Enjoy!

TG: How much effort was put into Colonization’s multiplayer experience, and what sort of scenarios do you anticipate players will find themselves in when matching against others to take over the new world?

SMITH: From the moment we played our first game of Colonization multiplayer, we knew we had a hit. It’s incredibly fun to do things like send a merchant fleet to meet with the natives surrounding an opposing player’s territory, sell those natives muskets and horses for cheap, and watch the havoc. Privateers are in the game and allow players to attack other players’ ships without declaring war. They even allow players to steal goods from opponents’ merchant ships. This is a great way to destroy your foes or eliminate the king’s forces. One of my favorite modes is the cooperative team game where you and a friend work together to declare independence on the hardest difficulty level.

Read the full interview at Tom’s Games.

VideoGamer is scoring the game a 9 out of 10, saying:

Being the gloomy people that we are, we’ve tried pretty hard to find something we can criticise about Colonization, but there really is very little to complain about. You could argue that the game should do more to address sensitive historical issues like slavery and spread of European diseases - but you know what? Bollocks to that. Super Mario World could do a better job of simulating the life of an Italian-American plumber, but we highly doubt it would make for better gameplay… Civilization IV: Colonization takes a classic game and updates it for 2008, without screwing around with the things that made it great in the first place. Because it does this, we like it a lot. If you like absorbing strategy games, then you probably will too.

GamesRadar awards Colonization with an 8 out of 10 (watch out, popup fest behind this link!). They note:

Some areas of questionable balancing make the late game tricky to navigate. First and foremost, the attacker seems to have a huge advantage in combat - I lost far too many battles from within heavily fortified cities, and dragoons seem to win nine out of 10 battles regardless of what unit they’re fighting and where, making a good offense your only real defense. That’s manageable against Natives and other colonies, but during the revolution with literally hundreds of enemy troops landing? Not so much. Also, once you’ve educated a few citizens in your schools, the amount of time it takes to graduate them makes it completely impractical - you’re better off just buying specialists from Europe.

CVG labels the game with a 7.9, commenting:

Once you’ve earned and built enough, your fledgling nation becomes an engine of war, desperately fighting off the vengeful forces of its European homeland. It’s a great switch, a visceral reward for all that patient tobacco trading.

Still, that battle doesn’t feel quite as thrilling as before, the fussiness of the interface and blandness of the art robbing it of some of its sense of event. What does lift this above its progenitor is multiplayer. There’s an old complaint about the original that none of the AI-controlled nations in the game are chasing independence themselves. While that’s to the benefit of making you the hero, it’s great to finally have some direct competition.

Kotaku doesn’t give scores, but they do have their own opinion of course:

Look, don’t get me wrong, there’s little that’s glaringly wrong with this version of Colonization. You’ve probably noticed most of the points above are fairly minor. If you’ve never played the original game, this is, new coat of paint aside, the same thing. Same goal, same mechanics. You’ll probably love it. But for me, a Colonization veteran, just replicating the nuts and bolts isn’t enough, and in choosing to remake the 1994 original they’re leaving this game wide open to comparison.

And, like most remakes, this is little but a facsimile of the original. It lacks the clarity of purpose, it lacks the little touches that made the original – and not this Civ IV-branded exercise – a truly unique, standalone product. If you’ve never played the original Colonization, try and track down a copy of it instead, because this feels more like a Civ IV mod than the standalone game a Colonization remake deserved.

It wasn’t long before we ran into a village belonging to the English—controlled by another player. The city was low on resources, and it was the hope of that player that founding near our border would stymie our nation’s growth. In a way, this worked, because as it turns out, you can place citizens in your city’s town hall to increase patriotism. This caused the small borders of the city to expand so that several production squares in our city, Montreal, were cut off.

At the same time in the far north, another of our opponents, playing as the Dutch, was growing his holdings at a tremendous pace. The Dutch begin the game with advantages in trade, such as the Merchantman ship class from the opening of the match, and the colonies’ treasury was filling quickly by trading raw silver and fur coats. However, we did commission a privateer unit to start raiding these wealthy Dutch ships for their goods. Privateers sail without their nation’s colors, so they can attack without declaring war. Utilizing privateers in multiplayer is a fun way to pester your opponents without entering a costly war.

Jose de San Martin
Liberator of Chile, 1st President of Peru
Lived: 1778 - 1850
Traits: Conquistador (+25% vs. Natives), Resourceful (-50% XP needed for unit promotions)

Groomed from a young age for the life of a soldier, Jose de San Martin would grow to lead the Peruvian and Chilean people to independence from Spain.

Born in Argentina, but raised in Spain, by the age of 11, Jose de San Martin was already a member of the Spanish armed forces. In the Peninsular War between Spain and France in 1808, San Martin began as an aide to the Spanish leadership; by war’s end he had attained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

In the midst of the war, the Spanish king abdicated from power to be replaced by an appointment of the opposing French. The citizens of Argentina, upon hearing of the Spanish government’s state of disarray, decided that there would be no better time to declare independence. When news of the Argentine revolution reached him, San Martin elected to support the rebels’ cause, leaving Spain for the New World. Upon his arrival, he was immediately recruited by the rebel forces to begin mustering and training an elite regiment. His regiment, known as the Mounted Grenadiers, became some of the finest troops South America had to offer.

Samuel Champlain
Founder of Quebec
Lived: 1567 - 1635
Traits: Cooperative (Natives are more tolerant, -50% time spend living among Natives to learn a new skill), Enterprising (+100% Native conversion rates from Missions)

A soldier, sailor, and scribe, Samuel de Champlain founded the French colonial capital of Quebec and is widely considered the father of New France.

