Civilization: Colonization
For Macintosh from Aspyr, $29.99 as digital download
Civilization's new chapter
Civilization IV: Colonization brings a new twist to the civilization building genre of games. Previous Civilization titles had you starting your game in 6000 B.C. having not even discovered the wheel yet. In Colonization you get to start quite a bit later than that. It is the age of exploration and you’ve been sent out by the king or queen of your homeland to build a colony, and send the riches of the new world home to your countrymen.
In Civilization IV: Colonization, you take the role of omniscient governor of your colony. Using the top down world view, you move your settlers and soldiers around like pieces on a game board. Created by the gaming legend Sir Meier, developed by Firaxis Games, published by 2K Games and brought to the mac by Aspyr, it continues Sid Meier’s great tradition of turn based strategy games utilizing an interface and graphics package that will be familiar to anyone who’s played any of the other Civilization games, especially Civilization IV. While I wouldn’t exactly call it a sequel, even though it’s a stand alone game and not merely an expansion of Civilization IV, it’s more of a Civilization mini-game, focusing on one era and expanding the micro-managing potential exponentially. The overall goal of the game is to eventually declare independence from your motherland and fend off the inevitable attack from them. Fortunately, it’s not a hard thing to convince your fellow colonists to join you in, as your king or queen will be constantly raising your taxes and simply demanding gold from you. You can refuse the payments and anger the king, but refusing tax increases causes your colony to have a “resource party”, like the Boston tea party, only with the appropriate settlement and resource name in it’s place. One that I experienced was the Quebec rum party, which doesn't sound half bad. The consequence of throwing this party and refusing the king’s tax increase is that you can no longer trade this resource with Europe.
To the business of building
The gameplay if Civilization IV: Colonization itself is very similar to Civilization IV, in fact it looks nearly identical on the world view screen with only a few additions necessitated by the greater depth of this title. It uses most of the same graphics with some new additions for all the new specialized units that were introduced. The game map is divided into tiles, usually containing one or more resources for you to harvest, such as food, lumber or cotton. Unlike in Civilization IV where all resources are gathered from any tile that is ‘worked’ by your citizens, in Colonization, only one resource can be extracted at a time. This gives you the opportunity to set up that perfect chain of resource harvesting to meet all the goals you set or self, or, if you’re not the micro managing type, you can set all your workers to automate themselves based on a list of resource priorities you set.
One of the big differences is the abundance of civilian units available to you in the form of resource specialists. These units will increase the yield of terrain squares or your manufacturing buildings. The best part about all of these units is that any of them, including your soldiers, can build a new settlement. No more long 20+ turn waits to build settlers in your cities, just grab anyone from the settlement, reassign him as a colonist outside the settlement and move him to the new location you want to build on. This is probably one of the best features that they added to the game. Quick expansion is useful in Colonization, since your settlements can only extract resources from the 8 tiles immediately adjacent to the settlement itself as opposed to the potential 20 you had in the normal version of Civilization IV. On top of that, you can only harvest one resource per tile, unlike Civilization IV and previous tiles where all resources were extracted from any tile that was being worked by a citizen of a given city. You will need to expand if you want to become an economic juggernaut.
Grow, Damn you!
Once you have your colony started you have several ways of growing your population. The first is similar to Civilization IV, harvesting food and stockpiling it. The second is to recruit more colonists from Europe, which gets more expensive with each colonist you recruit. The third and final way is to send missionaries to set up missions in native villages. This will cause natives to be gradually converted to your nation which is much easier violently capture barbarian cites in Civilization IV, another great addition.
Double clicking on an individual settlement will take you to the screen that allows you to direct the actions of that settlement and it’s citizens. This is the Settlement screen. On the settlement screen you have the ability to assign your workers to work specific resource tiles. Some units, such as indentured servants and converted natives, are much better at working resource tiles than they are at manufacturing, so keep that in mind when your assigning workers. Also on the settlement screen you’ll be able to see all the buildings in that particular settlement. Most of these buildings are your manufacturing centers where you turn cotton to cloth or furs to coats, for example. They need to have citizens assigned to them in order to work as well. Some units are manufacturing specialists, who provide greater output for the resources given to them, so you’ll want to assign them accordingly.
