was about to play civ3 online with a friend when we realized it doesn't have multiplayer. WTF is going on? Why doesn't it have it. Civ2 had it.
are they going to make a $50 multiplayer version in a year?

"are they going to make a $50 multiplayer version in a year?"

I heard that's a possibility. Don't know about the price though.

The original release Civ2 was not multiplayer. A later release did support multiplayer gaming.

I know your pain! When I found this out I was unhappy... but they did it before... why not again?

Had they implemented multiplayer, chances are you would not have seen the game until the coming holiday season. Much like what was said before, Civ2 originally did NOT come with multiplayer and it took a while for the multiplayer edition to come out.

Civ3 is a good enough game to survive without multiplayer in my opinion.

I agree. I played the original Civ 2, and never picked up Civ 2 multiplayer.

I played Alpha Centauri, which had both single and multi-player. The problem with multiplayer was...

Play-by-E-mail takes so damn long... and it is difficult because of game lengths to play at one sitting an online game.. and then getting all the people eb ack together at the same time to continue...

Playing online could be fun, if you can set it up right.

I have been playing Civ3 for a while now, and I have to say... What a tough game! I'm still trying to get a good hang of it at the 2nd difficulty level...

Firaxis announced that the game would ship without multiplayer before it was released, and this wasn't too big of a surprise. Good multiplayer is very hard to do on a turn based game...and according to Firaxis they are trying to come up with a workable solution. Who knows what that might be, and if we'd have to pay for it or if it'll be patched.

Personally, I'm not interested in multiplayer for the game. I tried Alpha Centauri multiplayer and never finished a game. In "real time" games we'd eventually poop ourselves out after 6 or more hours. In email games, somebody always ended up dropping out after a while. Plus you kind of lose track of things when after a month only 30 turns have gone by.

Overall, I prefer turn-based strategy to real time. However for multiplayer, I much prefer real time because I can sit and play a full game in less than an hour.