Customer Reviews

Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

As a disclaimer, I love Civ IV, and have loved every game Sid Meier has done to date, including the original Colonization. So it's actually quite painful for me to give this game such a dismal rating.

In a nutshell, the game is horrendously flawed. When you start playing it (and this is where I think most people are reviewing the game), it appears to actually be quite fun - you develop an economy, trade with Indians, make heaps of money, expand inland, build huge trade networks which make even larger heaps of money, reinvest the money into buying specialists who can refine your raw goods and produce *even more* money, and so on, all with a rather simplistic military system strapped on to allow raiding other colonies or stealing their cargo at sea.

The problem is, NONE OF THIS MATTERS. It's an awesome economic sim, where economics has nothing to do with winning the game. In fact, the larger and more successful your colony is, the harder it is to rebel, and the larger the expeditionary force you'll have to defeat to successfully win Independence. And successfully declaring Independence is the *only* way of winning the game, and you have to do it within 300 turns, which means that most of that uber-colony management stuff that makes it so great should never get used if you're trying to win the game.

In fact, 90% of the game is useless if you want to win. You basically have two options in the game: 1) Play it like a colony building sim, and trade and make lots of money, but lose, or 2) Win, but ignore all the economic stuff that makes the game great.

The problems are manifold - Independence can only be declared if you have "liberty bell production" at a certain rate, per person in your colony. All of your colonists (including your army, and people out building roads) count against this, but you can only have three units per city producing liberty bells. Even with every single one of my cities producing maximum liberty bells (with a Founding Father bonus, newspapers in every city, and three Elder Statesmen specialists in every town), I couldn't rebel. In fact, my Independence counter slid backwards, since my colony was doing great and expanding rapidly, all of which counted against the ability to go into rebellion.

The only way to win is to keep a small colony (or have lots of small cities) and burst liberty bell production - another screwed up mechanic is that the longer it takes you to rebel (i.e., the total number of bells producted), the larger the Royal Expeditionary Force gets -- and it grows exponentially. You can literally be making no headway (or going backwards, as I was, since my colony was expanding) but the REF will expand exponentially until you have next to no chance of being able to defeat the thousands of units coming your way.

Contrary to all logic and common sense, this is how I could have won: in order to boost Independence to 50%, I could have just killed off all my colonists, slaughtered my specialists, and just had nobody left alive but statesmen and my army. Then, with my colonists all pissed off at the king, for whatever reason, since I killed their next door neighbors and crippled their economy, could have bursted Statesmen, hit 50% Independence, and steamrolled their weak military since I wouldn't have produced bells up until that point.

It makes no sense, and I refuse to play it that way. It's really painful to say, but Firaxis really screwed up royally when they developed the mechanics for this game. They set one goal to the players -- develop an economically successful colony -- which is actually counterproductive to the real goal -- declare independence and defeat the REF. As a side note - the way the original Colonization did it worked differently - the more money the King got in taxes, the larger the REF got, which actually made some sort of common sense.

There's plenty of other issues as well:
-There's next to no reason to be mean to Indians - they're like these fairy godmothers that give you free resources, train your colonists, and serve as massive sources of money.
-There's next to no reason to be mean to the other colonies. Since you can do everything you want in the game with 1 to 3 cities (and cities take up half the space they do in Civ), there's really no competition for land in this game. There's also no military victory; in fact, if you waste your time fighting the other colonies, you're pretty much guaranteed to lose the game. Worse, you have to pay your king off in order to go to war.
-When Indians like you so much (via a culture push) that they convert their cities to your cause, they destroy their city and all commit suicide. If that doesn't make any sense to you, you'd be right.
-There's exponential decreases on everything in the game - colleges train settlers slower and slower over time, churches recruit less and less people, taxes go up meaning you get less and less money, prices of cannons go up meaning you can afford less and less. It gets to the point where you say, "What's the point of it all?"
-City defense is pretty much pointless. While there's all sorts of things to boost your defense percentage while in towns, the REF has units which get 150% to attack towns, meaning that all that stuff is useless, since they just slaughter you in a town. What's the point of waiting 50 rounds to train a guy to be a fisherman in a game with only 300 rounds overall?

This game will continue to be deeply flawed until Firaxis or some fans come out with a patch for it overhauling the mechanics. IMO, it needs the following:
Complete overhaul of the REF / Revolution mechanics.
A bit more detail on the military units. Maybe allow buying Man O' Wars, or building forts, or capturing cannons.
Have money actually mean something.
Economic, Military, and Loyalist victory paths.
Fix the rather stupid Constitution process - most of the choices have only one answer that players are interested in.

