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335 of 342 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Deeply Flawed Game Mechanics, October 7, 2008
Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars
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.
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120 of 131 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A welcome expansion, but buyer beware: contans Securom 7x, September 29, 2008
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
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.
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38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
unrealized potential, October 1, 2008
Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars
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.
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