14 DAY TRIAL // Colonization is one of the earliest games made by Sid Meier and one of the first turn based strategies that I played way back when I was starting to be interested in videogames. The title never got as much attention or publicity as its bigger brother, Civilization, but thanks to the success of the latter, Colonization is getting a remake in the form of Civilization IV: Colonization. In anticipation of the launch of that game, I decided to replay Colonization (which I do once every few months). This is my story:
14:00. Yes, it looks kinda ugly but this is how nostalgia looks in my head. It's pixelated and weirdly drawn and there's so little detail you can barely distinguish a caravel from a city but it manages to make the game work without employing the latest state of the art graphics card.
14:10. Did you know that you could play this game entirely by only using the keyboard? I did it a few times back in 1996 when my mouse died and I did not have enough money to buy another one. I thought about doing this during this play session but there are some things really hard to do only by keystrokes, mainly managing the way various people get their work assignments.
14:15. Progress report: I have one nice colony near Caracas. I have a Wood resource nearby, a fishery that I can reach and when I take down the forests that surround me, I will probably find a Sugar Cane resource, which means I can get money rolling in from selling rum to unsuspecting Tupi natives and to the European drunkards that sent me here. Ahhh, I forgot to mention that I chose the Netherlands as my starting country because I can use the extra capacity of the starting vessel.
14:20. I really hope that they plan to keep the quirks of each nation in the updated version without making it too relevant. At times, the leader profiles in Civ IV seemed poorly balanced to me, with some of them clearly more useful than others.
14:23. I meet the Spanish and I already hate them as they seem poised to take out the Tupi villages I wanted to inundate with cheap booze and requests for land. Damn the Spanish and their urge to slash and burn. Meanwhile, I got rum production up and running. Prohibition is now only a few hundreds of years away.
14:25. I've got four colonies up: one is near iron, one near cotton on the Southern tip of South America and one inland near tobacco. Things seem to be looking up for my fledgling Dutch Republic.
14:40. Wow, how time goes by. I seem to be dealing with the same issue in this game that I always have with turn based strategies which involve cities. I tend to focus on too well placed, resource rich cities while letting my smaller colonies fall by the wayside. This means that I basically end up with colonies that are very unevenly developed, which poses problems later in the game, mainly because I will have to support the smaller and poorer colonies from the resources generated by the bigger ones.
14:50. First hour almost done? Again, wow! I have a cloth and a rum industry up and running while putting a lot of people on “bells duty”. This practically means that I put three citizens, even if they are not statesmen, on the City Hall building to generate Liberty Bells which bring me Founding Father (more Fathers in the remake, please!) and make my citizens more interesting in a little thing called auto determination. Onwards to Independence!
To be continued.