The Revolution will be Reviewed from the bargain bin

Setup.exe

Sid Meir’s Civilization IV Colonization is a remake of the original 1994 game using a heavily modified version of the Civilization IV game engine. I never played the original game so this was a new premise for me. It’s a turn based strategy game where you micro manage the colonization of the new world on behalf of the European power of your choice (France, Spain, England or the Netherlands). Your ultimate goal is to build your colony into economic self sufficiency and complete a revolution to gain independence.

Before you can get to that you of course have to install the game and get it to run. Which reminded me of how annoying this aspect of PC gaming can be as getting it to run on my machine required quite a bit of googling, installing a Microsoft DirectX patch and configuration. To be fair I didn’t play it on a gaming rig as I’m using integrated graphics and 64 bit Vista. I got it to work but I was never able to completely resolve a flickering issue with the menus.

Game Mechanics

You start the game with a ship and two units near the coast of the new world. The units and the ship vary slightly depending on your European heritage. Your first task is to establish your first settlement. Unlike other Civilization games any unit can establish a settlement. Each tile on the map when worked yields varying resources per turn such as food, ore, cotton, tobacco, sugar, lumber, fur, etc. Your settlement’s city square is automatically worked.

You can also put colonists on the eight squares directly adjacent to the center. The population of the settlement is limited to the amount of food gathered though you can import food from other settlements. You can also assign colonists to buildings in your settlement which will consume resources to produce manufactured goods for example a tobacconists shop consumes tobacco to produce cigars, a blacksmith’s shop uses ore to produce tools and a weaver’s shop uses cotton to produce cloth. You also allocate the productivity of the town towards constructing: building upgrades to increase productivity; fortifications; or units such as ships, cannon or covered wagons (to move supplies). Manufactured goods can be sold in Europe or to Natives for a higher price than raw resources. You’ll need the money to: recruit colonists; buy cannon, ships, horses, guns etc; and hurry city production.

The new world isn’t all free for the taking; there are various Native American tribes with settlements as well as the other European powers. As your settlements encroach on their land they will become more hostile towards you and may declare war. Diplomacy is conducted the same as other Civilization games where you can offer and request items to trade such as your world map, open borders or defense pacts. There’s also some diplomacy with your King. Over time he’ll raise your taxes, and make other lump sum demands. When he raises taxes you have the option of having a tea party where you give up the right to trade a commodity to Europe to avoid the tax. He also increases the size of his army based on your rebel sentiment.

If that weren’t enough you also gain political, economic, religious and military points which can be spent to acquire founding fathers. Each founding father grants a unique bonus to the colony. Once a founding father is acquired no other colony can obtain them.

The ultimate goal is to win independence before your rival European colonists do. In standard speed, you must declare independence within 300 turns. You can’t declare independence until you’ve raised your rebel sentiment above 50%. This is done by assigning colonists to produce liberty bells in your settlements. You’ll also need to be sure to produce enough guns, horses, cannon, and ship of the line to defend yourself. After you declare you have 100 turns to defeat the King’s expeditionary forces. Unfortunately for you his military units are better than any you can produce, though you do get substantial defense bonuses.

Multiplayer

There’s quite a few options for playing multiplayer: LAN, internet, direct IP, hotseat, and even play by email. I was particularily interested in it because there isn’t a whole lot of interaction between colonies. In fact, a sure way to lose the game is to get into a prolonged conflict that wears you down preventing the buildup required to revolt.

Conclusion

A typical game can be broken into 100 turn increments consisting of: exploring and establishing your colony; building up production and trade routes; preparing for the war of independence; and then hopefully crushing the King’s army or less hopefully getting slaughtered by it. Most of my games led very peaceful pre-revolution lives. But managing the logistics of the colony is satisfying enough I didn’t miss the conflict. A standard sized world full game takes about eight hours to complete, which feels about the right length. It is disappointing when after investing your time into the building phases you start a revolution and get wiped out, but that can’t be helped with this kind of game.

Being a remake, it reminds me of the range and creativity of the PC titles that came out of the early 90’s before first person shooters came to dominate the industry. It offers a novel experience both in terms of subject matter (how many games can you think of with this time period?) and game mechanics. By playing you can’t help but gain a shallow understanding of colonial economics (though slavery is notably absent) and warfare. Unfortunately it doesn’t delve into greater historical detail. I would have enjoyed for instance when gaining a founding father a famous quote and skip-able short bio. The civiliapedia (in game help) offers some of this but it’s not really presented in game.

As a product it didn’t always meet my quality expectations. My setup and graphic flicker problems are demonstrative of the Wintel experience. Back in ’94 I would have happily reconfigured my config.sys and autoexec.bat just to get it to run, but now I expect games to just work. Of course, I don’t hold Firaxis accountable for this though it did hamper the experience. I do hold Firaxis accountable to some other issues I ran into. There were times where I would have to repeatedly try to click on a unit before being able to select it. In one game I had a pioneer that refused to build terrain improvements. Then there’s some UI annoyances like there seems to be no way to select a unit in town so that it’s the active unit in the world view. And it can be difficult to distinguish between the different ships when zoomed out. And I’m not sure if this is intentional or not but you’ll likely need more guns and horses than your settlements can store. Therefore you have to build and park galleons and wagon trains full to accommodate the excess.

Despite these issues, Colonization is a decent strategy game. Though it’s not as fun to play as Civilization it’s a novel experience worth the bargain bin price.

Rating: C+