I just would like to tell you why, for me, this game is merely the perfect example of game-design, a masterpiece that every student or passionate about the art of creating a game - with its rules, its mechanics, and its story - should examine carefully. My goal today is not to review Colonization, you can find plenty of reviews out there. It never reached the popularity of Civilization (a franchise that still lives today with Civilization VI) but it sold well, it got many positive reviews (> 90%), and it’s present in many lists of Best Games of All Times. It’s often much easier to kill them with kindness, as they will offer to give you their settlements when your borders expand around them.Colonization was a success.

Plundering Native villages for a quick buck and free territory is only one of your options - playing nice gives you a free place to train your colonists, a source of converts, allies against your enemies, and trading partners (and you don’t have to spend a bunch of resources to fight a war).

You also have to deal with the inconvenient fact that there are already people living on the land you’re trying to colonize. At least upgrades earned through combat experience allow you to specialize your troops to some degree. Combat is a little simplistic - with only three military units (soldiers, dragoons, and canons) and three warships to choose from, it’s not the deepest part of the game by any means. Neither system is particularly well fleshed-out, though.

Meanwhile, other Europeans competing for territory must be dealt with either diplomatically or militarily. I particularly appreciate the wagon train automation, which allowed me to designate which supplies should be imported and exported from each colony and then sit back and watch as the wagons redistributed them accordingly. Later in the game, automation becomes a necessity, as guiding the production of goods such as muskets on a large scale would be maddeningly complex. While the game has some impressive automation features for those averse to micromanagement, much of the joy early on comes from setting up your colonies just right - cultivating the land, training specialized colonists and assigning them to specific tasks, and building structures to enhance production.

You must extract raw resources from the land and produce goods for sale back in Europe, and then spend the proceeds to recruit more colonists to expand your operation. As in Civ, you start by founding a single colony and exploring the map (random, or pre-made scenarios based on the Americas), but from there on out the challenge is entirely different Col is more about trade economics than warfare or diplomacy.

Civilization 4 colonization review