations, museums and acting troupes...

Oh yeah... and one major problem is the idiotic move of making the data files _not_ editable in a text editor. You have are forced to use the clunky "scenario editor" to make mods... ugh.

I am sure there are plenty of other things I have forgotten, but that is enough ranting for the time being...