Colonization: Create a New Nation

Colonization is a game I spent far too much time with as a kid. I rarely played it all the way to the technical endgame but had such fun just doing crazy stuff and setting up weird supply chains.

Anyway.

Let's get going.



My plan is for the first bit of this LP to go through the pre-built "America" map, which is kind of sort of accurate to North and South America. We likely won't get all the way to independence but to avoid weird issues I'd like to get familiar with the overall idea of the game.



Easy difficulty for this part...



Next you choose what European power you hail from.



Each one has a bonus as follows (text is directly from the manual):

English: During the Age of Discovery, England was steeped in religious strife and dissension. the colonies became a safe haven for religious groups looking for freedom from persecution. Accordingly, the English produce a greater number of immigrants than the other nations.

French: The primary strength of the French colonial endeavor lay in their ability to cooperate with the native population. Alliances and trade agreements were made and maintained between French colonists and native tribes for many years. While these relationships were not without violent incident, they were largely successful. The French have the ability to live among the natives more peacefully than other nations.

Spanish: Spain had recently completed a centuries-long war of re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and had an abundance of military-minded young men spoiling for further conquest. The Native American population offered a good target for just such adventures. The Spanish ruthlessly destroyed countless Amerindian civilizations in their relentless search for gold, silver and other plunder. Accordingly, the Spaniards receive a 50% attach bonus when attacking Indian villages and towns.

Dutch: During the Age of Expansion, the Dutch gained their independence from Spain, and quickly began to extend their economic influence globally. They established the Dutch East India Company, which dominated trade in the East Indies. They subsequently attempted to do the same in the west by establishing the Dutch West India Company. These large-scale trading concerns were made possible by the rulers of the Netherlands, who were primarily of the merchant class. Accordingly, the Dutch economy is more stable than the other European powers. This is reflected by the consistency of prices in Amsterdam. Also, the Dutch start the game with a trading vessel.

I chose the Dutch for this part because I want to spread out quickly to expose everyone to as much as possible and the starting ship makes that easiest.

A note here: As you probably noticed from Spain's bonus, you can attack and destroy native villages. You can also generate missionaries to "convert the natives". I really hate these parts of American history so we will not be doing these things. There are cases where you do get into a war with the natives (other European powers turn them against you) that usually can't be avoided, but I am not setting out to do that. Deal with it.

After choosing your homeland the game has a brief decree from the ruler:



And an animation of your ship being loaded:



And then you appear in the middle of the ocean! When you start the game, everything is assumed to be ocean (super dark blue) and the ship needs to move around and explore.



The choppier looking waters below return the ship to Europe (more on that later), but we're going to look for land! These are the main windows but there isn't much to do right now. The map is in the upper right and is all black since we haven't discovered anything, and there's a few details in the unit window below it.



The game has little woodcuttings for major events.



As helpful man mentioned above, we currently have two types of units:





I found a nice spot and threw these two off the boat then took off to explore. A lot of new things are showing up in this shot!



The two circular tan areas are sacred burial grounds. These can contain nothing, lost colonists, graves, angry bees, etc.
The picture of the deer mean a lot of fur can be generated in those areas.
The gemstones in the very bottom mean it's a good site for ore.
Trees mean it's a good lumber site.
Fish mean fish.
There are various symbols like this, they're pretty self-explanatory and all mean one resource is prevalent in that area.

Resources are depleted over time. The amount of time depends on difficulty level, since we're on easy I'm not concerned about it.

As I move the units around to explore we meet the Iroquios:






Wagon trains will be really important later on!

Also, I send my pioneers into one of the burial grounds, we find some random dudes:




While wandering around we also meet the Cherokee:


At this point the map looks like this:


The pioneers were the active unit and happened to blink as I took the screenshot, they're next to the deer and lumber symbols. Which is a good spot for the first colony! The first one also needs to have water access so ships can dock and trade.





Below is the main colony screen. Our pioneer used up tools and is now a normal boring gray colonist.



The game automatically assigned him to trapping, but I think we should change things up. Colonists have a lot of options, but it depends on the land and the raw materials present (to make cloth you need cotton, to grow cotton you need plains, etc.).



I make him a lumberjack 'cause he's okay.

Now that we have a colony we get to start building our continental congress! These guys give us bonuses that help build the colonies and ultimately declare independence.



Peter Minuit: Director-general of the Dutch West India Company's Colony in America, he bought the Island of Manhattan from the Indians for $24. Once Peter Minuit joins your Continental Congress, you no longer have to buy land from the Indians.

