civilization iii comes out on october 30th. there's interview with jeff briggs and sid meier on zdnet. the screenshots look pretty, but i'm a little surprised they went back to the squares-with-bumpy things for mountains instead of using something like smac's three-dimensional surfaces. (i still love smac, but there's so many little things about the gameplay and interface i wish i could tweak. i wish firaxis would follow the lead of id and open-source their old games.)