Gamespot's Colonization Preview

[Ginger_Ale]

Another new preview for Colonization has been released on Gamespot, similar to the other detailed hands-on previews by sites like IGN. It contains a few new screenshots in addition to summary and experiences from the game. Here is its conclusion:

If you're looking for a challenging Civ experience, Colonization is it. Management plays a much greater role than combat, and you can't simply fight your way to victory from the very beginning. We'll have more on Colonization soon as we examine multiplayer, community, and mod tools heading toward the September 22 scheduled release date; that is, if we can pry ourselves away from the extremely addictive single-player mode. Just one more turn? Yeah right.

Gamespot has a page of release dates, which seems to indicate the game will come out September 22nd in North America and September 26th across the rest of the world. We'll keep an eye out for an official announcement.

[KevinTMC]

This looks like it tracks the original game pretty closely. Which--speaking as a fan of Colonization--is a good thing.

The major things I would be looking to fix would be:

* Lack of geographical coherence in colonies. In the original game, both the human player and the AI were tempted to scatter settlements willy-nilly all over the New World. Using the cultural-boundaries system that has since been developed in Civ III and IV ought to help this.

* Management of relations with Indian tribes. In the original game this was at the same time too superficial and too cumbersome. I had to try to draw a map by hand and pencil in the villages, what they wanted to trade (which changed with each trade), and what training they offered (and whether I'd used it yet or not). Also it was not generally possible to protect friendly tribes from the depredations of other Europeans, and not worth trying to ally with them in war.

* Mid- and late-game micromanagement. The game simply asked too much of the player as the game went on. Too hard to make sense of the overall picture, too many little things (from trade to production to worker assignments to movement of units and goods) to manage each and every turn.

If they've addressed these at all effectively, then this update will be a dream come true, and I can move on to pining for Imperialism III--and for the really niche desire for Sid to revisit "Covert Action", which he has always viewed as one of his failures, but which I think could be truly unique and special if re-made now.

[JayKay]

Originally Posted by KevinTMC

This looks like it tracks the original game pretty closely. Which--speaking as a fan of Colonization--is a good thing.

yeah, same here

Too bad that they didn't put the Portuguese this time...

Originally Posted by KevinTMC

* Lack of geographical coherence in colonies. In the original game, both the human player and the AI were tempted to scatter settlements willy-nilly all over the New World. Using the cultural-boundaries system that has since been developed in Civ III and IV ought to help this.

yes, this would also be good for keeping the AI off our land, since in the old Colonization game they tended to crawl all over the player colonies (even in peace), giving a lot of headaches about the logistics of our units.