Played it, but while it's good I didn't think it was great. Normal mode is way too easy, hard mode is only for the more experienced players. Food cap at 90!? Seeing as units cost a lot more food in W3 than in W2 that means smaller armies. And guess what? That makes heroes more powerful. Yay.
I know they tried by using the costs 1-5 food approach to allow more units of one kind than another, but whilst the undead are supposed to have strength in numbers you can only achieve that by raising skeletons. How hard is it to just raise the undead food limit?
Another nice touch: upkeep. Realistic, yes. But does it have to take 60% off your income?
Speaking of which, what's with only five miners at one mine at a time? Can't they just dig another shaft? I mean, you can have a hundred... no wait, ninety peasants or wisps or whatever harvest lumber, but only five mine gold per mine. With most things costing more gold than lumber, that kinda slows you down, doesn't it? If you have to play it that way, ditch the lumber and concentrate on gold in full. Which means more workers per mine or simply more mines.
At least the units themselves are nice and diverse, although you don't want to try and use the editor. It's better than most, but sometimes you can't do the most basic things. Why can you only model a new unit on an old one, heroes on heroes, flyers on flyers etc.?
I haven't even started on the storyline yet, but I think that was already handled quite nicely.

Despite all that, though, the game's still better than a lot of other games you see today. And it's certainly improved over W2. After all, there you could only select nine units at a time, and in W3 they upped it to an unbelievable twelve. A whole three extra models!

Without sarcasm, don't let me dissuade you from buying a copy. It really is quite good despite some shortcomings (it may even be that they came to mind because there's nothing worse to say).
Blizzard may just need the money ;)

At least they should have made the upkeep %, the max amount of units and the max amount of workers per mine be editable when making custom maps. Then people could balance it as they and their friends wanted when they played online.

Ah, the map editor...
Another great feature which is easy to use. Until you want to do more than plonk down a couple of orcs here and a satyr there.
With a bit of experimenting it's not that hard to get a basic grip on the trigger editor, which is really quite good.
The sound editor, on the other hand, happens to be a bit more complicated than neccesary, and the unit editor is a disaster. You can change coulour (roughly), damage and names without problem. Try abilities and you're treading on dangerous ground. Undead can't use orc abilities, for example, no matter how hard you try. If you base your new unit on certain models, there may not even be an abilities option. changing the sound is well nigh impossible. Trying to make a flyer a ground unit not only makes it move with no animation, but also puts the selection in the wrong place. Giving any model the root ability crashes the game.
And why can't you see the effects of items in the items list through a simple toolbar popping up?
Try making a 'button' to open and close a door once, then destroy the door and try opening it again. Just to see what happens. Brilliant.
And then the upgrades. In the W2 map editor you could set gold, lumber and oil costs for each individual upgrade, as well as the time to research etc..
I'm missing this in the W3 version, where you can only use Blizzard's settings.
Well, at least there's a decent trigger editor.

While i myself don;t have WarIII , i have played it a couple of times at my friends house and it IS great. The movies were mindblowing and the campaigns were amazing. While i myself haven't finished it yet i'm sure the ending will be great not because the ending IS great but all the hours of playing i spent on it have finally paid off for A ending is the aim of any game.

X marks the spotty dog