[LLB]

Atrocities,

My experience with CivIII was surprisingly similar to yours, but we seem to have come to slightly different conclusions. I too shared my starting continent with the Brits. After several hundred years of a mutually profitable trade relationship, Elizabeth broke it to attack with swarms of ground units. I too had more cities and better technology, and I too was losing. (What was worse, Elizabeth managed to enlist just about everyone else in the world in her cause of exterminating Evil Me.) When I lost three elite Knight units trying to kill a lone regular Spearman defending unfortified in open terrain, I too almost lost it. Ridiculous!

After I cooled off, I took a closer look at the combat system. It turns out that, like the earlier Civ games (though to a lesser degree), the combat system strongly favors quantity over quality. The benefits of higher attack and defense values are just not as great as their numeric values might suggest. This means of course that defending cities with small numbers of high quality units is a prescription for losing cities, and attacking with small numbers of high quality units is a prescription for losing a war of attrition in very short order.

Despite being a little slow to realize all this, I did manage to exterminate the English and achieve a rough stand-off parity with the rest of my opponents, although it cost me about 40% of my cities and took about 500 years. In the process I discovered that some subtleties in the game that weren't initially obvious (similar to your experience, and mine, with BOTF). Some of these subtleties include the use of terrain on defense, the use of bombardment units, and the use of the better mobility of the more advanced units (and your own transportation net, which, unlike in earlier Civ games, your opponent can't benefit from) to create local firepower superiorities.

My point here is that CivIII could definitely have been a *much* better game, but like BOTF I think it does reward some patient effort. After your frustrations have cooled a bit, you might want to give it another try before giving it to Goodwill. Just a thought.

L.