Hey sboog,
I invite you to have a look at the Civ 3 forum, which has just started to receive a wealth of new information on Civ 3. Indeed, it will be better - see the Civ 3 forum for details (eg. there will be things like the ability to construct armies, there will be resources (ie. you will not be able to build tanks without having iron), they have added the concept of culture and so on...)
The only bad thing is that they are keeping the 7 civilization per game limit
also present in Civ 2. If it annoys you, though, you can petition Firaxis about it in my long thread
.
BTW: It will be possible to turn off unique civs, so that should bot be a problem.