Breathing some life into this old thread...
I'm very much into Colonization after a long break. Essentially, loved the original game from 90s (played it on Mac which btw had much better graphics than PC version back then) then rediscovered the Civ4 version when it came out. Like many, I was disappointed, did some light modding for myself to make it more playable, but eventually trailed off to other games for many years. Tried Civ5 last year, didn't like it, so went back to Civ4 instead recently (mostly Fall from Heaven mod, which is amazing), then checked out what had happened (mod-wise) to Colonization in all these years. Just finished a TAC game (loved it) and am now trying RAR (loving it so far, but will try to do some minor tweaks for myself).