Calling Col Oners...

[player1 fanatic]

I think with some fine tuning (like REF generation) this game will definetly be better then original Colonization.

I do miss some features of original though, but they are not crucial to make Civ2Col better game.

 

[BlastDuke]

Is there any Col I player out there who even thinks this is as good as the original?

When comparing Col1 to Col2 there is one big difference to remember:
Col2 is Multiplayer capable.
This point alone is enough for me to say "Col2 is better that Col1".

The whole multiplayer idea caused some fundamental re-thinking of the Col1 ruleset (micromanagement, diplomacy, multiplayer exploits, ...), so if you want a Multiplayer Col2 it cannot be "just a graphical update" to Col1 with the same rules IMO.

Some points have been changed for good (some examples):
a)pioneer micromanagement
b)villages show education
c)the complete useless Col1 feature "defeat an enemy soldier to get a free colonist" has been removed completely
d)"unique" founding fathers
e)no "fountain of youth" (=fun in singleplayer but completely unbalanced in multiplayer)

The problem with Col2 is that it (please choose)
a)has been released too early
b)not enough playtesting, therefore very unbalanced in some respects
c)too much "copied" from Civ4 without modification so the "spirit" of Col1 is not always there
d)the AI is ..erm.. "not challenging"

I believe Col2 has a HUGE potential and the only thing that would really disappoint me if there will be no official patch(es) to make Col2 the clearly better Colonization game.

 

[Lord Chambers]

Original Colonization allowed you to create a more difficult game for yourself by increasing the difficulty.

New Colonization does not. The REF on Revolutionary can be as small as you want it to be.

 

[ADHansa]

I have both games on my computer. There are some aspects that make me not going back to Col after having started Col2. For me the orderbar is the best one. It is so much easier to play the game when you don't have to go in and of the city view all the time. That you do not get partycrashed by indians and Europens that occupy the roads are also a much appreciated function. And that it's a more obvious what indians want to trade also helps a lot.

But Col had it's advantages too. Trading with guns and horses was more of a shortterm deal that generated a limited amount of money. If you did it to much, prices rized in europe and it became unprofitable. Indian also had a more reasonable demand of it and wasn't prepared to pay as much. In a short while you could make money exploring and trading, but in the long run you (with most of several possible strategies) had to build up an economy off your own, that was to an intresting degree dependent on your national traits.

You never really knew where you had the Indians either, you could think you was friends but every now and then a rouge indian would raid your settlement or attack a pioneer. I think it was great because you constantly had to choose between ignore defenses, having a small garrison or wiping the indians out. And it was often a close call what choise was the best.

The fellow Europeans began pretty defensivly, but with time became more and more of a military threat to your empire. If you ignore your military to long you would after a while get into a nasty war with your neighbours so especially in the harder levels you had to build up an army in the same time as you got your economy going. Of course, if i took BenF that wouldn't be an issue, but i chose to play without allowing him to make the game more intresting. Yep, Col1 it also had it's share of bad design choises.

The most important differance still was that you was rewarded for building op a fledging empire of well-runned colonies, since it helped you beat the Europens and gave you an advantage in the WoI. That is the most important differense, if they can reinstall that feeling in Col2, i will happily spend as many hours on it as i have Col1.

 

[Lord Shadow]

...so if you want a Multiplayer Col2 it cannot be "just a graphical update" to Col1 with the same rules IMO.

Besides the Fountains of Youth (which should in fact be just one), I can't see anything multiplayer-unfriendly in the original Colonization. Rulewise, I can't see the need for more than minimal tweaking, like having a king and REF for each European player, for instance.

 

[cephalo]

In my opinion, the lack of a Fountain of Youth or One of the seven cities of gold is more detrimental to the atmosphere than people think. You can leave such things in and adjust the reward or the mechanics if necessary. The new world has to be a place of wonder and mystery. Without that imaginative aspect, it quickly becomes an algorithm.

