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Civilization IV: Colonization

Colonization, the long-lost "little brother" of Civilization has finally been dug up and polished for a whole new generation. I always had a soft spot for Sid Meier's simpler but fun Civ-style simulation of the early American history exactly because it was simpler. Explore new lands, trade with natives (or just exterminate them), deal with the European rivals and finally turn a fledgling colony to a profitable operation while aiming for a small revolution.

Civilization 4: Colonization takes the old gameplay and moves it to the Civilization 4 engine. The main difference from the Civ series for those who have never played the original is the introduction of colonial trade, manufacturing, immigration, founding fathers and the revolutionary war. You start out with a ship and a couple of colonists on a dangerous new continent, and the goal is to build a nation and ultimately declare independence - and stay independent by tossing the King's army back to the sea.

To avoid any confusion, it should be noted that Civilization 4: Colonization is a stand-alone game that does not require Civilization 4 to play. It's also priced at a lower-than-usual price point ($29.99 / EUR 29.99) and available as digital download. Some might considered it to be a stand-alone expansion or mod of sorts - even if it's really a modern remake that happens to use an existing engine.

Building a Nation

You start off with a single settlement and plenty of untapped land. Any colonist can be assigned to do any job - harvest resources, manufacture goods from resources, provide crosses to speed up immigration or liberty bells to spark that revolutionary spirit in the population. Each job also has it's designated specialist that harvests or produces twice as much. Specialists randomly appear in the immigration queue or they can be hired from Europe with gold. Alternatively you can educate untrained colonists or converted natives. Native tribes can teach harvesting professions, including tobacco planters and cotton planters that are unavailable for hire from Europe. Alternatively you can build schools that allow any untrained colonist to learn the profession of any existing specialist that is present in the same city.

While there are specialist veteran soldiers as well, any colonist can be turned into a military unit by just providing it with guns. For cavalry, add some horses to the mix. Same is true for improving the terrain - specialist pioneers do it faster, but any colonist can pick up tools from a warehouse and turn into a pioneer. Tools and guns are also needed for specific buildings and ships, and one of the main goals is to build a working supply chain to arm your colonists for the coming revolution. Farmers and fishers produce food for the rest of the population, miners harvest ore that gets turned into tools by the blacksmith. Gunsmiths then turn tools to weapons.

The rest of the manufacturing is aimed to provide goods that can be exported back to Europe or sold to the natives for profit. Cotton is used for Cloth, Furs for Coats, Sugar for Rum etc. While you can also export raw materials, it's almost always a better idea to get the manufacturing up and running - the manufactured goods bring in the real cash.

Automation to the Rescue

As the warehouse capacity in each settlement is limited, you also need to move the goods around with wagon trains. Thankfully this part of the game can be automated fully - just build some wagons and set them on autopilot, then adjust the import and export lists for each settlement and the wagons will zoom around carrying the goods. You still need to ship everything you export to Europe manually, but automated wagons can be set to carry it all to a single port, so it's manageable. Same is true for assigning colonists to work. Here I personally prefer to do it all manually, but again full automation is available.

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

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