Colonization is much like a more-developed version of Sid Meier's previous game Civilization (1991) in visual design and handling, but the two have marked differences in gameplay. Instead of forging a nation from nothing, the player manages the cross-Atlantic expansion of an established one in the service of the Crown. As the colonies become more self-sufficient, their relationship with the colonial power declines from being beneficial to harmful, and to win the player must ultimately declare independence and defeat the Royal Expeditionary Force in battle.[2]
Gameplay
The main map (DOS version)A colony producing furs, tobacco, coats, and cigars, among other things (DOS version)
The game begins in 1492. The player controls the colonial forces of either England, France, The Netherlands, or Spain; the other powers are then played by the computer. Each nation has unique abilities that favor certain strategies. There is a choice between a historical map (America) or a randomly generated map (the New World), and players may also construct their own map with the included scenario editor.
The journey begins with a ship and two units arriving at the new world; as the ship moves into the unknown, the map is revealed. Subsequently, the player makes landfall, explores the New World, meets the indigenous Indians, builds colonies and buildings, and improves and works the surrounding land. The ship can return to Europe to collect more colonists and sell and buy items.
The colonists can work the immediate land around the colony. Different map squares can yield different resources; for instance, most squares can produce food, while only forests can yield lumber. Harvested resources from the land, such as cotton or tobacco, can be manufactured and converted into commodities, such as cloth and cigars, and either used or sold. The prices of commodities in Europe fluctuate depending upon supply and demand. With money, the player is able to buy goods, fund faster building construction, recruit new colonists, or buy ships and artillery. The king may at different times raise colonial taxes to pay for a war taking place in Europe or for some other reason.
The player is also required to protect their colonies from potential invasion by equipping and stationing soldiers. Moreover, the player manages their citizens, educating them in various skills to increase their productivity in areas such as farming, gathering of resources, or manufacturing.
Players may send missionaries into Indian villages to convert them to Christianity. The Indians may accept and convert, or they may refuse and burn the missionary at the stake. If another colonial power has already established a mission in a village, a missionary may attempt to denounce them as heretics with an equal 50/50 chance of success or failure.
When waging war, the player has a basic colonial army consisting of militiamen, artillery, cavalry, and ships. Weapons and soldiers can be purchased from Europe; however, to win independence, the player will need to develop an indigenous armaments industry. Indians will initially only have braves and no horses or guns; over time they may obtain them via trade or defeating colonial forces in battle. Guns and horses must be available in a colony to equip citizens and turn them into soldiers. If a colonial power captures a colony, it will remain in their possession unless it is retaken by force. Indians will destroy a colony if they capture it.
Colonies are most often built on the coast; although they can be built inland, the player must build wagons to transport goods between colonies. In addition, wagons are necessary to trade with inland Indian villages. Goods may be sold to rival colonial powers, sent back to Europe for sale, or sold to Indian villages.
Colonists come in four types. The first is the basic free citizen, who has no particular skills but may be assigned to any job. If a citizen performs the same job for a certain length of time, the game may upgrade him to a specialist in that particular job. The second is the indentured servant. He is suitable for performing unskilled labor, but less productive at skilled trades. With enough time at a particular job, he may become a free citizen. The third is the petty criminal. Like the indentured servant, petty criminals are only useful for unskilled labor. Petty criminals can eventually become free citizens through military service. If they survive enough battles eventually they are promoted to indentured servant followed eventually by free citizen. All free citizens can become veterans by winning enough battles.
Citizens may also travel to an Indian village and learn a skill from the natives such as tobacco farming. The Indians will not permit petty criminals to live among them, but will teach free citizens and indentured servants. In addition, missionaries may convert Indians to Christianity and convince them to live in the player's towns, where they are a little better than free citizens at working the land (and unlike specialists, are better at any type of it), but poor at industrial trades.
Specialists are citizens who are trained and skilled at a specific profession. These can be free citizens, indentured servants, or petty criminals who learned the profession by doing the job, through education, or by visiting an Indian village (except criminals), or they can be pre-existing specialists (obtained via European immigration). Some professions, for example growing cotton, sugar and tobacco, can only be learned in Indian villages or in a colony, and are unknown in Europe. Eventually the player can build schoolhouses where they can teach their citizens to become specialists in specific professions. The player may at any time unassign a specialist and turn him back into an ordinary free citizen.