 

[Hammurbabble]

There are a lot of things that were in ColI that aren't in Civ4Col, but most of them are nitpicky small stuff. There are two enormous differences, though, that change the gameplay and feel. One of those is correctable by the player. The other will require some recoding.

The biggest single change is the 300-turn time limit. There was no time limit in Col. In fact, I don't even think the year was given, although I could be misremembering that (I no longer have the game). So you could expand at your leisure, deal with natives and other Europeans, and play THAT game for as long as you wanted before starting the OTHER game, the WoI. With only 300 turns, you have to do everything differently and race into position to fight for independence. It takes a lot of the fun out.

Luckily, you can restore a lot of the old feel by playing a Custom Game and turning off the Empire winning condition (and Time, although that's unchecked by default). Then you have no turn limits and can play in the old fashion. The limiting factor then becomes the tax rate, but you can slow that down by doing a lot of trading with the natives. There's also a kind of annoying psychological time limit in that you get told the year. I sometimes find my games going into the 20th century, which feels a bit weird.

The other change is that in C4C, the European powers are utter wimps and pushovers. They SUCK! I've found myself agreeing to go to war with another European nation on request by natives, just to keep on the natives' good side, because why not? It's not like there's any danger involved, or any reason to keep the other Europeans liking you. If the enemy nation had colonies conveniently close, I would grab some of them -- which was ridiculously easy -- and if not, I would just declare and ignore them. I've never received a serious attack from another bunch of white guys. Not once. I sure used to in the old game, though!

To balance that somewhat, in C4C the natives are a lot tougher than they were in Col. Now, in Col you had the somewhat more realistic aspect where "young hotheads" would raid your settlements or your people on the roads, and the chief would deny having anything to do with it. That was a nuisance, while in C4C you're either at peace with the tribe or at war. But when you are at war, they're much, much more dangerous.

I also find the REF harder to beat in C4C than it was in Col. The mechanics are pretty much the same, you still want to fight them in the open and not let them assault your colonies, but because of the Civ4 combat engine it's a lot harder to pull off. Which is good, I think.

Those are the main things that IMO need to be balanced out. In the next patch, if I were the devs I would simply toss the time limit, and either have the year not appear or have something like four turns to the year on normal speed. (Another note: multiple game speeds don't really serve much purpose in C4C. In Civ4 they do, because of technological research and units becoming obsolete, but those factors don't exist in C4C.) I would also beef up the European AI a whole awful lot.

Oh, that reminds me. Another good change: in the old Col, none of the other European colonists had to fight a WoI. You'd get a notification that the King of whatever was considering granting his colonies independence. You had to declare independence yourself before he did, or you'd lose. It's a nice touch to have them face the same thing you do, but it needs a lot of work, because they suck against their own king just as much as against you. They need to have a chance to win their war.

The rest is just color. I'd love to have intervention by another European power in the WoI, and some of the old quests. The King making you go to war and giving you military units was a cool thing from the old game. It seems to me the developers sacrificed a lot of that stuff simply because they'd decided, foolishly IMO, to make it a 300-turn game, and they knew there wouldn't be time for that kind of distraction or for anything except a race to the finish line. But since I don't like to play that game anyway, and don't have to, well . . .

 

[Dida]

Some of the ideas contained in Col2 is pretty interesting, would be a very nice addition to the main civ4 game. I think this should have been a civ4 expansion.

 

[Ringtailed]

Colonization had its fair share of problems. Like, the computer surrounding me with dragoons so I can't improve my tiles unless I declare war on them. I used to get so mad at it, I'd scream.

C4C improved on a few of these issues. But in exchange, Firaxis decided for some reason to strip away the game's flavor and depth. It was a poor trade. They shouldn't have fixed the parts of the game that weren't broken unless it expanded on their strategic depth.

Some of the ideas contained in Col2 is pretty interesting, would be a very nice addition to the main civ4 game. I think this should have been a civ4 expansion.

Really? Which parts of C4C would you want in Civ4? The only thing I can think of is the economic model, which is too micro-intensive without heavy modification.

