Sid Meier's Colonization

The Good
All the different things/ways you can play it. Each game is like a new game. Sound is not to bad.--Sid Meier classic. A game in my list of top 10 games ever played.

The Bad
The music, normal I like the music in games, but the music is the first thing I put of when I play this game.

The Bottom Line
I game you either love it with you whole heart or you had it.

The Good
This game looks and plays a lot like the designer's classic Civilization game. The difference is that while that game was won by expansion of your civilization and developing technology, this game is won by careful development of your cities and trade. This game is really more about economics than military conquest.

In Colonization you are given different types of prospective colonists with various skills (or lack of skills) and you decide whether to sail them from the Old World to the New. Then you have to get those colonists to where you can take full advantage of their skills. So you'd want to get the miners close to mountains and distillers close to sugar supplies, etc. You then want to arrange trade routes between your cities so you can get your raw materials shipped to cities that can then upgrade it to more refined and valuable goods. Ultimately you can ship your raw or manufactured goods back to the Old World for profit.

Eventually you will reach a point where you will declare independence and have to fight a revolutionary war. Your success in this war is heavily dependent upon how well you fortified your cities and built a strong, diverse economy prior to independence.

The Bad
To get your cities productive will require a lot of micro management of your cities. While I really enjoyed this at first. As I got better at the game it became a bit of a nuisance moving colonists around. I think if the computer could have managed some aspects for you it would have cut down on all the mouse clicking.

But the real sore point of the game is its frustrating combat system. In this game you don't really damage or destroy units, instead, when beaten, a unit downgrades. So after a battle a military unit would loose all its guns making it a normal colonist until you armed it again. While this fits the games focus on economics, it makes for fighting wars very frustrating. After a hard fought battle, unless you had extra troops to mop up the beaten armies they would retreat and return a few turns later rearmed with weapons. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that fighting the King's army is very difficult on the harder settings. I understand that it was made this way to stress the importance of developing your colony's manufacturing . But I think there could have been a better way to portray this in the game.

The Bottom Line
Despite its flawed combat system this game is quite addictive. You will have many late nights perfecting cities and trade routes as you prepare for independence.

The Good
A nicely woven trade context, you can harvest many different goods, process them to varying levels of refinement, ship intermediates between towns (like RRT) then trade them either back in Europe, with other Civs, or with the indians, to reap huge profits. It allows rapid expansion if that's your style. It allows temporary cities (build, then later dismantle) if that's your style again. You can fight others, or grow peacefully, relatively unhindered.

The Bad
It can get a little too peaceful, if you're not attacking anybody. You can go for 200 turns without a war, which is fine, if you like merchant/trade simulations. The military units never advance in technology, which is historically realistic, but a paradigm shift for seasoned CIV style gamers. The graphics are of course 1994 state-of-the-art, but that was amply sufficient for me, since the spreadsheet engine underlying the graphics is no worse than that of Civ 3. At least the AI doesnt cheat so much in Colonization.

The Bottom Line
DOS and Windows versions virtually identical, I play both (I find the interface more smooth in DOS. You settle and build cities like other Civ games. You can engage in trade and make money, or attack and rob the Indians and make money. You can get $100 for a good or $1000, depending who you go to trade with and what they need at that time. You can conduct shallow trade, with inexperienced workers right from the start and make a little money. Or you can go deep, develop the land, train workers to be specialists, and built industrial infrastructures, to make 5 to 10 times more money from trade. If you want to be peaceful, the AI pretty much can leave you alone to develop and grow peacefully, and build an economic powerhouse.

But there is ultimately a war you need to prepare for. The war of Independence, which you have to spend 200-300 turns preparing for, and to win it, you will need every cannon, every cavalry, and every fortification (and every dollar) you could possibly have built during those peace years.