I got pretty bored with it pretty quick. I played Civ II a bit, and I was addicted to CTP for quite a while, and maybe I've just done Civ. If you haven't played CTP then Civ III would be great, as it does have some good features (culture, mainly, although trade diplomacy and spying are all also a lot better and the slight differences in the civs are mildly interesting. resources give you more strategic issues to manage. Oh, OK then, its quite a lot better than CTP. Combat and the interface itself I found worse but not by much).

but if you've played the earlier games the feeling of same old same old creeps up pretty quickly.

But as was said above for a budget game you can't complain.