Played my first game of Civ3 earlier, took Greeks on a chieftan level/4 civ/small map. It was much different than what I expected. It's going to take a while to get use to the attacking style that will have to be used. It's also going to be hard to wage war on a foreign island/continent unless you have 1. A city on it, or 2. the Battlefield Medicine small wonder, otherwise your units get ripped up pretty quickly.
I screwed around for most of the game, and then just built the UN a few years before the forced retirement so that I could have something other than a "score" victory (I got a diplomacy victory, I was elected head of the UN). I just got done messing around on a prince level game (actually it's not "prince," but I forget the name they gave it, and I looked in the manual and they had it wrong in there, saying that it was still "prince"). I basically got my butt kicked because I didn't expand fast enough and got sandwiched between the ocean, the Americans, and the Romans. Even on Prince level you have to expand quickly.. when I play another game tonight I'm going to try building 1 road and then adding my worker to my city to help produce a settler quicker (for those who don't know, you need a pop 3 city to produce a settler since a settler takes up 2 pop points)
I was a bit irritated how they had the overall interface set up. I knew it wasn't just a window like civ 2, where you could do all kinds of other things like icq and surf the net easily... but this is much much worse. I couldn't even alt-tab out of the game, and basically had to exit the game to do anything else (I got locked up after I came out of the game after the first time as well.) Overall I like it, and I'm sure it's gonna be a great game on MP. Happy playing.. and watch out for those raging barbarians... eek!