Again, I'm kind of amazed at reviewing a Sid Meier game this low, but in essence, don't trust the high reviews of this game - most of them haven't played it enough to see how badly designed the game is.

I love the whole concept and set up for this game. I just don't think this game is very fun. Despite the name, this is a very different game than Civ IV with very different game mechanics, which is fine with me. But I would warn Civ IV players drawn to this game to wait until its patched or heavily modded. There are many gameplay failures in this game, but I will point out the overarching problem: you never feel like an explorer or colonizer in the 16th and 17th century. There's little freedom of action - the entire goal is ultimately to defeat the motherland's armies. To achieve that goal, you must play in a very boring and limited style. The open-endedness is just not there. There are no secondary goals, no interesting exploration, no wars with natives or other colonizers. Trading, a core element of the game, is a pain as well. Diplomancy is somewhat pointless. Building an empire is actually counter-productive. [The developers in a legit desire to avoid the unlimited spamming of cities (like in Civ 3) have gone insane. Civ IV handled this issue perfectly.] The forums at civfanatics.com discuss the gameplay issues in much more detailed if you are interested. I really don't understand all the glowing reviews - did the professional reviewers actually try to play the game several times through its conclusion? I doubt it. I'm holding on to my copy and waiting for the patch or a good mod. There's potential, but for now, I would not recommend this game.

I've been playing Civilization games for the last decade, and they never disappoint. Even the slightly lackluster Beyond the Sword has its selling points, and I eventually became fond of it. Colonization is no exception. It is a more regional, less 'world wide' game than the Warlords Expansion Pack (I spent WAY to much time for a few months making custom maps!), with an emphasis on cooperation early on, and then war making later. Staying diplomatic is not a very viable strategy late in the game.

Some may like the logical progression towards a war of independence, but it left me wondering why they didn't make it at least a worthy consideration to remain aligned with your home country. What makes Civ games so great is the ability to play out historical scenarios with new rules (What if Rome had never fallen, what Germany had won WWII, etc...) and it could have been really interesting to see how a colony still in substantive relationship with its founding nation fared vs. independent colonies.

The graphics have been improved, but they're nothing special. Most of the changes from CIV IV graphics are related to unit animations, something that I don't find adds to the game that much. Much more welcome are support for higher resolution monitors, so that the action can play out on my entire 24" monitor (connected to the DVI out of my HP laptop) at full resolution.

A word for those who care about DRM: this game installs Securom 7x on your computer, and while it doesn't have an installation limit like Spore or Crysis Warhead, it does install programs that have ring 0 level access (above administrator) to your computer, and installs files on your hard drive that are very hard to remove. Some users have reported these programs causing problems with their DVD/CD drives, virus scanners, or other software. I was willing to play this game because ir runs on my older laptop which I don't as jealously guard from any form of DRM programs like my game rig and which I store no personal data on. (It's only for loaning out for a LAN party). Also, my laptop already had securom on it from Mass Effect :(

If you love other Civ games, and don't care about the DRM, go ahead and buy the game. It won't disappoint. If having a ring 0 *root-kit like* program installed on your computer is a deal breaker, buy a different game. If I didn't have an older lap top to play the game on, I might have steered clear of it because of the DRM issue.

I really like this period of history and was excited to have an interactive experience with which to live out some fantasies of living on the wild frontier, but this game took all the fun out of it and while it has so much potential, I gave up playing it after 3 days because I found myself more frustrated at what it wasn't than entertained by what it was.

My biggest problem with it are the restrictions. You have to play this game the way that Sid Meier wants you too. You have to claim independence from your European benefactor within a specific time limit or you lose. I really hated this for two reasons, one, what if I want to stay loyal to my European heredity - did you ever think about that Cid? Maybe I just want to conquer the known world in it's name. The second reason is that even if I did want to claim independence, why do I have to do it in a specific amount of time? I really would just like to take my time and enjoy watching my colony grow, but with Sid's restricitons I feel like I'm too rushed to actually enjoy myself. You can choose a slower game speed, but then it just takes longer to produce buildings and recruit colonists and do everything so it doesn't really help.

It was a waste of my time and money. I hope this helps.

First off, I love Civ 4 and I love Civ 4 Colonization. I did enjoy the game and the gameplay. BUT, if I had it to do over again, I probably would not buy the game again, for the following reason:

This game comes with SecuRom 7.xx. As almost everyone has already pointed out in their reviews, this is a big deal. This DRM really does treat paying customers like criminals, makes the game harder to use, and makes certain that pirates have more rights than paying customers. Strong words? Yes, but consider what SecuRom does.

