Sid Meier's Civilization 4: Colonization - A Short Review

Sid Meier's Civilization 4: Colonization is actually a remake of a fan favourite Sid Meier's Colonization that was released way back in the 90's. The new remake uses the Civilization 4 engine as evident by the extremely long title.

The original came out in 1994. The Colonisation game while looking familiar to a Civilization game, departed from a few fundamental things.

It didn't have a tech tree and was about the player colonising the new world and using your colonists to take on different jobs. The end game was about declaring revolution and defending against the kings army.

The remake makes use of the new Civ 4's Gamebryo engine and makes some gameplay tweaks that try to reduce the micro management in the game. You get to choose from four different nations, the dutch, English, Spanish or the french. Each one of these nations have their own strengths like the Spanish get bonus for combat against natives and the dutch has bonuses for trade.




Each nation has it's own leaders that you pick to gain more specialised bonuses(there is two leaders for each nation). While these bonuses don't force you to play in a certain way or focus your play on its core strength, it is highly important to make use of any advantage you get because as I'll describe later, the game is simple brutal in its difficulty.

You get similar options like you would starting a Civilization 4 game. You get to change the size of the land mass, the amount of turns per game, set other nations and the difficulty level. Firaxis gives you a lot of options to customise your game so that you will get a new and challenging experience every time by trying something different.




You start out on a lone vessel in the middle of the sea and must find dry land. Once you have landed on the Americas, your objective is to settle a new colony. Just like in Civilization 4, settling your first colony is extremely important as it will the backbone to your expansion(especially so in Colonization).

Once you have settled your first colony, the differences between Colonization and Civilization becomes apparent. The colony screen shows you specialisation of your colonists and you can switch your colonists around any job.




You need food to sustain your colony, timber that can then be turned into shields that will be used to construct buildings. Ore is mined and can be turned into tools which go into the manufacturing of certain buildings, ships and cannons.

You can harvest the raw materials surrounding your colony and these can then be turned into finished goods. You can net a bigger profit by trading finished goods compared to raw materials.

Speaking of trade, these can then be traded with colonies of other nations or the native settlements peppered around the map. Each of the colonies and native settlements have a particular good that they demand and will pay good money for it.

Apart from these, you can also ship these goods back to Europe for a profit. You can view the prices for goods buying/selling in the Europe screen tab. It is more vital to start building trade route's in the Americas as the game progresses you will be forced to adopt a more local trade policy to encourage rebellion against the king.

The natives apart from being another trade partner can also teach your colonists certain skills like training them to be expert fisherman or farmer. This can be very useful as you can harvest a lot more of these raw materials by using experts.

Turning raw materials into finished goods, you can increase you production by using master skilled colonists. They can only be brought in from Europe and often cost a lot more than regular colonists.




Your strategy in Colonization will revolve a lot around how you want to manage your colonies. Do you want to turn you colonies into specialised production center's that produce one good or diversify or have an entire production chain( harvesting raw materials and turning that into finished goods) in a single colony.

There will probably be a lot of shipping goods around your colonies and trade partners with trade carts. The micro management of this can get extremely overwhelming later on as you have a few colonies each producing and needing particular goods.

The game does give you the ability to automate trade routes that might be a little helpful but I found the automate trade route option to not work as effectively as I would have liked. Sometimes trade carts wont move when there is ample stock to ship out of a colony. I micro managed everything in this game.

As you are playing the game, the King will make regular demands from you to pay him gold or increase the tax rate of trade to Europe. You can choose to deny his demand by not paying him or by boycotting trading a particular good back with Europe. These actions obviously will anger the King and will help generate rebellious sentiments in your colonies.




These can also act as a strong motivation for you to break away from your greedy king and declare independence. Which is the main goal of the game. But it is not just as easy as pressing a button though. To declare independence, you need to build up rebel sentiments in your colony by building liberty bells.

Placing colonists or specialist elder statesman in the correct town slot will start building up liberty bells in you settlement. You need to have these in all your settlements and once you have reached 50% rebel sentiment(throughout your colonies), you can declare independence and break away from your oppressive king.

You will have to face the wrath of the King as he sends his royal army after you. The Kings army will outnumber you and probably outmatch your soldiers man to man. You however have the advantage of fighting on familiar soil. The Kings army gets no defensive bonus from terrain while your men do.

This is vital to your strategy for defeating the Kings army's superior numbers. What I find interesting is that to be successful you will probably have to employ the same strategies American generals used to fight the British. Use guerrilla tactics and take the fight to your enemy.




Colonization is by no means an easy game. From the get go, you will be challenged to do all these on a limited number of turns. You will have to get enough weapons, build enough ships, build defences, get rebel sentiments up, and defend against overwhelming force.

Even on the easier difficulty settings, you will find that Colonization is a game that will not leave you any room for mistakes as you need to effectively and efficiently manage your colonies. It also doesn't offer the same varied ways to victory like in Civilization 4. The only way to win is to declare independence and defeat the Kings army.

Civilization 4 : Colonization is a good game. The graphics look bright and detailed and the sound and music is charming. It requires ample amounts of micro management and patience if you take up the challenge of trying to win a game. You will probably have to try a few times before you get the right formula for victory.


The Good

• Nice graphics
• Charming music
• Good focus on trade
• A lot of variety in terms of strategies on managing colonies

The Bad

• A lot of micro management
• Only one way to victory
• Not much variety in units
• Combat is more simplistic
• Extreme difficulty
• Diplomacy is not as important or robust as Civ4
• No proper indication on demand and supply of other nations colonies
  

Retail Price : RM109


Availability : pcgame.com.my


Rating : 3.5/5