The player must balance a good infrastructure, resources, diplomatic and trading skills, technological advancement, city and empire management, culture, and military power to succeed.

Each tile is made of a particular type of terrain that determines, among other things, how much food, production, and trade it produces when "worked".

This commerce is split up as the player sees fit between research, tax revenue, and luxuries, each with a different purpose.

Additionally, there are non-requisite technologies that nevertheless provide useful bonuses that are often essential for good empire management, or allow a civilization to install a new government.

The second expansion, Conquests, adds two new types of citizens to the game: Policemen (reduce corruption) and Civil Engineers (enhance building and wonder production).

As the city's culture rating increases, so does its sphere of influence, bringing more territory under the player's control.

If one player's culture rating is sufficiently higher than the other's, the former's borders will encroach into territory previously owned by the latter.

Additional defensive bonuses can be conferred by, e.g., certain terrain types, the unit's "Fortify" command, or defending across a river.

A Great Leader has the ability to create an Army or instantly finish construction of a building in a city, which made them particularly useful for completing wonders.

With respect to developing the cities within an empire, bonus resources may be found on tiles within the cultural borders.

Each type of resource may provide a bonus to food, production, or commerce if found within the city radius and worked by a citizen.

Corruption exists in Civilization III alongside waste, which decreases a city's productivity; together, corruption and waste represent the mismanagement of resources, the malfeasance of city-level bureaucrats, and the limits of a central authority's ability to manage an empire.

There are a number of ways to combat corruption which include building city improvements, such as the courthouse and the police station.

Small wonders like the Forbidden Palace and the Secret Police HQ also drastically reduce corruption and waste by acting, in effect, as supplementary capitals.

[2] Developed by Westlake Interactive and published by MacSoft, a version for Mac OS was released on January 6, 2002.

[3] In the United States, Civilization III entered NPD Intelect's weekly computer game sales rankings at #1 for October 28–November 3, 2001.

[4] Thanks to this debut, Civilization III became the country's fourth-best-selling computer title of October as a whole, with an average retail price of $49.

[5] In its second week of availability, the game was pushed to #2 by Backyard Basketball, and the Collectors Edition was absent from the top 10.

[14] Civilization III sold 550,000 copies and earned $21.7 million in the United States by August 2006.

At the time, this led Edge to declare it the country's 21st-best-selling computer game released since January 2000.

"[29] Two expansion sets have been published for Sid Meier's Civilization III: Play the World in October 2002, and Conquests in November 2003.

[clarification needed][31] Play the World was followed-up by Conquests, which offers nine more historical scenarios, ranging from Mesopotamia to WWII in the Pacific.