When people write to us or tell us about their most memorable Civ experience, they usually talk about the first time they built up a powerful military force or built a really cool unit and crushed another civ. Focusing on your military strength is always a lot of fun and a very successful strategy in the Civilization series. It's a concept we have a lot of great new ideas for in CivIII and we'll be telling you more about them as time goes on. In addition, we're focusing on new concepts that will provide players with more interesting pathways and directions to explore. In CivIII players will be able to build powerful civs by creating a strong cultural and art base, or by developing and protecting trade routes that can carry precious resources to cities, or by being a savvy and respected diplomat. These concepts all played significant roles in shaping and defining some of the greatest Civilizations in history and will now be an integral part of the gameplay in Civilization III.

We're also working on easy-to-use customization tools that will provide players with many options to create their own individual and unique civ games and share them with other Civ fans. We're excited about the possibilities to build a stronger online Civilization community - one that promotes and rewards cooperation as well as competition.

Civ has always been intuitive and easy to understand for strategy fans. Weâre now working even harder to make Civ a game that can be easily played and enjoyed by both casual and avid gamers. We're streamlining some of the more complicated information screens and simplifying the interface so that everyone can easily and effectively manage their civs. Civ III will continue to offer an experience that is easy to get into but provides as much depth as a player would like.

It's been a lot of fun for the team at Firaxis to take a fresh look at a game that has been very successful and to build on it with a lot of new interesting gameplay ideas and concepts, along with updating the look and feel of the game with a completely new graphics engine. We've got some of the best talent in the industry working on the game, including many of the people who helped create Civ and CivII, and we've been greatly assisted and energized by the support and suggestions from the gaming community. We look forward to giving you the most fun Civ game yet!