-Our current colony was far enough away from a village that we didn't have to worry about this, but as things get crowded this may come up. Land with better resources costs more money.

Hernando de Soto: Ruthless Spanish Conquistador who led the first European expedition into the Southeastern areas of North America. He landed in Florida and explored much of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. In search of gold, he is credited with the slaughter of thousands of Native Americans. With de Soto in your Congress, the line of sight of all units increases to two squares, making all units able to see as well as scouts.

-Very useful for the start of the game. Whenever he doesn't show up until the end of my game when I've explored the whole map I'm annoyed.

Hernan Cortes: Spanish conqueror of Mexico and destroyer of the Aztec empire, Cortes is the paradigm of Conquistador- a master of conquest and plunder. When Cortes joins your Congress, conquered native settlements always yield treasure- and more of it.

-We're likely not doing this.

Pocahontas: Powhattan Indian princess who mediated tensions between the English colony at Jamestown and the Powhattan Confederacy of Virginia, Pocahontas married John Rolffe, an Englishman, which led to a period of peace between the Indians and the English. When Pocahontas joins the Congress, all tension levels between you and the natives are reduced to content and from this time forward all Indian alarm is generated only one half as fast.

-We absolutely don't want to use this reset right now, so don't choose her! This is incredibly useful further into the game.

William Brewster: One of the Pilgrim Fathers and framers of the Mayflower Compact, William Brewster served as the first Pilgrim minister, and was instrumental in organizing the party that sailed on the Mayflower. With Brewster in the Congress, you can select which of the three available immigrants in the recruitment pool is driven to the docks whenever religious unrest causes an immigrant to move from the recruitment pool to the docks. In addition, criminals and servants no longer appear on the docks to immigrate.

-Normal colonists generally produce 3 units of material per turn, servants produce 2 and criminals only 1. Excluding them and being able to select who wants to come to the colonies next is really useful since there always comes a time when you need a certain skill.


For the LP I'm going to put these up to a vote. However, the possibilities change every time you load the save so I'm just going to leave the game open for a few hours/overnight for voting and then move on. What do people want?

Oh man, I put hundreds of hours into this game. So awesome.

I vote for William "Punky" Brewster.

I vote for the Trade Advisor.

Also, super excited to see this Let's Play

Haha the character models.

de Soto sounds good. Get your explore on.

This game has amazingly bad art. It's sort of fascinating how much better a lot of the 320x200 DOS stuff holds up in comparison to the higher res 640x480 things.

Anyhow, de Soto sounds like a winner.

De Soto it is! Next update will probably be Thursday or Friday.

I didn't think the art was bad looks like the early workings of what their character designs would become in Civ Rev and such...

i always pick desoto and cortez, but i also play the spanish (to keep them out of the game).

This was the first game i learned how to hack, because all of the game's rules are in text files that are easy to modify. My ships were taking 99 space moves all game =)

Man, i want to play this again.

That's not a bad technique at all, the Spanish are crazy. Whenever I meet them before I get the Continental Congress guy who makes all Europeans offer you peace I'm terrified they're just going to wipe me out.

I'd never heard of this game before, and so far it looks like a (slightly) less conquest-oriented version of Civilization, but in a way that would probably just be a mod these days. Do they break any further away from the Civ formula as the game goes on?

The latest version of Colonization was just a big mod of Civ4.

Having never played either I'll leave the question as to whether they are different to more knowledgeable tyrants

The basic interface and mechanics are pretty darn similar, yes. The immigration angle and the way the end-game is structured though makes for a very very different experience when you actually play them though.

The recent remake was, in fact, built on the civ 4 engine, but it was also completely terrible. none of the charm of the original (which was built off of civ 2), and horribly broken mechanics to boot.

Colonization is a great example of a mod done right- it keeps the good core elements of civ, in exploration, city building, and combat, and builds a really robust resource trading and diplomacy system over the top of it.

Alright, in this update we won't actually accomplish a lot due to me being absent-minded, but oh well.

Our choice for Continental Congress doesn't take effect immediately so we'll be stuck with normal sight for a while.

Which is why I'm very excited to see this right after my choice:



(If we had picked Brewster we would have been able to pick one of three colonists, instead the game picked the Scouts for us).

Let's look at the Old World screen for a bit.





Since we picked the Dutch there likely won't be a lot of variability in prices during this game. For other powers prices change like crazy.

Recruiting gives us the option of more colonists (the next round of religious unrest will make one of these three available for free):



Purchasing can get us guns and ships:



Training is like recruiting but more specific (and expensive):



I grabbed the Master Carpenters. Since our colony creates a ton of lumber each turn we want someone really good to use the lumber.

