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Comment by galfarragem | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see a remastered Colonization. Colonization IMO is way more original than Civilization and one of the best games ever made.

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Have you looked at FreeCol?

http://www.freecol.org/

There is a Civilization IV: Colonization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_IV:_Colonization). I found it to be a terrible remake compared to my memories of the old Colonization, though those may be rose-tinted at this point.

Yes, that just plays basically as a Civ IV scenario, not a real Colonization game.

Perhaps it's because my introduction to the Civ series was made by the original Colonization, but for me that will always be the most addicting of all the Civ series.

I don't think it's fair to call the original Colonization a Civ, it was a completely different 4X with its own principle and gameplay.

I liked it because it played much more tactically than Civ, with much more micro-management of individual colonies, and way more interesting interactions with non-civ players (native tribes)

Sadly that style doesn't seem to have been pursued much, or if it was I missed those, the 4X I've played since mostly seem to follow Civ's relatively remote/high level investment in cities.

It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or concurrent environment. The economics of the game are really cool, but balancing that against other players or modern-quality AIs (the AIs in the original are basically nonfunctional) is a tricky task. I think the focus on making 4X games into multiplayer experiences is kind of suboptimal, but I think that's also what the playerbase seems to want.

Also, the topic itself is kind of messed up for a video game, in that doing it justice is really difficult. Like, in retrospect, while I dearly love the game, Colonization is deeply problematic in the worldview it pushes (while the manual for the game is notable in being pretty up-front about the shitty behaviors of the colonial powers, the game itself plays as straight as "in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue") and I think, in order to ethically create a similar game, you have to challenge the default assumptions a lot more. And that's a really tough line to walk: on one hand, you do want to make it possible to dispace and wage war on the natives, because that happened, but that comes with its own ethical problems that I don't think a game is very good at exploring (and yet I feel needs to explore in order to treat the historical topic appropriately). The only nod in Col to the general shittiness of European colonial powers in the New World was a score penalty when you burned native villages, and that's not nothing, but it also isn't a lot given the game they were working with.

The best idea I came up with was the synthesis of a fake Wikipedia article after the end of the game, but that's going to be more of a lecture after-the-fact than a conscious exploration of player decisions as they progressed.

It's a really, really hard one to tackle. I'd love to take another crack at it someday.

> It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or concurrent environment.

Makes sense. I only play solo 4X so I don't really see that, or care.

> Also, the topic itself is kind of messed up for a video game

The topic is a side-issue, you could make a similar micro/tactical 4X with a completely different settings, it's not like all 4X have the same premises. Hell, not even all Civs have the same premise (if you consider Alpha Centauri and Beyond Earth Civs anyway)

You totally could attach it to a different setting, but figuring out that setting is in itself tricky! Like, I think a bunch of the military dynamic in the game is tied to the pseudohistoricity of it. While it isn't strictly historically accurate that, for example, dragoons devolve into soldiers when defeated, there's a certain amount of concreteness to the concepts involved (okay, you lose your horses before your guns) that makes a lot of sense. So I think you could make a more micromanagement-focused 4X, but I don't think you could really learn too many lessons beyond the very general ones from Col in the process just because so many of the game concepts are so tightly tied to the historical context around it. (That's huge, huge praise for Col, btw. It uses its setting to inform game features, not to merely dress them up in the way that, say, Civ does.)

For another example of a game that sort of falls down when it becomes so unmoored from something we recognize as reality, I'd like to suggest Pandora: First Contact. In addition to just not being a super-great game, I feel like the fact that it relies on transposing "familiar" concepts to an unfamiliar environment and just totally falls over in the process. Ditto Beyond Earth. Alpha Centauri actively doesn't do that, but it was also designed by Brian Reynolds and he's a rather sharp individual. =)

> Like, I think a bunch of the military dynamic in the game is tied to the pseudohistoricity of it. While it isn't strictly historically accurate that, for example, dragoons devolve into soldiers when defeated, there's a certain amount of concreteness to the concepts involved (okay, you lose your horses before your guns) that makes a lot of sense.

Sure but I don't think that's a very important/interesting part of Col, and you could always have that with mounted or mechanised units in other settings. The most interesting parts of Colonisation to me were the management of cities, their very specific resources, the colonists/workers and their specialisations, and the necessary setup of trade/exchange links (both with AI and between your own colonies as you might have raw resource cities which are not amenable to extension and processing, so you'd have a small colony producing a ton of e.g. tobacco or sugar — either directly or through native allies — and a bigger one processing them into cigars).

The big sticking point I think would be Col's early reliance on the "mother nation" for economic needs (selling goods, raw materials and new colonists).

The remake that was built as a mod for Civ 4 didn't quite stack up, in my opinion.

Colonization was a fun game, though. I still load it up quite often on GOG.

I still play the game, like once a year ! The pixels look huge on a 27inch screen today, but hey, the game is still excellent

Agree I loved colonization too, a remake would really be great :)

Man, I used to love this on the Amiga 1200. In fact, I've just bought the iOS version because you mentioned it :)

One of the best things about the Amiga version was the music/soundtrack. It was such high quality, and always seemed to match perfectly what was happening in the game - from the jangly violins and upbeat folky "exploration" songs, to the mournful pipe music that played once a battle was dragging on a bit.

Another one of those games that taught me loads about the history of a situation, as much as it was loads of fun.

The only thing that wasn't fun is that the game seemed to corrupt floppy disk 2 every once in a while, even when it wasn't write-enabled.

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