new game of colonization

[asleepathewheel]

I just popped in the ole colonization cd and gave it a brief game. Suprised it actually runs well on my pc, since some games that old have lots of problems.

I think this was an underated game by microprose, I thought it was quite entertaining in its heyday, if it was a bit linear. Unfortunately not enuogh time to play right now, but will hit a while this weekend.

ah memories. the crappy graphics. I've turned off the sound, so don't have to deal with that. A little difficult to remember the controls and how to do everything. I like this game.

[Jethro83]

Indeed. Colonization is a classic, worthy of more attention that it ever got. I can only name two things that would make it better.

1. Option to play as one of the natives. I would find it to be an interesting challenge being the Aztecs, and then, using European muskets and horses conquer the whole of America, build new cities, etc. then wipe out the pesky European colonists.

2. Colonies with a larger radius. A one-square radius doesn't quite cut it.

Apart from those, Colonization is an excellent game.

[MrWhereItsAt]

For some reason my (Hard-drive only) copy of Col doesn't let me save when running in Win2K, although it plays fine. Anyone have any solutions?

[tishco]

the sound is good on col1, although, i havent started a game like you so maybe memory has fogged the quality

[Bleyn]

Originally posted by LordAzreal
Indeed. Colonization is a classic, worthy of more attention that it ever got. I can only name two things that would make it better.

1. Option to play as one of the natives. I would find it to be an interesting challenge being the Aztecs, and then, using European muskets and horses conquer the whole of America, build new cities, etc. then wipe out the pesky European colonists.

2. Colonies with a larger radius. A one-square radius doesn't quite cut it.

Apart from those, Colonization is an excellent game.

I agree that Colonization was(and is) a classic that would be worthy of a remake.

I also agree that more options for groups to play would be nice, though I never thought of making the natives playable. Groups that would be nice to play that came to my mind include the Norse and the Portugese, both of which did settle colonies in the New World, though admitedly the Norse didn't exactly realize what they had done. The Russians also come to mind, given that Alaska was a Russian colony for a while.

I'm not so sure that the colony radius needed to be larger. The smaller radius allowed for closer tiling of colonies than any Civ game and that could be sort of handy at times. Though, I will admit the AI was as annoying as ever in its habits of overlapping your colonies.

Some items I can think of for improvement include:
1. Diplomacy. I always found it rather annoying that no matter what you did, the other nations consistently grew more and more hostile, and would eventually declare war, even when you were trying to be nice. Yes, I know there was a founding father that was meant to minimize that, but how often was he actually your best choice of the five at any one time?

2. Food gathering. Namely, I found it extremely annoying that there would be ocean tiles that had high quality fishing grounds placed in positions where nobody had any way what so ever of getting at them. If they aren't on a square reachable from land, I personally would have rathered that a) there be some way of building something that would allow a colony to reach them, or b) they just plain not be there. They may have looked nifty but that was it.

3. Trade Routes. I always felt it would have been really nice to be able to more exactly specify what you wanted the ships and wagons on automated trade routes to do. Ie. be able to do things like tell them only to pick up a load of an item once it has reached a certain volume, or wait so long before moving to the next point in the route, etc. You know, being able to tell them what to do so that they don't just blunder on their merry way and send your distribution of goods all to higgldy-piggldy.

4. Colony governers. I'm sure that if it were redone today, something could be done so that you could turn on a governer that was bright enough to know when your Ore supply had reached 300 and it wasn't being exported or used by a blacksmith, that maybe your Ore Miner should go do something else for a while. It could even be set up where you could designate secondary jobs for colonists, so that the governer knew to automatically make that Ore Miner a blacksmith or statesmen or furrier or whatever.

[Locutus]

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt
For some reason my (Hard-drive only) copy of Col doesn't let me save when running in Win2K, although it plays fine. Anyone have any solutions?

Haven't played in a while so not sure if this is possible, but can you save on a floppy disk? If that's not possible, try to install the game on a small partition (< 500 MB). Maybe the game can't handle the size of your HDD, I've had problems with that with other games in the past...

