Civ III Civilization Rankings

As overanlyzed before, here is an attempt to rank the best civilizations in Civilization III Complete based on how I like to play.

I like religious civilizations, I like to work towards Writing right away so starting with Alphabet is a bonus and I like defensivly strong Unique Units that are available as early and with as few resource requirements as possible. Lastly some Civilizations are more enjoyable to play or fit my ancestry or world views better.

The recent score is the one I got while making this table, it may not be my most recent score and I may have to keep updating this assuming I continue to play Civ III and update my blog.

The civilizations not in the table are not necessarily not worth playing, but the above are the best civilizations to play as a peacenik builder with an emphasis on religion and culture or at least that has been my experience.

Having played a lot of games of Civilization, Colonization, Civilzation II, Alpha Centauri, Civilization III, and Civilization III Complete, I’ve lost a lot of games, far more than I’ve won because I like to try out the different options and methods of winning. In losing so much I’ve built up some animosity towards some of the other civilizations. In the original game the worst AI neighbors were Shaka Zulu and Josef Stalin by far. In Colonization I continued my hatred of the Spanish which was a hold over from Pirates!. Civilization II didn’t change all that much, though perhaps they removed Stalin from the game. Not surprisingly, there has never been a Hitler or Hirohito though both Germany and Japan have been the game many if not every single time.

Alpha Centauri may be the best of all the Sid games and I wish it was fully ported to Mac OS X and it is deserving of a sequel. I didn’t enjoy being neighbors with the Believers, I never played as them. The Spartans and the Pirates were not the nicest of neighbors but they were fun ideologies to play. The aliens were not nice neighbors to have and I’m not sure if I ever got around to playing as them.

In Civilization III after many losses, I think the Romans are the most aggressive. I play as a lot of fertile crescent civilizations so I see a lot of them. The Zulus even the Mongols don’t seem to attack me as much as the Romans nor do they seem to do as much damage, the Impi aren’t so powerful and the Mongols don’t get their Keshik till much later.

I’m still in the process of finalizing the order of the top eight civilizations, but I’m pretty sure these are the eight I do the best with:

• Celts
• India
• Carthage
• Greece
• Babylon
• Byzantium
• Japan
• Iroquois

I spent way too much time playing and blogging about Civilization III. I also spent a lot of time playing Civ V but less time playing Civ IV. Now I may play Civ V some more as I’ve yet to buy Civ 6. I am once again unemployed so I am updating, editing and improving old blog posts

This entry was originaly posted on July 20th, 2006, it was last edited on March 15th, 2019 and is filed under: Gaming and tagged: Civ III, Sid Meier's Civilization, Video Game Strategy.