SecuRom first of all installs itself into Ring Level 0 of the operating system. This has higher privileges than the administrator account, meaning you can't uninstall it in ANY WAY, even if it interferes with other parts of your system. And interfere it does, as it disables or causes problems with legitimate CD burning and CD ROM emulation software, and has been reported to have conflicts with anti-virus software. And uninstalling the game does nothing to remove the SecuRom code... FireAxis apparently feels it has the right to just install this software on your machine and leave it there, whether you want it or not. The software acts as a rootkit and may introduce security holes, and the only way you can get it off is to re-install windows.

Here's the bigger issue for me though. I have a small laptop with a 12 inch screen. It is a tablet PC, and it has no integrated CD-ROM drive. I bought this computer on purpose because the smaller size gets me better battery life and better portability, especially on airplanes with limited space in the seats.

Apparently, though, in the eyes of FireAxis, I'm not allowed to buy such computers, or if I do, I can't play their game. I tried to use CD-ROM emulation software so that I wouldn't have to drag around and external CD-ROM and a bunch of power and USB cables on airplanes and car rides, and SecuRom disables the CD-ROM emulation software. It literally won't work unless the CD is in a physical drive, and since I don't have a permanent physical drive on this laptop, I generally can't play the game I purchased on this laptop.

So I won't be buying any more FireAxis games in the future, no matter how good they are, unless they are DRM free. When I spend a lot of money on software I expect to be able to use it on the computer of my choice.

William Kerney wrote a pretty definitive negative review for Amazon for this title, just look his up, he's dead on.

I just want to add my voice and vote to the naysayers of this game: Don't believe the Civ fans, this game stinks.

I've played all the Civ titles over the last 20 or so years, and this is the only Civ game in the series that just doesn't work. The game objectives don't make sense (Doing well in the game, running a successful colony, gets you crushed in the endgame when you rebel), the micromanagement is fairly pointless and tedious and you seem to get punished for doing anything out of the narrow constraints the game has for winning.

Oh and there are all of three units in the game you use, and no tech tree, so no real decisions to make except when to stop playing this game and return it.

Pretty much the antithesis of the entire Civ game line, imo, Sid Meier just phoned-in this work, it feels like.

Do not buy.

You know, I have always enjoyed Sid games, all the way back to the C-64 days. Absolutely loved Pirates. Now comes Colonization, love the old version and tought I could get into this one. Prices are fixed, the indian know how much stuff sells for and what the purchace prices are in the empire and do not give you a fair shake at all. I don't see how a person could win at this game. Now for the really horrible part, SecuRom!!! It is a menace to computers and just about locked me out of my own computer because I loaded a map making program. What gives, a map program? Getting tired of not being told what form of copy protections are on a program and then find out the hard way that it is using a service more intrusive then MicroSoft.

My recomendation is not to buy it and not to buy ANYTHING with SecuRom on it. Sure you might have to wait and see, but your computer will love you for it. Get console versions instead.

I had another review written, but after reading some already posted, with which I agreed, I decided mine needed revising. Yes, Colonization is fundamentally flawed. I've played 8 or 10 games now at the easiest level; an experienced Civ IV player, I should have begun winning at the easiest level almost as soon as I figured out the system of labor and specialists, of cities producing tools and horses and cash products.

Instead, I've put dozens of hours into this game and can't win even at the easiest level. I have only launched the revolution once - the game's ultimate goal, where the colony you built breaks away from the mother empire. I had fought off one wave of the empire's attackers and made a dent in the second, when time ran out. No matter, I would have lost anyway; the empire had a bottomless pool of forces compared to mine.

The game I've got going at the moment, I've done everything right. I grew my colony a little slower, got each city finely tuned, coordinated production of tools, guns and horses as best I could. Not perfect, mind you; the terrain allowed little ore mining, permitting little tool production. Maybe I shouldn't have refused a tax hike, suffering a tool embargo. I was up to 50 percent Rebel Sentiment, enough to declare independence - Rebel Sentiment functions like Culture in regular Civ IV - at least a hundred turns before game end, and I had only started promoting Rebel Sentiment relatively late. I avoided wars with neighboring colonies or Indian tribes.

