Posted May 31, 2018
I still love this game. But there are few gotchas with it.
You discover all this lovely LAND with your Scouts in the early-mid part of the game. But you can't make plans to settle it all.
1. Maximum number of colonies is 48. I think I read this over on http://www.colonizationfans.com/. Haven't confirmed it myself. A certain number (10?) are reserved for rival European colonists.
2. Maximum number of units (for you as the player) is 255. Luckily I came across this while buying a Frigate over in Europe - the game quite gracefully told me the max units had been reached, so I just refused the deal and didn't lose anything. Might be really annoying if it's a vital Artillery that fails to spawn, perhaps when you've rush-bought it.
This limit seems quite confused - I don't know whether there are sublimits for naval, colonist and wagon units. I disbanded a Merchantman and could buy a Frigate. Later during the war of independence, artillery units and newly-born colonists spawned just fine, even though I hadn't further reduced my population.
3. The default "end turn when entering colony" for Wagon Trains is something that always annoys me. The focus flips to somewhere completely different, so that you have to click back to where this happed to do unloading (perhaps to solve an urgent shortage), or loading (so that I can remember what I was intending that Wagon to do when the next turn comes around).
Also means that for long-distance travel, you have to build "bypass" roads around colonies if your colonies are close together, so that the Wagons can use their full movement points.
An optional order "end turn in this colony, so that you can load/unload here" (SPACE, like for other units) would have been much better.
Don't know if the Civ IV: Colonization is better on these points. But that seems like a very different game anyway.
You discover all this lovely LAND with your Scouts in the early-mid part of the game. But you can't make plans to settle it all.
1. Maximum number of colonies is 48. I think I read this over on http://www.colonizationfans.com/. Haven't confirmed it myself. A certain number (10?) are reserved for rival European colonists.
2. Maximum number of units (for you as the player) is 255. Luckily I came across this while buying a Frigate over in Europe - the game quite gracefully told me the max units had been reached, so I just refused the deal and didn't lose anything. Might be really annoying if it's a vital Artillery that fails to spawn, perhaps when you've rush-bought it.
This limit seems quite confused - I don't know whether there are sublimits for naval, colonist and wagon units. I disbanded a Merchantman and could buy a Frigate. Later during the war of independence, artillery units and newly-born colonists spawned just fine, even though I hadn't further reduced my population.
3. The default "end turn when entering colony" for Wagon Trains is something that always annoys me. The focus flips to somewhere completely different, so that you have to click back to where this happed to do unloading (perhaps to solve an urgent shortage), or loading (so that I can remember what I was intending that Wagon to do when the next turn comes around).
Also means that for long-distance travel, you have to build "bypass" roads around colonies if your colonies are close together, so that the Wagons can use their full movement points.
An optional order "end turn in this colony, so that you can load/unload here" (SPACE, like for other units) would have been much better.
Don't know if the Civ IV: Colonization is better on these points. But that seems like a very different game anyway.
