I'll tell you how it compares to the SMAC manual It's worse... And IMHO it's pretty bad overall... Very vague on a lot of points and definetly written by a hardcore Civ dude who didn't consider that all people don't run around with all the Civ2 stuff in their heads...
It lacks a few things, has a few things mislabeled or with the wrong stats, things like that. But it also has alot of lists and thing, including a bunch of hotkeys and things that'll be of help. It is also exactly the same size as CivII's manual, exactly.
-FMK.
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The Civ3 book covers some items like beating a dead horse while breezing over (or even completly skipping) hard data. Think one of the reason they did that was while the book was being printed...the hard game data was still in quite a bit of flux (from testing and balancing and tweaking). More often lately on computer games the books are printed before the game goes gold. So they left out a good chunk of data either because the did not have to data to print and did not want to print what data they had only to become erronous because of final tweaking before the CDs were burned.