Born in 1567 in Brouage, France, Champlain was trained as a navigator, and began his career as an explorer by visiting the French and Spanish colonies of the Caribbean. Upon his return from the islands, he committed his many observations to paper and gave the resulting report to the French king, Henry IV. His careful observations helped establish him as an authority on the New World. (Interestingly, Champlain mentions in his report the idea of creating a canal across the thin strip of land known as Panama, marking the first conception of what would become the Panama Canal.)

The actual process of building up your city and managing your colonists is intuitive and delightful, but you are going to lose most of your battles with the CPU unless you opt to play titles on Epic or Marathon length. Even then, fighting off your mother country’s army is a Herculean task, although clearly by design. The game supports online multiplayer and is almost certain to be most enjoyable in that mode, especially with its integrated voice chat. We were unable to test out that portion of the game, so this preview rather strictly talks about the single-player game modes, which are typical of what you might expect of something from the Civilization lineage but somehow less satisfying than the more open-ended gameplay allowed in the core games.

John Adams
Second President of the United States
Lived: October 30, 1735 - July 4, 1826
Traits: Tolerant (-25% Crosses needed for immigration), Libertarian (+25% Liberty Bells in all settlements)

A diplomat, politician, lawyer and firebrand, John Adams was one of the driving forces of the American Revolution.

Born in 1735 in Massachusetts, Adams trained as a lawyer and rose to a prominent position in the colonial legislature, earning himself a reputation as a staunch opponent of the English. In 1770, however, when a group of British soldiers fired on a mob of unarmed American citizens - the so-called Boston Massacre - Adams was selected to defend the soldiers. While fearing that acting as defense on such a trial would tarnish his reputation, Adams discovered his worries were unfounded. After the trial, his reputation only grew as he became known as a defender of the rights of all men - even the English.

Peter Stuyvesant
Final Governor of New Amsterdam
Lived: c. 1602 - 1672
Traits: Mercantile (market prices are less sensitive), Industrious (+25-percent Hammers in all Settlements)

Peter Stuyvesant first began his career as a soldier and administrator in the Caribbean, governing the Dutch island colony of Curacao. During his time in the Caribbean, Stuyvesant lost his right leg in a raid against a Spanish outpost and had it replaced with a wooden one. Yet his raw bravado made him popular among the Dutch West India Company’s administration.

Gamespy had another look at Colonization and wrote an in-depth preview, describing some of their adventures. A blurb:

Cities will grow in Colonization — albeit slowly — through births, but the major source for new colonists is European immigrants seeking religious freedom. This is controlled via the colony’s production of crosses, although players can also use gold to bribe a European to make the trek across the Atlantic. Having good relations with a Native American tribe along with a string of Christian missions in their cities can also result in “Converted Natives” that can be used the same way as a European citizen (though they will not take up arms as a soldier). Much of the game involves this fascinating mercantile balancing act — having the right people in the right places to produce the right commodities to generate fat profits on sales trips back to Europe.

If all this sounds like a lot, it is a lot. It’s a bit surprising because Colonization is so narrow in scope compared to the Civ IV that encompasses most of human history. Colonization only takes place during a few hundred years and puts a heavy emphasis on resource management. Thankfully, the native tribes and rival European colonies aren’t interested in war, at least not early on in the game. One of the final products you’ll produce is guns, which are stockpiled in cities to be used as defense. The process of simply creating guns, cannons, and artillery is at the very end of the tech tree, but such items may not have even developed before your game ends. Even though the maps can be huge–we played for hours and only saw a fifth of the Northwest Passage map–valuable land is at a premium. To maintain your colonies, you’ll also need to expand into the territory of native tribes. Slowly, the tension will build, and war will inevitably be upon you, whether you would risk it or not.

TE: While there is a big draw for independent games right now, have you also noticed a demand for more of the same? For instance, you’re remaking Colonization right now. Do gamers want something new or do they want more of what they already love?

SM: They want it all. I think there’s always been this tension between sequels and follow-up products and something new, and I think a lot of that has kept the industry growing and evolving. But I don’t think there’s ever really been a right answer to that question. I think it’s great that we’ve had the innovation like the Guitar Hero games, MMO games. Those have been big steps forward that have added new energy, brought new people into the industry. Then you’ve got Rock Band and a rationale that you need to expand on those new ideas and genres. So I think both answers are right, there needs to be innovation and new ideas, but once an idea’s out there, there’s a lot you need to build on. I think Civilization is a good example. We’re now up to Civilization IV and each of those games has brought something new that appealed to the audience that was designed to appeal to the audience of the preceding game. A good balance of both those things is really what’s good for the consumer, and also good for the industry. Like Madden 2009, I think EA can afford some risk-taking because they know a game is going to reach a certain audience. It’s the same thing here; we can take some risks with some ideas we have because we have our track record.

The city management screens provide one of the more obvious points of difference. The left hand side of the screen is dedicated to a variety of specialist slots - furriers, blacksmiths, ministers of religion and rum distillers, to name just a few. As the game progresses, you can plug specialists into these slots, which will generally increase a city’s production of a particular resource or item. These can then be traded between your cities, with the native population or sent home on a trader’s ship. In our short time with the game, it quickly became apparent that one of the keys to success is a vibrant economy that makes the most of every resource at your disposal. Trade routes can be easily set up and automated, as can the placement of specialists. It’s also possible, in the best Civ IV traditions, to simply put people to work in the fields around your cities to produce food, lumber and whatever else lies with your city’s radius.