I don't know about the dedicated Civilization fans, but 3 was the only version I played.

I didn't play it much, but when I did I'd play for 6+ hours at a time. I'll check this out later tonight, and might see if I can find the old CD and get the original running.

Ooof, good luck. Civ3 copy protection was intense. I had to get out my old Win2k disk and stand up a VM. Attempts to rip an iso will be complicated by the fact that they deliberately wrote bad data to the disk. All of this is surmountable, but unless you enjoy a very particular kind of fun, you may prefer to spend $2 on GoG.