Colonization is kinda cool, cute maybe (?), but the math is too easy, even on the hardest difficulty. Once you get your early scouts out exploring you can get a galleon to transport your own big treasures, now you have 2 ships to buy tools and muskets from Europe and sell to indians almost always for profit. Then get 2 or 3 cities clustered together, most importantly to build newspaper and fort, then in rapid succession from all the capital you've built, buy out a bunch of muskets and horses, stick elder statesmen (one school helps this since they're expensive to buy outright) in the newspapers, then just stick your entire population into dragoon status, declare independence. All you have to defeat is the ground units and you're continuously spamming attacks with dragoons who are constantly promoted. The only real difficulty is where and how to store muskets and horses as you're building up to the climactic end, but you can park them in wagon trains or in harbored ships, and it's not like warehouse expansions are expensive.
So it becomes going through motions, and the only replayability is whimsical use of privateers or the challenge of balancing expert growers to factories, but that's not even really necessary because you get all the money you need exploring for treasure and selling to indians to win the game. You're actually making the game last longer if you accumulate more than 20ish dragoons by the time the war happens, and each turn longer than necessary lowers your score.