[Jethro83]

Originally posted by Bleyn

1. Diplomacy. I always found it rather annoying that no matter what you did, the other nations consistently grew more and more hostile, and would eventually declare war, even when you were trying to be nice. Yes, I know there was a founding father that was meant to minimize that, but how often was he actually your best choice of the five at any one time?

Not to mention the fact that they keep sending their units into colony squares, even in peace time. Then they have the audacity to demand cash for a withdrawl of them. Then they come back next turn. Especially Spain, who have the annoying habit of having more dragoons than colonists.

2. Food gathering. Namely, I found it extremely annoying that there would be ocean tiles that had high quality fishing grounds placed in positions where nobody had any way what so ever of getting at them. If they aren't on a square reachable from land, I personally would have rathered that a) there be some way of building something that would allow a colony to reach them, or b) they just plain not be there. They may have looked nifty but that was it.

Food is so important that in colonies where I want to produce large amounts of sugar, and rum, I find I have to farm most of those Savannah squares for food, just to keep the people fed. I wish that there was a better system for the gathering of food, without having to go outside the colony for it.

3. Trade Routes. I always felt it would have been really nice to be able to more exactly specify what you wanted the ships and wagons on automated trade routes to do. Ie. be able to do things like tell them only to pick up a load of an item once it has reached a certain volume, or wait so long before moving to the next point in the route, etc. You know, being able to tell them what to do so that they don't just blunder on their merry way and send your distribution of goods all to higgldy-piggldy.

I agree. In the early days of having the custom-house guy in congress, I'm stuck having only one or two custom houses, and I need to use ships/wagons to get goods to this colony. But when it picks up goods from colonies in smaller quantities, it gets even more annoying when there's a huge surplus in other colonies.

4. Colony governers. I'm sure that if it were redone today, something could be done so that you could turn on a governer that was bright enough to know when your Ore supply had reached 300 and it wasn't being exported or used by a blacksmith, that maybe your Ore Miner should go do something else for a while. It could even be set up where you could designate secondary jobs for colonists, so that the governer knew to automatically make that Ore Miner a blacksmith or statesmen or furrier or whatever.

I agree with that.

[Gdiguy]

i've been running without problems with win2k...

i think there was a patch released a while back that fixed some problems with it not running (or crashign a ton) under win98... might want to check that patch out...

[Jeje2]

Love Colonization - great game

One square radius is very important so that one city cann't make everything. (Not enough food supply)
I could go as far as stating the one square radius to be the best innovation of Colonization. (In Civ you just build everything in each of your cities - booring)

[chronocrator]

Originally posted by Bleyn
2. Food gathering. Namely, I found it extremely annoying that there would be ocean tiles that had high quality fishing grounds placed in positions where nobody had any way what so ever of getting at them. If they aren't on a square reachable from land, I personally would have rathered that a) there be some way of building something that would allow a colony to reach them, or b) they just plain not be there. They may have looked nifty but that was it.

This is actually directly related to the colony radius. The developement team of Col wanted to include the normal Civ-style radius in Col but changed their mind at the end of the developement because of the reason Jeje2 mentioned, they wanted more specialized towns (which is a good thing IMO). Since they changed the colony radius so close to the release date they either did not have the time or forgot to delete the unusable fish two square away from the coast.
Back in the days I always searched for the founding father that could increase the colony radius because I saw those old screenshots on the back of the box Col came in.

BTW in our Col2 Projects we've allready discussed ways to simplify the old trade routes and I think we've found quite a good way.

[MrWhereItsAt]

AHA!

I found a copy of ColWin and it works flawlessly! Who knew Colonization could look so Civ2 like! I've been playing the DOS version for centuries.

[Rex Little]

Where did you find ColWin, MWIA? I loaded it from The Underdogs and it wouldn't run at all.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Here it is.

It claims to be in French but it ain't.

[Rex Little]

The game may not be in French, but the site is. I'm ashamed to say I can no longer understand the language well enough to figure out how to download the game. (30 years ago it would have been no problem.) Thanks anyway for the link.

