Normally I'd whine about how Conquests is inferior to PTW, but I've thrown in the towel, and will finally advocate Conquests.
Conquests has a few nice features. Agricultural is an overpowering trait, and if you play for score, is one of the traits you *must* have.
Seafaring is very cool, and when combined with the Great Lighthouse, makes for great island maps.
The new armies are very nice as well. It's a shame the AI doesn't ever build any, but if you don't mind using a unit the AI will never use, make extensive use of armies. With a fully healed army, you can waltz through the AI's territory, and pillage resources, disconnect the capital, etc, without ever being attacked.
Corruption is different. I miss the old FP, but you'll soon learn to live with it. Make sure you patch to at least 1.15, as in the original unpatched game, the FP makes corruption worse. For a large/huge map at higher difficulty levels, Commercial is a trait to consider for the corruption benefits.
Industrious is slower. Almost to the point of being a useless trait, especially now that slaves don't get the Industrious bonus. I used to moan about this, but again, I've learned to live with it.
The only thing about Conquests that really gets my goat is the Shift-D change. In PTW, Shift-D brings up the diplomacy window, making it very simple to quickly talk to multiple civs, which is essential when you're trying to make trades between civs, etc. Now, Shift-D is both the diplomacy window AND Automate Clear Pollution, which means that if you have a worker selected, at best nothing will happen, and at worst, you'll send a worker running off automated to clear pollution. Why they would map Shift-D to both of these actions is unknown, especially as Shift-P (the logical pollution choice), is still mapped to Clear Pollution. I'd love to hear the reasoning behind this change, and is really the only problem I have with C3C anymore.
As I said earlier, I used to whine and moan about Conquests, but it has grown on me, and so I'll tell you to get it. You can find it for under $20 in the US, so it's a decent deal.
No seriously it is a good game, well worth the money (I would think that, I didn't have the misfortune of buying PTW though).
