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polypheus
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United Nations of Earth
Jun 2001
time: 21:33
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I am very excited about Civ IV but in reality what I really want is a "Colonization II" that spans the whole of history. Colonization implemented many features and ideas that I really liked and which many of us are asking for in Civ IV. Some of these features deserve a second look:
1. People & Equipment Model (versus Civ's unit model)
Colonization uses discreet peope for everything from tile improvement to collecting resources (food, ore, sugar, etc) to constructing buildings to creating finished products (muskets, rum, artillery, ships, etc). You didn't build mustketman or dragoons, you equipped a person with muskets and/or horses and you manufactured muskets, you didn't build musketman as such.
2.Quantified Resources
Colonization uses quantified resources (including food) and goods. If you placed a person on farmland to farm, he would collect so many units of food per turn which would be deposited into the city's warehouse. Same for sugar, ore, etc. Raw materials could be converted into units of finished goods (sugar->rum) (ore->tools-->muskets), etc.
3. Physical Trade Routes
All resources and goods needed to be shipped for sale to earn money overseas and to distribure resources . And this was done using physical units such as Wagon Train or Ships which of course could be sunk or intercepted/pirated. You could also distribute food so that a city was not tied to its own local supply.
4. Differentiated Factories and Cities
Colonization had many specialized buildings that you needed to manufacture thing. Some buildings came with the every city you founded but others had to be built in order to manufacture certain things. To produce ships, you needed "Ship Yards". To produce armaments like artillery and muskets, you needed "Armory". And to produce ships and muskets you had to physically move the finished good tools (produced from mined ore) in the right quantity into the city producing either ships and/or muskets.
Comments:
It is quite clear to me that it is Colonization that got it right and not Civ. I wished that Civ II and Civ III were more based on Colonization than on Civ I.
It's "people model" is vastly superior to the Civ's hodgepodge of city-worker, physical worker, and military unit model. By delinking people and equiptment, you sort of had a "unit workshop" implementation. Equip a person with tools and he became a tile improvement worker , equpit a person with horse and he was a scout, equpt him with muskets and he was a musketman, equipt a musketman with horses and it became a Dragoon, etc.
It's finished goods and trade routes implemented a far more detailed and sophisticated economic/trade model than Civ III's simplistic one resource per entire nation and imaginary trade route model.
Colonization's differentiated cities also is better than Civ's city-state model. In Civ, each city stands on its own and in every Civ city, you tended to build all the buildings (temple, cathedral, granary, etc) and each city could build any unit and stands on its own. In Colonization, this is not the case at all. While you could, you wouldn't and didn't need to build every type of building in each and every city. It didn't make sense to do that. This made the Colonization "Empire" resemble a nation much more realistically as opposed to Civ's city-state, generic city model,
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17-01-2004 05:37
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