You know there are no stupid questions.
Just stupid people.
Haven't installed civ3 yet myself, but all home/budget PCs bought 2 1/2 years ago lack RAM. All of them. Add it now, you get 512MB quite cheap these days, although W95 might not be able to take full advantage of that much.
I would suggest an upgrade to Win98 Second Edition. Don't know if it's still possible to buy that, but it should not be impossible to borrow a copy. Best practice would be to do a full fdisk, format and install, not just upgrade. If you dare.
A third good option is to get a new video card, at least if it's stuff like map drawing/movement that is slow. Most non-custom PCs came with horrible video cards some years ago, low on video RAM, with terrible frame rates. For such an old PC, I wouldn't spend much, though. Buy the cheapest you can find, just be sure it has at least 8MB RAM. Newer PCs should have 64MB video RAM.
Answers to CornMaster's question would surely help finding a solution.
C.