Enthralling and compulsive - great for gamers with low-end machines (Colonization (PC))

Member Name: sgreenland

Product:	Colonization (PC)
Date:	01/03/01 (132 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Enthralling and easily playable

Disadvantages: Eats your time! No graphics frills

This game, once again from the Sid Meier stable, is in my opinion even better than that perennial favourite, Civilisation.

You play one of the four European powers of the Middle Ages, trying to conquer and settle the New World across the Atlantic. You will have to build, maintain and expand settlements, trade or fight with numerous native tribes and your rival Europeans, and increase your military and economic power until you can cut yourself off from your European benefactor and declare independence - although you will then have to fight off his troops before you can win the game!

Although the scope of the game can appear more limited than that of Civilisation - there is none of the scientific discovery chain that makes Civ so appealing - it is more than compensated for by the sheer variety of playing options when managing your cities and settlements. Whereas Civ gives you variety by having a wealth of different military pieces, Colonisation has only foot soldiers and cavalry. But each and every citizen in Colonisation has a special skill, which will double the colony's productivity in that particular area. The depth of play becomes all too quickly apparent when you are setting up your first colony with a Master Distiller, to be confronted with the issue of whether to increase your trade production of rum, build some useful buildings or defend your colony - multiply that out by the thirty or so different skill sets and you will see where the challenge of managing your resources takes off in a whole new dimension.

Despite all this, the game itself is easy to get the hang of, and the learning curve continues throughout the game. A novice can pick up the basics in minutes, and can gain enough to play a full game with success very quickly, whereas the experienced gamer will forever be finding new ways to fine-tune his strategy in order to produce the perfect path from a simple settlement to the greatest independent empire the world
has seen!

The beauty of the game lies in the number of different ways in which you can achieve success. Because of the wide breadth of resources, this is never going to be quite as much of a two-dimensional wargame as Civ was - although that element is still very much present - instead, it is a game in which the consequences of every move have to be thought out in detail. If you send off an expeditionary force to capture a rival settlement, or to crush an Indian tribe so that you can exploit their (more valuable) land, who will you send? Your skilled workmen, who are not as vital to the everyday survival of yuor colony, but who bring in the trade revenue, or the woodcutters and builders, who are less valuable for trade but who underpin your settlement? And when you send off colonists to explore the great unknown, you may be sending those who will be most useful in building a basic colony off to their deaths at the hands of ferocious natives, or to discover the gold of the Lost City of the Incas...

Add to this mix the familiar battle engine of the Civilisation game, graphics which are nothing special (but then the focus of this game is not technical wizardry), the ability to design your own worlds and some lovely touches of humour, and you have a game which is engrossing and endlessly replayable. And for those of us with low-end machines, it's a game which does not discriminate against us. A must-have for any strategy gamer's library - but at the cost of plenty of spare time!

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