 

[Öjevind Lång]

Colonization I definately had it's flaws. This new version is a much tighter and well designed game, in spite of some bugs that are always going to be there in games.

The reason that I prefer Col 1 is because it had atmosphere. The game had multiple phases. You weren't even thinking about independance when you got off the boat. There was much more of a challenge from other Europeans and natives, and you simply can't include all of that in a 300 turn game. The independance game here is a good game and I enjoy it, but that was only a part of Colonization I.

My feelings exactly. Col I would probably not be very enjoyable now to those who never played it back then; but it was longer and had more diversity than the present game. In addition to that, Col II is full of stupid and annoying bugs and bad decisions, such as tying the increase of the king's army to your production of liberty bells. In the old game, the king simply increased his army over time, so the sooner you declared independence the better, but you never had to be afraid of producing efficient colonies with the aid of liberty bells. And you went through several phases before it was time to prepare for the revolution - just as happened in the history of our world.

I think the best system for the expansion of the REF would be the old "time" one plus extra additions every time you annoy the king by refusing a tax raise or a request for a contribution. That would make some sense.

I think there are quite a few things in the original game that should be brought back. When it comes to the scouts, I can think of the following list: fewer treasure troves, even with the FFs who help you find even more of them with better results. The old game had the message "You find nothing but rumours" until you had acquired a certain FF that "made all rumours true". That is to say, until you had acquired that FF (was it Coronado?) you mostly didn't find a treasure, though sometimes it did happen. Now you always get a treasure, it seems. Far overpowered. Also, back then you had better let your scout escort the treasure to the nearest city, because otherwise it would probably get ambushed and stolen by the Indians. Then there was the "goody hut" which lead to the message "Your expedition has disappeared without a trace!" And then there was the one where you found a burial mound and got the following alternatives: "Let's search it for treasure" and "No, stay away from those!" If you did search the mounds, sometimes you found a treasure, sometimes you only found cold and damp chambers and sometimes you annoyed the local Indian tribe so much for desecrating the tombs of their ancestors that they hated you for many turns afterwards and very probably killed your scout before he could get back to safe territory, and anyone else from your colonies they encountered. If they lived nearby, they also attacked your settlements and tried to kill you. And there was the goody hut where you found a member of a lost European colony who gladly joined your civilization. And the Fountain of Youth, which I loved and which could be brought back with perhaps 3 extra colonists instead of so as not to make it overpowered.

The new result where your scout gets promotions from a goody hut is from Civ IV, of course, and a good feature to include.

Also, in the original game the Indians sometimes did mischief even if they were pleased with you. Some young braves decided that it would be cool to attack one of your settlements, and if they succeeded, they burned down something (usually the docks or your recently finished sawmill) or stole a lot of stuff from your warehouses. They even stole timber! (LOL. Why not let them set fire to it, the way they loved doing to the docks?) They loved stealing horses - a realistic feature. Sometimes, they killed one of your settlers, but that mostly happened if the whole tribe (or a nearby village) had become suspicious and angry. They often cooled down after such an attack.

But the Indians very seldom destroyed a settlement completely. They only way that could happen was if they made reepated attacks and killed off one colonist at a time until there was nobody left in the colony. That only happened if there was a full-scale war going on between the indians and that European colonizing power. But the "Indians attack and raze the city!" feature in Col II has been lifted straght from Civilization. I'm a bit doutbful about it, since it seems to benefit you against the AI European civs. Unbalanced.

In old Col, your newest settlements, the ones where you hadn't achieved 50 % revolutionary spirit, sometimes spawned United Empire Loyalists who attacked your garrison and, if successful, captured the town and held it for the king. The settlement had a pro-king defence bonus based on how many of the population supported him. Not only is that a rather neat game feature, but it is also historically accurate. The typical American "Tory" was not an aristocrat; the American elite were not against the revolution, they led it. The loyalists were usually members of marginalized groups such as ethnic or religious minorities, or backwoodsmen who hated and distrusted "the east coast establishment" (the concept existed even back then), so if the east coast establishment was against the king, by gum, they were for him!

