Review anarchistica 1/5 · May 7, 2019
Civ IV made worse
Civ IV: Colonization suffers from many of the same problems as the vanilla Civ; Combat is awful, your starting location is far too important, exploration is dull and city development feels overly restrictive. But Civ IV did have that hilarious tech tree, religions and unique buildings. All of those are missing here. Instead there are simplistic interactions with natives and …
Civ IV: Colonization suffers from many of the same problems as the vanilla Civ; Combat is awful, your starting location is far too important, exploration is dull and city development feels overly restrictive. But Civ IV did have that hilarious tech tree, religions and unique buildings. All of those are missing here. Instead there are simplistic interactions with natives and a 'homeland' that basically functions like a market. You constantly have to travel back and forth to sell stuff and recruit new colonists.
It all feels too clinical. You upgrade buildings to be more effective. You recruit special units to be more effective. And development the same for every single building. Combat is even worse. There are a handful of land units and after over 210 turns i still don't know why i can't recruit cavalry (i do have horses). The (handful of) ships are nearly identical, most have 5 strength, the others 3 and 4. The difference between them seems negligible - strength and HP are the only combat stats. Diplomacy isn't much better.
You kinda feel like you're going through the motions, slightly improving your colonies with +3 bonuses. You're supposed to defeat the motherland at some point, but even on the lowest difficulty their strength seems absolutely ridiculous. And there's a 300 turn time limit too, ugh.
Almost every other 4X game i've played is better than this, including the vanilla Civ IV. You're basically paying a ludicrous €20 for a mod that makes Civ IV worse.