Horses can be imported from Europe. If any colony has two or more horses, they will breed up to a maximum number. An unskilled colonist (including a petty criminal) who enters a neutral or friendly Indian village on horseback may (rarely) be killed, may be given a gift, or may be promoted to be a specialist scout. Seasoned scouts have a better chance to meet with a favorable reaction when entering a village, and an improved chance of discovering a fabled "Fountain of Youth" when investigating ancient ruins—which will provoke a sudden influx of potential colonists of all types to the player's European port. Further, mounted soldiers are more effective and have a better survival rate than dismounted infantry.
Each colonial power has certain bonuses that make them unique and different from each other. Aside from European colonial powers, the NPC powers include eight Native American tribes, in four main categories. Each Native American settlement can convert one regular colonist into a specialist. More advanced tribes (Incas and Aztecs) live in larger cities. Analogous to "Wonders of the World" in the Civilization series of games, social and industrial advances are achieved by the addition of "Founding Fathers" to the "Continental Congress", which are gained by generating a sufficient number of "Liberty Bells" through the colonial pride of settlers. These are all named after real historical figures, such as Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Pocahontas.
One main driving impulse in Colonization is the harvesting of natural resources, such as lumber (for building), ore (for manufacturing), and food (for population growth). Squares on the map have basic values of resource output (depending on the type of terrain and if a river runs through it), but certain "prime" squares have double or higher output values, making them highly desirable. Pioneers can, at the cost of expending tools, create roads on tiles, increasing their yield and removing terrain movement penalties, or remove features such as forests to make room for agriculture. They can also "plow" flat terrain to increase agricultural yields.
The ultimate goal of the game is winning independence from the mother country. When the player is producing sufficient Liberty Bells, he may choose to declare independence. He then has to defeat most of the King's army to win, which is not an easy task as the royal army and navy are individually more powerful and usually more numerous than the player's colonial forces, although the King's troops are unused to fighting in the New World and are more easily defeated in rough terrain. Other colonial powers may help with the enterprise, analogous to the French intervention in the American Revolutionary War. Of course, if the player has a large enough treasury, another foreign power may provide military aid in the form of mercenaries.
Development
Computer Gaming World's "The Rumor Bag" column reported in April 1994 that "MicroProse is working on a game like Sid Meier's Civilization that covers the Age of Colonization".[3]
Sales of Sid Meier's Colonization surpassed 350,000 copies by September 1997.[8]
In 1996, Colonization was ranked the fourth best game of all time by Amiga Power.[9] It was named the 52nd best computer game ever by PC Gamer UK in 1997.[10]
Next Generation stated that "MPS Labs borrowed heavily from classic hits of the past to create a surprisingly addictive title with a flavor all its own."[6]
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a 4X video game, considered a spiritual sequel to the Civilization series. Set in a science fiction depiction of the 22nd century, the game begins as seven competing ideological factions land on the planet Chiron ("Planet") in the Alpha Centauri star system. As the game progresses, Planet's growing sentience becomes a formidable obstacle to the human colonists.
The Colony of Virginia was an English, later British, colonial settlement in North America between 1606 and 1776.
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States refers to the institution of slavery as it existed in the European colonies which eventually became part of the United States. Slavery developed due to a combination of factors, primarily the labour demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies, which had resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were victims of enslavement by European colonizers during the era.
The colonial history of the United States covers the period of European colonization of North America from the early 16th century until the incorporation of the Thirteen Colonies into the United States after the Revolutionary War. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic launched major colonization expeditions in North America. The death rate was very high among early immigrants, and some early attempts disappeared altogether, such as the English Lost Colony of Roanoke. Nevertheless, successful colonies were established within several decades.
Redemptioners were European immigrants, generally in the 18th or early 19th century, who gained passage to the American Colonies by selling themselves into indentured servitude, to pay back the shipping company which had advanced the cost of their transatlantic voyage. British indentured servants generally did not arrive as redemptioners, after the early colonial period, due to certain protections afforded them by law. Redemptioners were at a disadvantage because they negotiated their indentures upon their arrival in America, after a long and difficult voyage, with no prospect to return to their homelands.
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered voluntarily for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or imposed involuntarily as a judicial punishment.
A headright refers to a legal grant of land given to settlers during the period of European colonization in the Americas. A "headright" includes both the grant of land and the owner that claims the land. The person who has a right to the land is the one who paid to transport people to a colony. Headrights are most notable for their role in the expansion of the Thirteen Colonies; the Virginia Company gave headrights to settlers, and the Plymouth Company followed suit. The headright system was used in several colonies, including Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Most headrights were for 1 to 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) of land, and were granted to those who were willing to cross the Atlantic and help populate the colonies. Headrights were granted to anyone who would pay for the transportation costs of an indentured laborer. These land grants consisted of 50 acres (0.20 km2) for someone newly moving to the area and 100 acres (0.40 km2) for people previously living in the area. By ensuring the landowning masters had legal ownership of all land acquired, the indentured laborers after their indenture period had passed had little opportunity to procure their own land. This kept a large portion of the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies poor and led to tensions between the laborers and the landowners.