A final observation: Why on earth did the people at Firaxis decide to actually dumb down the game and make it shorter? Very unlike them. What I should really like to see is a game the same length as the original one, with plenty of time for the various phases: your first settlements and exploration, fighting the Indians or managing to reach an accommodation, fighting back encroaching fellow Europeans (this was often an issue throughout the game after the first few turns and ensured that you always kept your settlements well garrisoned unless you wanted to lose them), building up your economy and infrastructure and then deciding that the king's army was becoming alarmingly large, and his tax demands really too much, so you had better get ready to rebel against him.

 

[Öjevind Lång]

Oh, that reminds me. Another good change: in the old Col, none of the other European colonists had to fight a WoI. You'd get a notification that the King of whatever was considering granting his colonies independence. You had to declare independence yourself before he did, or you'd lose. It's a nice touch to have them face the same thing you do, but it needs a lot of work, because they suck against their own king just as much as against you. They need to have a chance to win their war.

The rest is just color. I'd love to have intervention by another European power in the WoI, and some of the old quests. The King making you go to war and giving you military units was a cool thing from the old game. It seems to me the developers sacrificed a lot of that stuff simply because they'd decided, foolishly IMO, to make it a 300-turn game, and they knew there wouldn't be time for that kind of distraction or for anything except a race to the finish line. But since I don't like to play that game anyway, and don't have to, well . . .

I agree 100 % with what you say. The rush towards the Declaration of Independence hurts the game; a lot of really good features have been sacrificed for it. That means that in some respects, the new Col is actually less sophisticated than the old one. And I speak as one who has been playing the old Col on and off all these years. I vividly recall all the things that are wrong with it, from the 256 units limit to the feature where dragoons from rival civs always start to surround your settlements in the hope of provoking you into going to war with them. And, of course, the idiotic way you got new colonists simply by capturing enemy soldiers.

One bad thing both versions have in common is that the developers still haven't bothered to remove the remnants of the Royal Navy from the map after you have gained your independence. A new one is that even though you can now still trade with Europe (if you chose monarchy on independence), you still have to pay the king's taxes, and you can't trade in the goods he banned.

Actually, I think that after you gain independence, you should be able to trade with Europe regardless of which option you chose in your declaration of independence. Monarchy should get an additional benefit - more emigration, perhaps? Something else has to been tweaked there, by the way: at present, you no longer gain emigration points in Europe after independence; your score for new emigrants is frozen in time. Properly, the cross production should move back to promoting emigration after victory, for the befefit of those who might enjoy playing on for a bit afterwards.

 

[Öjevind Lång]

To compare the two games is difficult. If your criteria is how they stand up against other games of their era then the original game would win hands down. However if you compare the two directly, head to head as they now stand, then I would rather play Col2 any day. No single bug in the present game is as bad as the trade route bug in the original which meant I had to move every wagon train manually for the whole game.

Was there a bug affecting that? I never had (or have) experiences of one. I like the very simple mechanism in Col I whereby you can set up and edit trade routes. It's one of the menus at the top of the screen, but then, you know that; you talk about a bug. Setting up and editing trade routes is much less convoluted in Col I than in Col II, where you have to go into various city screens to tell every single city governor concerned what to import and export. Of course, in Col I sometimes the wagon trains make strange detours, but you certainly do not have to supervise all wagons manually. Perhaps your computer has some kind of trouble with that mechanism, but none of mine, at least, ever did.

 

[ZippyRiver]

So they removed the wagon train # = colony # cap?

I actually liked how that was set up. Endless piles of wagons is just screaming for a ... cheese corporation. (grin)

 

[JonBrave]

I hadn't actually remembered/clicked that Col I had no time limit/no date! I do know you had time to set up a whole trading empire; in most ways that was the whole point.

I'm on Turn #80 of my first Col II game (will I even finish it or play again?) and only just getting going. So far as I can see, with the turn limit + prices in Europe + taxes and no way to unembargo + marginal terrain improvements + mostly tobacco squares + apparently Natives pay so much for guns, there seems no point/time in bothering to set up an economy in this one.......

