YouGamers.com

Reviews

Civilization IV: Colonization

Friendly Neighbours

Competition comes in the form of native american tribes and other European nations. As a new "freebie" feature of the Civ 4 engine, all nations now have borders. Tribes also have (invisible) borders, and if you wish to settle inside them, you can either pay up for the use of land or risk angering the natives by ignoring their claim.

Natives appear to be mostly friendly, unless you explicitly anger them. Generally in the early game the natives outnumber you, so diplomacy is the key. Natives are also a great source of income. Initially when they first encounter an European colonist, they hand out valuables (free gold!) and they are now also a viable trading partner as their money supply replenishes over time. You can also loot the valuables from numerous ancient ruins and burial sites - most of the time the natives won't mind enough to declare a war. Just be careful selling guns or horses to a tribe that might turn on you - a pile of mounted braves can be a pain to contain.

Locals looking for scalps.

Training your troops for the revolution!

As the new engine includes the combat experience and general system of Civ 4, in practice you'll end up abusing the native population - first as source of gold and free education and ultimately as live target practice for your revolutionary army. Once you are ready to rebel, a couple of close native settlements can provide nice experience boost for you troops before facing the European elite troops. Evil? Sure. Historically accurate? Not exactly, but it follows the general theme that the European colonists abused the native american population in every possible way.

Visuals and Performance

Visually the game is almost identical to Civ 4. The new 3D models for the new buildings are fine, but the UI looks a bit weak. Some 2D elements are available only as fairly low-resolution images, and while all modern resolutions in 4:3 and 16:9 (at least up to 1920x1200) are fully supported, things look a tad dated. Some graphical screens of the original, like the continental congress and the European dockside view are represented with depressing brown UI screens. Sure, the information is all there, but the original's graphical representation brought some atmosphere to the game.

Boring brown UI representing the immigrant supply and European trade.

Founding Fathers - the "Wonders" of Colonization.

As Colonization uses Civilization IV engine, the original review still applies. The engine has been polished and streamlined slightly and the minimum requirement is now Pixel Shader support (1.1) - and PS2.0 support is very much recommended. In practice, all this means is that the oldest Hardware T&L only cards (museum pieces such as GeForce 2 and GeForce 4 MX) are no longer on the supported list.

We updated the YouGamers recommended hardware to point towards a slightly more modern (and cheaper) video cards as it would be pointless to look at obsolete models for a recommendation. Almost any system available today will run the game just fine as just about any video card that supports pixel shaders is fine and any CPU still on the market has enough power to run the game. Civ4 engine is mostly CPU-limited so in case of troubles with an older PC, if the game works but runs too slowly at the minimum graphical settings, always look for a processor upgrade first.

Page 1: Introduction, GameplayPage 2: Gameplay, VisualsPage 3: Bugs and Gameplay ProblemsPage 4: Summary and Scores

Related Stuff

Tags