[MrWhereItsAt]

The link just under the rating is Telecharger (insert accents). I didn't know what this meant but I'm a born link-clicker. So I clicked. Some time later I had downloaded ColWin!

(Moral of the story: even though you may not know a language, a link to download something is always a link to download something )

[Grumbold]

The town radius in Colonisation worked well because they were never expected to become true modern cities within the timespan of the game. Colonies typically were founded to exploit one single local resource and then either grew in importance because they were in the right place or dwindled into obscurity when the goods they produced ran out or became less desirable. It worked very well and I would have liked it if a good system of slowly expanding radius could make it into a true Civ game (CtP2 ddin't get it right imo). The very unautomated way in whigh the game worked was par for the course at the time. Indeed if you had a governor who sensibly automeated all craftsmen switching and training of new experts there would be little for the user to do most turns.

[Rex Little]

Thanks for the guidance, MWIA. I loaded the game and it works. It is in French, but between my knowledge of the game and what little is left of my high school French, I think I can muddle through.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Oh. Sorry, I wonder why I didn't notice - isn't that strange?

[player1]

The ONLY problem I find with Coloniztion game is that when you get 10 or more cities it becomes micomanagment nightmare (worse then any other civ-type game).

Still, pretty good game.

[Rex Little]

Best strategy isn't to build a lot of cities. I generally build no more than half a dozen major ones; any others are resource feeders, to be kept at size 1 or 2 and disbanded as soon as independence is declared.

[aaglo]

Yesterday I tried to play colonization on my PC. I couldn't even start the game, because some freaky code error about "dividing with zero" or something.... maybe I should try to install the game again...

[Playa del Carmen]

I loved to play Colonization. It was probably my first turn-based strategy game.

I don't have the manual for it, but was their ever a way to become independent without having the war? And did they other countries ever fight wars of independence?

[Rex Little]

You can't win independence without fighting the war for it. Basically, the game is set up so that the war of independence is the goal you're supposed to be driving towards. Of course, there's nothing to stop you from just playing in "sandbox mode", never declaring independence and just building a thriving set of colonies. I assume there's some time limit built into the game, but I don't know what it is.

Other countries' colonies do get their independence (your final score is lowered for each one which gets it before you do), but they don't fight wars for it. At least, their wars aren't played out where you can see them. You're simply informed that they're now independent.

[Playa del Carmen]

Originally posted by Rex Little
You can't win independence without fighting the war for it. Basically, the game is set up so that the war of independence is the goal you're supposed to be driving towards. Of course, there's nothing to stop you from just playing in "sandbox mode", never declaring independence and just building a thriving set of colonies. I assume there's some time limit built into the game, but I don't know what it is.

Other countries' colonies do get their independence (your final score is lowered for each one which gets it before you do), but they don't fight wars for it. At least, their wars aren't played out where you can see them. You're simply informed that they're now independent.

I didin't think you could Thanks.

[Andemagne]

if you ask me what COL2 would need I would answer:
*better graphics (is this really needed?)
*better diplomacy
*more colonizers
*a better AI, of course

these are "at least".

[chronocrator]

Originally posted by Andemagne
if you ask me what COL2 would need I would answer:
*better graphics (is this really needed?)
*better diplomacy
*more colonizers
*a better AI, of course

these are "at least".

- we will make our own graphics and they will look better than those of Col, I don't think we'll have animated units like in Civ3 neither do i think that these are esssential.
- better diplomacy is on of our goals, too
- I don't know what you mean with that but I think we'll have more than 4 nation, yet perhaps not in the first version.
- Our first version might be hotseat only, though we have a new programmer who is especially interested in AI-programming, we'll see.

[Andemagne]

by "more colonizers" I mean more european nations.

and yes, multiplayer, of course, I forgot about that.

[Mihai]

More colonist type won't hurt either.

One thing that I found annoying was the fact that there wasn't a way to see info for the indians villages (what they would teach, what they will trade), other that to send a scout over there.
Also, no real support in war from the allies, but I guess that goes to better diplomacy.