Civilization III: Play the World Add On

adding eras
setting diplomacy between civs for scenarios
events timeline
AI scripting

None of these are in CivIII, and they're not in PTW either. So you if you want to create scenarios, e.g. for WWII, you're scuppered.

But let's look at what the XP does bring. You ge 8 new civs, each with an era-specific, animated leaderhead and their own Unique Unit. Unfortunately, it looks as though the new leaderheads are based on the same 2 or 3 stock models, with only skin-deep differences. The Celtic, Viking and Mongol leaderheads, for example, all have the same facial bone structure and their faces move in the same way for the different facial expressions. A bit cheap, if you ask me. There are 2 new terrain sets, one for winter terrain and one for european terrain. However, you will find yourself not using them. They are somewhat specific, and seem more suited to scenarios. Ironic really, when historical scenarios are impossible (see above).

Multi-player doesn't work. It's as simple as that. There have been 2 patches released already, with a 3rd released in the US and about to be released here soon. Owners of the European copy can't use the US patches because they use different CD protection schemes (SafeDisk and SecureROM respectively). Even after the 2nd patch for PTW, multi-player still wasn't playable on anything other than 2-player games. I dislike duels, because there's no cut 'n' thrust diplomacy, which is what Civ is all about. Not only that, but even with just 2 players, the lag after only a few cities were built was 6 seconds, which is rediculous - particularly for games with a ping of only 290. And this was after 2 patches - out of the box, you can't even get a multiplayer game to start up. Which is all a bit pathetic. Incidentally, you can never have more than 8 players in a MP game, be they human or AI. Not only that, but the specialist game types are rubbish, they never leave you enought time to do what you want, and you will always go back to good old turn-based.

The biggest benefit of Play The World is the mod-swapping capability, called the Search Scenario Folders. This lets you install total conversions of CivIII without havig to rename your original files. Absolutely essential for modding, as I'm sure you'll agree. It's this feature alone which pushes this review above 2 stars.

Play The World also installs an Extras folder in your CivIII directory, which contains various WWII infantry and tanks, as well as Feudal Japan units. The Japan units are great, and you'll use them a lot. The WWII units are perhaps less useful, often being flavour units of each other. So you have American, German and Japanese fighter planes, American, German and Japanese infantry, etc, etc.

Play The World also contains fan-made content, such as a reduced-graphics version of the Double Your Pleasure mod, TETurkhan's Test of Time scenario, SnOoPy's terrain graphics, etc. However, these can be downloaded free of charge from varous websites - so don't buy this product for them.