Back to the New World!

The colonists we found in the burial ground have made it to our colony, and now we need to put them to work.





Because we're producing 12 lumber we need someone to turn the lumber into hammers! Until our carpenter gets here this is the new guy's job. Note that he'll only make 3 hammers a turn.



Hammers go toward large colony-related projects. For now I elect to build a wagon train, because trading is useful!



Our ship makes it to the New World, and I decide to drop the Scouts off in the area to the South.



New friends!



And then I get this message:



And realize that I forgot the Carpenter on the boat even though I went right past the colony. Gah.

So because we can't hold more lumber, I switch that guy to a pioneer! All this requires is giving him tools.



I move him East of the colony and have him clear the forest. This will make it easier to farm, and if you're lucky the land under the forest will be good for cotton/sugar/tobacco. Also note that I dropped the carpenter off on the other side of the land. He'll be fine.



We get some new recruits and prices change on a few items (I won't be screencapping all the price changes):



Finally, the carpenter makes it to the colony and the wagon train is complete! Our next project will be a warehouse so we can store more things:

On the exploration front, we've found Central/South America, the Aztecs and a new ocean!:









Finally, as we wander some more we find a silver deposit:



Silver is a huge freakin' deal and we'll want to build a colony that can mine that.

Back at the colony, the forest is cleared, and we have enough coats to take a shipment back to Europe:







I sell the coats and the price immediately drops.



The good news is that we got the initial higher price for our entire shipment. This is an argument for only selling 100 (the max) of something, that way you sell as much as possible before the price goes down.

Oh hey, I remember playing a lot of this game! I was all about the rum. Get your distill on!

Can you rename towns? First is a terrible name for a colony, acurate though it may be. May I sugest something a little more historical? How about Dicksnbuttsburg?

Finally, Congress time!





Apparently dude carries a bloody sword at all times. Classy.



The additional burial ground bonus wasn't in the manual and I forgot about it. The negative possibilities for burial grounds are that they contain aggressive soldiers who attack you or that the natives become furious that you went into the area and attack you. One thing to note is that even after he joins the neutral "you find nothing but rumors" result can still happen.

Finally: Time to pick someone new!



Peter Minuit: Director-general of the Dutch West India Company's Colony in America, he bought the Island of Manhattan from the Indians for $24. Once Peter Minuit joins your Continental Congress, you no longer have to buy land from the Indians.

-He was in our last round, and as I said before buying land will matter later on.

Ferdinand Magellan: A Portuguese explorer, he was the first European to lead an expedition that successfully circumnavigated the globe. Although Magellan himself did not complete the voyage, this leadership and daring made it possible. With Magellan in the Congress, the movement allowance of all naval vessels is increased by one, and the time it takes to sail from the west map edge to Europe is shortened considerably.

-This is useful, but not a huge deal. I also don't know how much we'll be sailing from the West.

Francis Drake: England's greatest seaman of the Elizabethan period, Drake was an incredibly formidable privateer who terrorized the Spanish main with a fleet of fifteen ships, then rescued a floundering English colony. When Drake joins the Congress, he increases the combat strengths of all your privateers by 50%.

-We don't have a privateer yet, but 50% is a huge bonus.

Benjamin Franklin: Colonial and later US Statesman, Franklin became the first postmaster, printer and foreign ambassador in the English colonies. He was also one of the first great American scientists. Franklin, as ambassador to Europe in the Continental Congress, brings coherence to the colonies' relations with foreign powers. When Franklin joins your Congress, the King's European Wars have no further effect on the relations between powers in the New World, and the cost of negotiating with other powers is decreased. Also, all Europeans now offer peace to you, though at some cost. It becomes your choice to go to war.

-We haven't run into other Europeans yet, but they can decide to attack you from the start. Having them offer peace is incredibly helpful.

Juan de Sepulveda: Spanish philosopher and "humanist", Sepulveda argued for harsh treatment of the natives. He based his reasoning on the proposition that natives were incapable of ruling themselves because of their savagery; the fact that they were unable to resist invasion by the Spanish prove it... His presence in the Congress increases the chance that subjugated Indians "convert" and join a colony.

-What a dick!

You can't, but that will be the name of the next town! If there isn't a character limit, I forget.

Magellan

Ben Franklin for the win!

Sure I couldn't help you out with that?

Minuet or Sepulveda!

Ben Franklin

Yes. He's just the best.

You were tiebreaker and I need to go, so Ben Franklin it is!

I'm about to head out of town for a long weekend, so next update will probably be a while out.