Games that Time Forgot: Sid Meier’s Colonization (PC)

Author: Vince | Date: June 23, 2008

Back in the deep, dark depths of 1994, Microprose released Colonization for the PC, the spiritual sequel to Sid Meier’s classic Civilization. Much like it’s more famous cousin, Colonization is a turn based strategy based on the European colonisation of the New World (America), and see’s the English, Spanish, French and Dutch battle and negotiate their way to dominance with the native tribes and the monarchies back in Europe between the years of 1492 and 1850. The ultimate goal is declare independence from the state and repel the expeditionary forces sent to destroy you when you do this.

When the game starts you are given your choice of the 4 nations to control, each with their own unique bonus, and then given a ship, a unit of soldiers and some colonists and sent packing into the great unknown. Once you make land fall, you will usually encounter one of the native tribes, who will introduce themselves and extend a peace offering to you. From there you build your first city and begin to assign your colonists roles within your city, they could be farmers, lumberjacks, miners, rum distillers, carpenters and many many more, each one either collecting a resource from the squares that surround your city or converting the resources you have to manufactured items such as muskets, tools, fur coats, rum, cigars, etc. These goods can then be traded with the natives, other nations, or shipped back to Europe to sell. As the game progresses, your king will begin to impose an ever increasing sales tax on you, this applies to everything you sell to Europe, but can be avoided by throwing a Boston Tea Party-esque rebellion by throwing all of one resource you own in t the sea, this item can then no longer be traded with Europe.

Of course the game is not solely about building up your city, you can also send your men out in to the big wide world as scouts, soldiers and religious missionaries. Scouts allow you to open diplomatic channels with the natives and other nations, they are also an excellent way to uncover the map and visit the ‘lost cities’ on the map, which give you a random reward, anything from thousands of coins, to instant death. Soldiers, as you might guess, are used to lay siege to the enemy and defend your own land, while the missionaries allow you to introduce Christianity to the natives, which in turn can result in better relations with the tribe, and in units of Indian Braves joining your colonies.

Compared to Civ, Colonization focuses a lot less on the military conquest aspect of the game and more on the diplomatic side, and while brute force and ignorance will get you through the game, diplomacy will get you there quicker. To aid you on your way you get to elect famous historical figures, referred to as ‘founding fathers’, to your continental congress. Each one of these leaders grants you a unique power, ranging from a free ship to an increased spot range for your units or clearing all diplomatic tension with the natives.

As time goes on you will eventually reach a point where you are self sufficient enough to sever your ties with mainland Europe and declare independence, this means you can no longer trade with the mainland, and worse still, that your king will send his expeditionary forces to wipe out your heretic society. This is the point when all your hard work is put to the test, as the expeditionary forces are tough, and the longer you wait to declare independence the larger the force is. If you have planned it right, your native and European allies should be able to help you keep them under control, but if you burnt those bridges then your in for a bumpy ride. You reward for defeating these forces is a smug sense of satisfaction that you actually beat the game.

I am happy to say that Colonization is still as much fun today as it was back in the day, sure the graphics look horrible, but that’s not what this game was about, it was about the solid gameplay and the immense replayablility. I always preferred Colonization to Civ, I can’t really say why, it just appealed to me more, which is why I was over the moon to discover that coming later this year is Civilization IV: Colonization, a remake of this classic game using the Civ 4 engine. Also, like most good games from 15 years ago, Colonization is now abandonware and can be freely downloaded from here.

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