All no matter: the Empire at the moment has a force of approximately 170 ships, soldiers, dragoons and artillery. I've got about a dozen cannon and soldiers; I could create about 10 dragoons right now. I have 5 ships. I could really put the heat on buying guns and horses and ships, crank my tool production as high as possible so I could make more guns, and outfit my soldiers. But, come on, against 170? (Note: the king's force got up to 300 units before I quit the game.) At the easiest level? Also, it must be noted that since you can't make Man O'Wars, you need at least two ships, a Frigate and a Ship Of the Line, to sink each Man O'War combo transport and warship coming you way. If the king has 30 ships, I'd need about 60.

So the game is flawed. It's also flawed in its punishing you for building cities or actually doing anything with them. What's sad is that it's so much fun to build the cities. If you were ever a Sim City nerd, you'll love this one. I keep starting new games despite the fact that I can't win these.

Here's a suggestion I haven't seen in other reviews: Keeping track of your cities' growth and fixing their various imbalances is complicated enough that I personally can't do it without taking handwritten notes. I finally created a grid where I can pencil in numbers - in the lumberjacks column I can note 2 for Baltimore, 1 for Jamestown and 1 for Plymouth because I need them there - as well as note which cities need tools or guns imported to finish a project. The city screen might include a memo field where you could do this, or a grid like I created.
Regular Civ IV doesn't require as much followup at the city level - in it, you can queue up your projects, shift your workers around to fine tune production, food or gold, or just get a city to crank out the same thing repeatedly. Colonization's cities require constant fiddling, and that's really much of the game.

Building the empires is fun. Once they get rebalance this game it'll be even better.

I am a big fan of the Civilization series.. including CIV IV, but this game is a big disappointment.. started out fun (a different twist) with the micromanagement and trading with the home country. But.. the game ends too quick, there's no incentive to build a productive colony (if you do, you'll lose).. Previous reviewers hit this on the nose.

Maybe, if the game didn't end so quick... Also, exploring the 'New World', you shouldn't even run into other European colonist for years.. the maps actually seem kind of small and crowded. Maybe all this can be fixed in an upcoming patch, but for now.. I think I'll just stick with CIV IV BTS.. for now, don't waste your money..

I can't belief what reviews I am seeing here - are we talking about the same game? As I am a fan of the old colonization, I was thrilled to see it come back to life, though under the Civ4 cover. I even pre-ordered it to have right from the start. Since I do not own Civilization4, I have no way of comparing the two games and can not draw from experience from Civ4.


Unfortunately the documentation in the manual and the help in the game itself are insufficient to answer my questions. Here a few points that ruin the overall rating and should be addressed in a patch ASAP, since it will make the game much more accessible for new players.

-In the game setup, the effect of one's choice of the game speed is not explained. (I.E. Marathon = higher cost of materials for building, more gold needed for purchases, more storage in settlements and most important - more turns until the deadline)

-In the diplomacy menu, the names of the native leaders mean nothing to me - the tribe name would help! It makes for "fun" diplomacy if you have to go back and forth to figure who is who and where on the map they are.

-I can't see how many turns I have to wait for my "Expert Farmer" to be done in the native village (yes, I do have that progress bar, but I saw it full for 10 marathon-turns and still no farmer) What if I have multiple students in the village?

-How does the education system work? Sometimes it takes 20 turns for a graduate, or 115, there is no information whatsoever on what influences the training time. If you only have a set number of turns, would you not want to know what you need to do to get specialists faster? I do!

-How do I train veteran soldiers? In the old game my soldiers would eventually get the veteran status if they fought enough battles. So far no veterans here.

There is no information about the other players, the options of interaction are very limited an make them very plain.

Somehow the AI must be confused. Here I had Spain ask for help and push for war with a native tribe(who only had 2 villages). A few turns later they declared war without my help and, behold, the natives nearly wipe them out in ONE TURN. All major Spanish settlements - gone! Just 3 Colonists in 2 settlements left. Odd!

Some of the benefits of the founding fathers are not clear. What is a "50% faster production of Church, Cathedral" mean? 50% faster construction? 50% more crosses? Some hard to get to founding fathers only offer a lousy one time bonus (like John Paul Jones).

On a preferential note, I find the game too short. In normal speed the game is plainly frustrating! In no time the "Just 100 more turns" pops up. Fortunately Marathon saved it for me.

The royal army is insanely HUGE! Even if most of my colonists are made into soldiers it is much bigger then anything I can field - and I was playing at the lowest difficulty setting!

The world is disappointingly small! Set on the "HUGE" setting one stumbles over the other Europeans within the first few turns.

This games plays like a beta version - WAIT AND LET THEM FIX IT!