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Review by Ox
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Firaxis's latest offering, Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization (hereinafter "Col2"), is a revamp of the 1994 turn-based strategy classic Sid Meier's Colonization. You command the first small clutch of Europeans to discover the New World in 1492 and must guide them through Indian raids, colonial wars, and a Revolutionary War to independence. It's based on the Civ IV engine, and anyone who has played that should get a handle on the interface and style quite easily.
I was a great fan of the original Col -- I still putter around with it a couple of times a year -- and this version compared nicely. Obviously graphics are much sharper than the original, but there are a couple of nice improvements over Civ IV: reflective water, for example. This cuts both ways: while the old game was highly cartoonish and iconic, the new version is more realistic (albeit still cartoonish) and therefore makes it more difficult to distinguish different types of colonist and different colonial buildings. Music is nice and understated. Anyone who has played the original Col, and even those who haven't, will find the basic gameplay pretty easy. Load European migrants onto your ship, take them to the New World, settle them in promising locales, ship valuable resources back to Europe, and repeat. Throw in diplomatic negotiations with native tribes who look askance at the theft of their ancient lands, rival Europeans who covet your colonies, and the King continually demanding greater and greater tribute, and you have a winning formula.
Going deeper, however, some problems emerged. The Civilopedia has been declining in quality with virtually every iteration of the Meier series since Alpha Centauri, and this one continues that hallowed tradition: you'll look in vain for an indication that farms can't be built on hills, for example, or a clue that educating a colonist in a specialty in any schoolhouse increases the time needed for training all other colonists by 30% globally. For a TBS with a paltry manual like this one, this means the only way to understand game mechanics is either tedious research or slightly-less-tedious skimming game fora. European good prices, which in the old version fell as you supplied more of them and nicely forced you not to depend too heavily on a single industry, are surprisingly inflexible now. Founding Fathers (sort of like Civilization's technologies in the old version) now work more like Wonders: if another European colony obtains Peter Minuit first, you'll never have access to his benefits. Which is a fine notion, except it means the temptation to delay growing your colony for a few years and spend the first couple of decades systematically exterminating all other Europeans in the Americas is nearly irresistible. I didn't realize I was playing "George Washington: Blood-Drenched War God of the Americas."
It also doesn't help that the Founding Fathers are oddly balanced, with many of the Fathers most useful in the early game being far too expensive to be obtained in time to be useful. For example, Jacques Marquette grants +1 movement to Scouts, a huge benefit when you are trying to get the bonuses for meeting new Indian tribes or robbing their burial grounds... but he's so expensive I inevitably have already explored the entire continent and converted all my Scouts into colonists or soldiers. Since acquiring a Founder consumes your accumulated points (in up to two of five different categories), a big part of the game is figuring out which Founders *not* to get. I'm also annoyed by the oddly foreshortened game length: 300 turns on Standard and the game ends automatically, regardless of whether you're still fighting your Revolutionary War. In the original, 300 turns would only get you to 1692, and this is not a dramatically simpler or quicker game.
Which leads me combat, and the central question in all such historically-based games: how should gameplay and historical authenticity interact? For those who played the old version, you probably know the overall arc of the game: you started poor and with a few incompetent and borderline-criminal settlers in vast, trackless wilderness. You grew, expanded, and developed the land, while also importing more (and more talented) colonists. This process led to a few Indian clashes and their land inexorably became yours by power of right (and maybe a little Pizarro-style annihilation), while the King gradually grew more concerned and increased the size of his Royal Expeditionary Force. You, in turn, grew more annoyed as taxes became more onerous and began encouraging the voices of independence (aka Liberty Bells) via assigning colonists to advocate for liberty. This had the added bonus of increasing the rate at which you acquired new Founding Fathers. Eventually you declared your independence, the King sent over a large army of professional soldiers... who surrounded your colonies' massive fortifications and died by the thousands as they launched frontal attacks against your entrenched forces. Not a bad simulation of history in the pre-war period, but an awful representation of the actual Revolutionary War itself, which was mainly fought in a much more guerrilla fashion and in which most of the rebel attempts to wage siege warfare (whether attacking or defending) were abysmal failures. Much more importantly, it was also kind of boring after a while.
Col2 works much the same in the beginning, although there is even more temptation to work on racking up rebel sentiment early on because Founding Fathers will get snatched away by your competitors. You no longer have the occasional harassing Indian raid as you struggle to keep the natives from realizing you spell the destruction of everything they hold dear: now, it's either complete peace or total war, with nothing in between. But broadly, the game is remarkably true to the original... until you declare independence.
Clearly Firaxis didn't like the turtling strategy that was so dominant in the original Col, so it did away with that via a simple expedient: all Royalist forces get an automatic +50% bonus when attacking settlements, except artillery, which gets a devastating +150% bonus. Since now your fortifications can be shelled into oblivion, as well, this means attempting to hold the cities is a surefire way to lose the game faster than you can imagine. Instead, you've got to use adopt guerrilla tactics and use the terrain features, particularly forests and mountains, to catch the Tories in ambushes (Royalists get no combat bonuses when defending outside settlements, and there are many promotions to give your units bonuses when attacking units outside settlements.
So far, so good, and an excellent way for Firaxis to both make the game more historically accurate and more interesting to play. The problem is that the King's forces in the Revolutionary War are very closely tied to how rebellious your population has been for how long: if you slowly accumulate rebel sentiment for the entire game, you'll have massive hordes of Tory scum who will crush you into dust. It's hard to overstate my shock upon realizing I had negligently encouraged the King to amass an army that outnumbered my own by 17-1, and that (because it's very easy to reach the Revolution without fighting a single battle) not a single one of my units had earned a promotion before the war began. The end result of this is that you spend the entire game trying to avoid acquiring rebel sentiment to keep the King's forces small, only generating Liberty Bells when your economy is fully developed and you race to get a majority in favor of independence before the King realizes he's got a problem.
Is that a bad thing? I think so. It certainly makes the game more challenging and requires more balancing of competing interests, but it also introduces an extremely gamey element to the calculus. Sid Meier's games were never particularly fun because people enjoy manipulating icons to maximize production of this resource or hurry the production of that structure. They are fun because of the imaginative aspect: you picture yourself as the great leader guiding a struggling people to greatness against all odds. This element, however, very forcefully reminds me that I'm just manipulating a formula in a computer. It's maybe a good mechanic in itself, but it detracts from the overall game so much it's actually a negative.
There is a lot to praise about Col2, and you'll find plenty of that praise in professional reviews. It's a valuable and often enjoyable reworking of the original much-loved game. But at $29.99, I can't in good conscience recommend it unreservedly. For diehard fans of Firaxis, this is a no-brainer. For anyone else, pick it up when it comes down in price a little and you don't feel so offended at paying full price for what is effectively a very slick mod of Civ IV.
Available on Steam.
biosc1 on 10/08/2008
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Telefrog on 10/08/2008
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