I never liked CivIII. I dunno why, honestly, I loved II and for years it was a constant presence in my HD when I was a kid and teen. III never sat right with me. The cartoony art, the "settler race" nature of the early game push, the boring doomstackish combat, the shit boring AI, etc. Honestly, only reason I ever touched it was to play the Fallout Mod, which was damn good.
IV would be pure perfection if it didn't run like ABSOLUTE DOGSHIT in modern systems, due to being an old-ass implementation of Gamebryo and full of other third-party programs and code that is simply OLD AS FUCK. Game suffers from massive performance and memory leak issues. Its doesn't even have 64-bit support.
Also, let's be frank here: IV was a good game, yes. But the truth is, IV exists mainly as a modding plataform. Nobody plays IV vanilla.
If those problems somehow went away, it could easily become the most absurdly epic civilization game ever. Imagine bigger-than-huge worldmaps with over fifty civilizations, ultra-detailed maps, giant tech-trees, vast barbarian hordes, etc etc. Considering how modabble IV is, the sky is the limit. Or would be, IF the engine was not ABSOLUTE DOGSHIT.
So, what this thread tells me is just to play Alpha Centauri instead? Sounds good.
The truth is that a good chunk of innovations in the newer civ games since SMAC is pretty much porting SMAC features.
Like Sociological Engineering -> Civics in IV.
Makes you wonder how Firaxis developed III after SMAC. Hard to believe it was the same developers.