 

[BlastDuke]

Was there a bug affecting that? I never had (or have) experiences of one. I like the very simple mechanism in Col I whereby you can set up and edit trade routes.

The automated wagon trains in Col1 do not unload goods currently affected by a boycott. This is clearly a bug.
Confirmation: I have just tested it in DosBox, bug still exists in Col1 (even in my version 3.0).

 

[Greybriar]

Is there any Col I player out there who even thinks this is as good as the original?

At this point I am of the opinion that the original Colonization is a better game then this new version. Like Lord Shadow, "I wanted little more than a graphical update. Perhaps a better interface and a tweak here and there, but nothing more."

It seems to me that they took a simple and enjoyable game and made it into something complicated and less fun. I feel if they had stuck to fixing the problems with the original (pathing, trade routes, etc.) and updating the graphics, most everyone would have been quite pleased.

As it stands now, I like the Revolutionary War mod included with the vanilla Civ4 better than the Revolutionary War you prepare for and wage in Civ4Col. That is not to say I don't like playing Civ4Col, but as it stands now I doubt I will ever finish a game of it.

 

[kooboo]

I don't, but it's not quite as simple as it being worse.

Colonization 2 seems a little confused in how it is constructed. If it had been a straight up graphical update, I would have been happy, but it's not. If it had been a proper sequel, rebuilt from the ground up, I would have been happy too.

The problem, as I see it, is that it is a remake of Colonization 1, with some changes. Some are good, and some are bad. Some are just buggy. But there's not enough.

I enjoy Colonization 1, but while I do honestly think it had fewer things wrong with it than Colonization 2, I am fully aware that my enjoyment of it comes through nostalgia. If I had never played it before and sat down to play it today, I probably wouldn't like it. Games have come a long way since its release, and there's not enough there in the first game for it to be commercially released today.

As such, when I play the original, I lower my expectations, and forgive the bad graphics, the bad AI, the lack of multiplayer, the hoops I have to jump through to get it to run.

If Colonization 2 was just a graphical update, I could still do that, though anyone who had never played the original wouldn't see it that way.

But it's not, so I come to Colonization 2 looking at it through the same eyes that I use to appraise games like Team Fortress 2 or Red Alert 3. What I see is a game with too few features, and too many problems.

Colonization 2 falls right in the middle when it comes to being a sequel. Too much changed to be a simple remake, but not good enough to stand on its own as a game released in 2008.

It failed to meet the expectations of my inner seven year old, and it failed to meet the expectations of my outer twenty year old. Which is a damn shame.

This is EXACTLY how I feel about Colo2 as well.

 

[Öjevind Lång]

The automated wagon trains in Col1 do not unload goods currently affected by a boycott. This is clearly a bug.
Confirmation: I have just tested it in DosBox, bug still exists in Col1 (even in my version 3.0).

Yes, but it still sounds like something that is easy to deal with. Just edit your trade routes and or/ locate your wagons and unload them as needed. It's not exactly something one has to do every turn, just something to remember to check each time one has turned down a tax raise. And anyway, a tax raise always means one has to check one's trade routes because now things have changed. No need to shift sugar to a harbour city any longer!

 

[Civsassin]

Col II is not a bad product IMHO. I never played Col I, but I've enjoyed this one. I am learning new strategies as I go, and it seems fairly robust. There are obviously some flaws that will certainly be addressed in a patch (or two), so keep the feedback coming. I'm sure our feedback will be reviewed and incorporated into the fixes. Keep playing and try different things, and I think may of you will find that game play is very flexible. Wait for the mods to start coming, and you may find one that brings the game more to your liking. Col II has strong fundamentals that will enable modding and patching to be an effective tool.

 

[Bad Brett]

That only happened if there was a full-scale war going on between the indians and that European colonizing power.

One time the Arawaks destroyed my very first colony after just a couple turns. Most of the time they would tie your Scout up for target practice as well, even if you didn't live near them.