Another important part of the settlement screen is your list of resources. It shows you how many units you have a given resource or product and indicates in green whether your current work assignments are producing an overflow and red if you are using more than you are currently gathering. When it comes to raw materials, unless you have a lot of cargo space to ship things back to Europe with, you want the net production to be zero. This is because the manufactured products are worth so much more than the raw materials themselves making it more worth your while to only export your manufactured goods back to Europe. The settlement screen is also where you assign the building products for a settlement. This can range from walls for the settlement, to upgrades for your manufacturing buildings, to ships for you colony’s defense and to be able to export greater amounts to Europe.
The settlement screen is where you will do most of your micromanaging. You can control every single citizens individual assignments if you want. I’ll warn you ahead of time, I don’t play these kinds of games for the micro managing. Luckily for me, there’s a fair bit of automation available. The default setting for a new citizen joining a settlement automates it to get the most out of it’s abilities, even if this means you’re producing more than you can store. You can also automate the focuses of a given colony, you can tell them to avoid producing a certain good if you want. However, there’s more than a dozen resources and manufactured goods you can have you settlement avoid or focus on, so the automation doesn’t save you from too much micromanaging.
Micromanaging and beyond
This brings me to another big piece of micromanaging: the trade system. In Civilization IV, all cities connected by a road or body of water automatically share their resources. If one city is mining coal, then every city connected to it automatically has coal. Colonization is different in this respect. Roads only make travel go faster between settlements and trade must be performed by manually loading up wagons, or ships if your settlements both have water access, and moving the goods there. Ugh. But there is hope, you can automate trade too. But it’s not without it’s tediousness. Like the production emphasis/de-emphasis options there are also automation import and export options which again, have to be set on a good by good basis. Ships set to perform trade automatically will also take goods that are set to be exported to Europe to sell, if you’re still able to sell them and if another settlement doesn’t have it flagged as import. Unfortunately, The system can be hit or miss, if you don’t have enough ships, they may go back and forth to the same colony taking one good to europe, while another settlement goes unattended and it’s goods simply pile up and start being destroyed as you run out of space. Another area I found the trade automation falls down is when dealing with other colonial nations. You can sell all of your trade goods to both the natives and the colonial nations as well, but you can’t automate it. If you do want to trade with your local natives or your colonial brothers-from-another-mother(land), you will need to do everything manually.
You’re not alone in the new world however. The other imperialist nations of Europe have colonies too, which you can interact with. The standard Civ IV options are there, open border treaties, defensive pacts or declaring war. You can also negotiate defensive pacts with the Natives, though they ignore all national borders so open borders treaties don’t exist. Since the real race in this game is against your homeland in Europe, I found the other colonial nations to be extraneous. They didn’t add much to any of my experiences, since I wasn’t vying directly with them for resources(even the standard map is huge!) there was no real reason to ever interact with them.
When you first land, the natives will welcome you and offer you gifts, but over time they will begin to be upset as you expand your settlements. You will be forced to either buy land from them or anger them or even go to war with them later on. Natives are also a useful source of specialists, missionaries are able to go and live with the natives to learn their skills, though each native settlement will only teach one specialization. Natives will also buy your resources off of you, which can come in handy if europe will no longer buy a particular good from you, though you can still trade it with natives and other colonial civilizations. However, their money is not infinite, like Europe’s is.
There are very few combat units in this game but then again, you can get by without any fighting until the very end. When you do declare independence from your homeland, they will send an expeditionary fleet after you. In order to win the game you have to wipe out their ground forces. Make sure you build up walls and forts around your settlements and regularly recruit your excess population into soldiers. It’s also a good idea to keep large stockpiles guns on hand to do some last minute recruiting when the expeditionary forces arrive. Unfortunately, the ships you’re able to build pale in comparison to the strength of the mighty armada that the expeditionary force sends to quell your rebellion, so building a navy is only really useful if you decide to declare war on your fellow european colonists.
Colonization comes with two randomly generated map types, The New World which is more abundant in tobacco and furs, and The Caribbean which is more abundant in sugar. The rest of the resources seem balanced between the two. There are also 4 scenarios that let you play on terrain that mimics North America, South America or the entire western hemisphere in two different scales.
All Civved Out
All in all, it’s another game in the Civilization series, which I enjoy greatly. You will too if you’ve liked the previous ones. I still prefer the grand world-building gameplay of Civilization IV and it’s expansions to the amount of micromanaging you need to do in Colonization and if you use a lot of automation in your Civilization games and steer away form individual city management, this game’s probably not for you. But if you’ve been looking for a game which gets into more detail than the original or your just an enthusiast for the time frame in which it’s set, you should definitely give this game a try.
