Loved that game! Fiddled around and figured out how to hack what price goods sold for and to change who (indentured servants vs. skilled trades people) was willing to cross the ocean.
My dad was obsessed with this game while I was growing up and I was so proud to learn how to use DOSBox so that he could play it again. A very formative game for me and I get a nostalgic itch to revisit it every few years. Just seeing the title, I can hear the music playing.
It's only hard if you actually try to engage with all of the game mechanics.
- Play as the Dutch to get their four-item capacity ship
- settle near Ore
- build only one or two cities, and make them as populated as you can. Wagon train food and raw materials in if you have to.
- produce Tools and Guns, nothing else.
- Early on, sell shiploads of basically anything from Europe to the tribes to jumpstart your economy. You don't need any other dealings with the tribes or other Europeans.
- Put your carpenters to work building fortresses, universities, and cannons.
- Once you have a university, start training up soldiers. Clear all special skills not involved in growing food or producing guns so you have an large number of civilians to train up.
- Put a tall stack of professional soldiers and cannons in your fortresses.
After that, play Civ 1 and follow the chariot swarm strategy. I forget the exact strategy, but it's something like this:
- build your cities only two squares apart
- research only until you can build chariots, then set Science to 0%. (This takes all the fun out of the game for me, but winning on Deity mode is nice too)
- alternate between building colonists and chariots only. I think you build barracks as well
- build cities until you have a dense network of ~50 closely packed cities, each very small. Then churn out chariots.
- swarm everyone else with chariots ASAP. Hope that every enemy is reachable through dry land, or you're cooked.
You can beat the game with the max number of computer players on the highest difficulty this way... if your chariot swarm doesn't cause a buffer overflow.
- Research only towards monotheism and swarm with crusaders
- More interesting variation to break the game: go for republic as soon as possible, only build cities near water and other high trade squares. Put luxury to 80% and max out trade in cities by putting production to water/max trade squares. Build temples, market places and aqueducts and reach 1M population well before 0AD. Once population is maxed, put tax to 80% and instead of building, just buy what you need including enemy cities and barbarians. This leaves you a bit vulnerable, but when it works out it's a lot of fun. You can have massive cities built on isolated island etc.
E: Also, if you manage, build colossus, observatory and Newton's college in the same city. By the end you'll churn out new advances every 2 turns.
The page author doesn't seem to be a big fan of the Civ IV total conversion, but I actually had a lot of fun with it over the Christmas break (the Steam version is included in a bundle with Civ IV). I haven't played the original though, so I'm not attached to any features that might have been dropped.
when I was a kid, I was frustrated by the difficult choices of colony placement: "here, I get ore, but one tile over there's bonus food!" and wished I could create a "perfect" map.
This was possible in the Civ IV: Colonization version! However, it appears that the more productive you are, the bigger the Royal army is. I wish I understood the precise mechanism of that.
Off topic but, Phantom wallet blocked this domain when I clicked on the link as being 'malicious'. I also found out I still had that extension installed on this browser profile.
The original domain has been suspended, but the article was insightful and of geek/hacker interest. The link can be replaced by the web archive, as has been done by someone else in the comments.
The Digital Antiquarian's analyses of these issues is always worth reading. Thanks for sharing!
(I liked Colonization back then, but I now acknowledge the issues. Even back then I thought it was bizarre that the French, Spanish and Dutch were expected to echo the experience of the US!).
https://web.archive.org/web/20250513173440/https://peyre.42w...
Loved that game! Fiddled around and figured out how to hack what price goods sold for and to change who (indentured servants vs. skilled trades people) was willing to cross the ocean.
Link appears to have become spam for some reason.
Congrats to HN on colonising the website!
The website was suspended by it's hosting platform.
HN hug of death?
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My dad was obsessed with this game while I was growing up and I was so proud to learn how to use DOSBox so that he could play it again. A very formative game for me and I get a nostalgic itch to revisit it every few years. Just seeing the title, I can hear the music playing.