The tobacco colonies were those that lined the sea-level coastal region of English North America known as Tidewater, extending from a small part of Delaware south through Maryland and Virginia into the Albemarle Sound region of North Carolina. During the seventeenth century, the European demand for tobacco increased more than tenfold. This increased demand called for a greater supply of tobacco, and as a result, tobacco became the staple crop of the Chesapeake Bay Region.
Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy video games, first released in 1991. Sid Meier developed the first game in the series and has had creative input for most of the rest, and his name is usually included in the formal title of these games, such as Sid Meier's Civilization VI. There are six main games in the series, a number of expansion packs and spin-off games, as well as board games inspired by the video game series. The series is considered a formative example of the 4X genre, in which players achieve victory through four routes: "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate".
Conquest of the New World is a video game produced by Interplay Productions and released in 1996. It is a strategy game, involving one or more players either by hotseat, on LAN, modem, or even PBEM (play-by-email). The game starts in the year 1493 and deals with the discovery and conquest of the Americas.
John Casor, a servant in Northampton County in the Colony of Virginia, in 1655 became one of the first people of African descent in the Thirteen Colonies to be enslaved for life as a result of a civil suit.
Anthony Johnson was an Angolan-born man who achieved wealth in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia. Held as an indentured servant in 1621, he earned his freedom after several years and was granted land by the colony.
FreeCol is a 4X video game, a clone of Sid Meier's Colonization. FreeCol is free and open source software released under the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later. In 2023, the FreeCol project reached its 1.0 release, after twenty years of development.
Slavery was practiced in Massachusetts bay by Native Americans before European settlement, and continued until its abolition in the 1700s. Although slavery in the United States is typically associated with the Caribbean and the Antebellum American South, enslaved people existed to a lesser extent in New England: historians estimate that between 1755 and 1764, the Massachusetts enslaved population was approximately 2.2 percent of the total population; the slave population was generally concentrated in the industrial and coastal towns. Unlike in the American South, enslaved people in Massachusetts had legal rights, including the ability to file legal suits in court.
Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization is a remake of the 1994 turn-based strategy game Sid Meier's Colonization. Players control settlers from one of four European nations – Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands – that are trying to conquer/colonize the New World in the period 1492–1792. The victorious player is the first to build up his colonies and army, declare independence from the mother country, and defeat the military force that the king inevitably sends to crush the rebellion.
During the British colonization of North America, the Thirteen Colonies provided England with an outlet for surplus population as well as a new market. The colonies exported naval stores, fur, lumber and tobacco to Britain, and food for the British sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The culture of the Southern and Chesapeake Colonies was different from that of the Northern and Middle Colonies and from that of their common origin in the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Indentured servitude in Pennsylvania (1682-1820s): The institution of indentured servitude has a significant place in the history of labor in Pennsylvania. From the founding of the colony (1681/2) to the early post-revolution period (1820s), indentured servants contributed considerably to the development of agriculture and various industries in Pennsylvania. Moreover, Pennsylvania itself has a notable place in the broader history of indentured servitude in North America. As Cheesman Herrick stated, "This system of labor was more important to Pennsylvania than it was to any other colony or state; it continued longer in Pennsylvania than elsewhere."
Indentured servitude in British America was the prominent system of labor in the British American colonies until it was eventually supplanted by slavery. During its time, the system was so prominent that more than half of all immigrants to British colonies south of New England were white servants, and that nearly half of total white immigration to the Thirteen Colonies came under indenture. By the beginning of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, only 2 to 3 percent of the colonial labor force was composed of indentured servants.
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide, is an official expansion pack for the turn-based strategy video game Civilization: Beyond Earth. It was released on October 9, 2015.
Irish indentured servants were Irish people who became indentured servants in territories under the control of the British Empire, such as the British West Indies, British North America and later Australia.
↑ Flynn, James; Owen, Steve; Pierce, Matthew; Davis, Jonathan; Longhurst, Richard (July 1997). "The PC Gamer Top 100". PC Gamer UK. No.45. pp.51–83.
↑ Get Ur FreeCol by Alec Meer on Rock, Paper, Shotgun"it’s an remarkable accomplishment, and I’m very glad it’s out there. [...] FreeCol, though, is here right now, it’s free, it’s stable, it’s pretty much feature-complete and unlike its parent it has multiplayer" (June 12, 2008)
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