In the annals of PC gaming, one series stands as a tribute to human strategic achievement, and appropriately that series is called "Civilization." Created by Sid Meier in the early '90s and continued with its superlative sequel, the Civ series seemed lost to the sands of time when Sid and his compatriots abandoned Microprose a few years ago.

In the intervening years there were only "Alpha Centauri" (SMAC) -- a hardcore science-fiction pseudo sequel that left some gamers cold due to its lack of familiar historical backdrop -- and Activision's pretender "Call to Power" series. Now, after many years, "Civilization III" has been released from its original creator, and the game is as ambitious and compelling as its subject matter.

It would be a mistake to call "Civilization III" a mere update to Civ2. Behind the familiarity (and it is familiar enough to easily pick up if you've played the previous games) there are a remarkable number of compelling and often brilliant changes. The changes ensure that even Civ2 and SMAC veterans will have to change their playing style and bump the difficulty down a couple notches.

Changes
There are many changes. Settlers are now worth two population points and can only be used to found new cities, while the new worker units are used for improving terrain. New victory options include the familiar Conquest and Space Race wins, as well as new ideas such as the diplomatic, cultural, or dominance victories. The science tech tree has been streamlined, there are now fewer technologies overall to research, and key techs must now be researched in order to progress through four distinct ages.

This pipeline effect prevents players from targeting and gaining superunits and improvements before it's reasonable for them to have them. It also streamlines the military units. You'll find units such as archers and riflemen useful for a longer period of time.

Challenging warfare
Warfare has been made more challenging with realistic concepts such as war weariness, which causes unhappiness, particularly in representative governments, when you lose military units or allow enemy units to ravage your terrain. This makes warfare untenable and unsustainable in the long run. Also, your military now costs money, rather than city-specific production and support, which makes more sense but can also break the bank if war is prolonged.

Both these changes make peace more attractive than war, which goes a long way to address Civ2's and SMAC's typical dissolution into warfare in the late game. A new diplomatic option includes the Mutual Protection Pact, which in the later game can make war undesirable. This is good, since a small border skirmish can quickly evolve into a full-blown world war.

Game roots
The game is still about founding and nurturing cities, and several changes highlight the importance of the rise and dominance of massive cities. As your population grows, citizens will automatically work the surrounding squares harvesting food for growth, shield symbols representing raw production power, and coins representing trade.

Your tax screen spans the empire. It's easy to convert cash into science production or into luxuries to make your people happy. New corruption rules effectively limit how many cities you'll want to found, as a massive metropolis can be more efficient and effective than several smaller cities.

Culture
Cities also generate culture. Culture is the single biggest change to the Civ dynamic, as a powerful culture can seduce enemy cities away from their empires. Culture is gained by building libraries, universities, and religious institutions. Your culture rating even affects your borders -- the more culture you have the more squares you can gain. As noted before, you can even win the game through the prominence of your culture.

Each Civ also gains a special unit that gives it advantages during specific eras in the game. For example, the Romans can exploit their early legionary unit in the ancient portion of the game, the British can use the man-of-war during the preindustrial era, and the Germans can make the most of their Panzer tanks in the modern era. If you want an even playing field, just turn off these advantages.

Trade overhaul
Thankfully trade has been completely overhauled. Instead of moving caravan and freight units as in Civ2, each Civ gains resources based on what's within their borders and connected by road or railway. These resources can be traded with other civilizations or used in your own cities, automatically.

Special resources pop up, lottery style, when you gain the required technology. Discovering iron working reveals iron deposits in the hills and mountains, while nuclear technology uncovers uranium. These resources can be traded in the revamped diplomacy screens.

Too many screens
The new diplomacy innovations are mixed. Each civilization is headed, literally, by a portrait of some famous figure (Elizabeth, Abe Lincoln, Chairman Mao, Joan of Arc, Caesar). The new diplomatic model promises depth by allowing all kinds of wheeling and dealing, but the new system is often confusing and also extremely exploitable.

After playing for a short time, all the mystery is gone and you can manipulate your rival fairly easily. It pales by comparison to the more sophisticated but less option-ridden model used in SMAC. Worse, there are too many screens to click through and you'll spend a lot of time simply calling up and checking to see if the enemy can offer you something new.

Many small annoying problems
This leads to "Civilization III's" many small but annoying problems. There's a strange lag when calling up information screens. Some of the screens lack important information. And some fast computer users are reporting an inordinate amount of lag between turns.

The excellent manual and civilopedia are missing key bits of information, like hard details on how to conduct espionage, which indicates these options weren't finished at the time of the game's release.

While the artificial intelligence is fairly strong, particularly for so complex a game, it's predictable and hampered by its drive to expand at all costs. For example, if you leave a piece of land clear, the game will eventually sneak a settler there and found a city. This leads to maps peppered with sprawling unconnected empires, something the Firaxis team claimed it was trying to avoid. It also makes even the large maps feel small, as every bit of land is claimed and settled by year 100 AD.

Corruption seems to be overused as a balancing device. Cities far from your palace are too hampered, making them all but unusable. And the difficulty level in the game seems almost cruel, making even games on lower levels such as chieftain and warlord too difficult.

Lastly the tone of the game has shifted from Civ2's and SMAC's deadly seriousness to something that feels less respectful. The leader portraits are whimsical, even when angry, and they're written to say often-stupid things. Elizabeth bemoans you interrupting her milk bath, and Gandhi invites you for vegetable curry.

The often inspiring Wonder movies from the earlier games have been removed and replaced with dull screens -- hardly a suitable reward for building a massive and influential landmark. The endgame features the losers with bruises and the winner with lipstick kiss marks while the talking heads spout oddball lines such as "We really mowed your lawn" and, worse, the incredibly tired cliche, "All your cities are belong to us." Ugh.

The whole endgame is a letdown. A warrior swings a sledgehammer on a carnival "strength game" to show your score at the end -- not a satisfying reward for a 10-plus hour game. Less compelling are imitations of Civ2's stately power graphs, and of SMAC's fast-moving replay feature.

But the maps and units are beautiful and superbly animated. Combat is particularly fun to watch as the units fire or strike at each other until one crumples to the ground. The entrancing music and compellingly complex but accessible gameplay are still unparalleled, making minutes transform into hours as your nights are dominated by the story of your civilization. Remember back in 1050 AD when the Aztec jaguar warriors cowardly attacked Persopolis? And then you fought them off with your new knights, thereby buying time for that great city to build the inspirational Sistine Chapel? Or that time in 1946 when Aztec tanks rolled into your capitol city of Berlin, thus spelling doom for your poor German empire? Yeah, all that and more await your own personal rewriting of human history in "Civilization III."