This was one of the hardest Civ games for me. It's so much harder than Civ 2 or +
It's only hard if you actually try to engage with all of the game mechanics.
- Play as the Dutch to get their four-item capacity ship
- settle near Ore
- build only one or two cities, and make them as populated as you can. Wagon train food and raw materials in if you have to.
- produce Tools and Guns, nothing else.
- Early on, sell shiploads of basically anything from Europe to the tribes to jumpstart your economy. You don't need any other dealings with the tribes or other Europeans.
- Put your carpenters to work building fortresses, universities, and cannons.
- Once you have a university, start training up soldiers. Clear all special skills not involved in growing food or producing guns so you have an large number of civilians to train up.
- Put a tall stack of professional soldiers and cannons in your fortresses.
- declare independence and win.
Nice! I'm going to try this
After that, play Civ 1 and follow the chariot swarm strategy. I forget the exact strategy, but it's something like this:
- build your cities only two squares apart
- research only until you can build chariots, then set Science to 0%. (This takes all the fun out of the game for me, but winning on Deity mode is nice too)
- alternate between building colonists and chariots only. I think you build barracks as well
- build cities until you have a dense network of ~50 closely packed cities, each very small. Then churn out chariots.
- swarm everyone else with chariots ASAP. Hope that every enemy is reachable through dry land, or you're cooked.
You can beat the game with the max number of computer players on the highest difficulty this way... if your chariot swarm doesn't cause a buffer overflow.
Next Civ2:
- Research only towards monotheism and swarm with crusaders
- More interesting variation to break the game: go for republic as soon as possible, only build cities near water and other high trade squares. Put luxury to 80% and max out trade in cities by putting production to water/max trade squares. Build temples, market places and aqueducts and reach 1M population well before 0AD. Once population is maxed, put tax to 80% and instead of building, just buy what you need including enemy cities and barbarians. This leaves you a bit vulnerable, but when it works out it's a lot of fun. You can have massive cities built on isolated island etc.
E: Also, if you manage, build colossus, observatory and Newton's college in the same city. By the end you'll churn out new advances every 2 turns.
I always enjoyed Colonization a lot more than the Civ series. Maybe it was the more constrained and narrative setting?
It's a fascinating time in history for a whole lot of reasons, I got a lot of enjoyment from Sid Meier's Pirates! set in that era too.
The page author doesn't seem to be a big fan of the Civ IV total conversion, but I actually had a lot of fun with it over the Christmas break (the Steam version is included in a bundle with Civ IV). I haven't played the original though, so I'm not attached to any features that might have been dropped.
Side-note, I had a performance bug in Civ IV: Colonization. The longer I played, the laggier it got. I would have to restart the game to recover.
I vaguely recall the embedded Python being accused of poor performance. I wonder if that's why they switched to Lua in later engines.
when I was a kid, I was frustrated by the difficult choices of colony placement: "here, I get ore, but one tile over there's bonus food!" and wished I could create a "perfect" map.
This was possible in the Civ IV: Colonization version! However, it appears that the more productive you are, the bigger the Royal army is. I wish I understood the precise mechanism of that.
Off topic but, Phantom wallet blocked this domain when I clicked on the link as being 'malicious'. I also found out I still had that extension installed on this browser profile.
yeah, and if you click "home" at the top, you get a suspended-website.com redirect. Odd.
I'm getting that redirect just clicking the main link here on HN..!
Hard not to like it after the enchantment of playing Civ.
Why is this flagged?
The original domain has been suspended, but the article was insightful and of geek/hacker interest. The link can be replaced by the web archive, as has been done by someone else in the comments.
FWIW the link works perfectly fine here (Win10, Chrome, Germany).
This link is broken for me, but here's a different writeup on the same game.
https://www.filfre.net/2020/12/ethics-in-strategy-gaming-par...
The Digital Antiquarian's analyses of these issues is always worth reading. Thanks for sharing!
(I liked Colonization back then, but I now acknowledge the issues. Even back then I thought it was bizarre that the French, Spanish and Dutch were expected to echo the experience of the US!).
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