Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a disclaimer, I love Civ IV, and have loved every game Sid Meier has done to date, including the original Colonization. So it's actually quite painful for me to give this game such a dismal rating. In a nutshell, the game is horrendously flawed. When you start playing it (and this is where I think most people are reviewing the game), it appears to actually be quite fun - you develop an economy, trade with Indians, make heaps of money, expand inland, build huge trade networks which make even larger heaps of money, reinvest the money into buying specialists who can refine your raw goods and produce *even more* money, and so on, all with a rather simplistic military system strapped on to allow raiding other colonies or stealing their cargo at sea. The problem is, NONE OF THIS MATTERS. It's an awesome economic sim, where economics has nothing to do with winning the game. In fact, the larger and more successful your colony is, the harder it is to rebel, and the larger the expeditionary force you'll have to defeat to successfully win Independence. And successfully declaring Independence is the *only* way of winning the game, and you have to do it within 300 turns, which means that most of that uber-colony management stuff that makes it so great should never get used if you're trying to win the game. In fact, 90% of the game is useless if you want to win. You basically have two options in the game: 1) Play it like a colony building sim, and trade and make lots of money, but lose, or 2) Win, but ignore all the economic stuff that makes the game great. The problems are manifold - Independence can only be declared if you have "liberty bell production" at a certain rate, per person in your colony. All of your colonists (including your army, and people out building roads) count against this, but you can only have three units per city producing liberty bells. Even with every single one of my cities producing maximum liberty bells (with a Founding Father bonus, newspapers in every city, and three Elder Statesmen specialists in every town), I couldn't rebel. In fact, my Independence counter slid backwards, since my colony was doing great and expanding rapidly, all of which counted against the ability to go into rebellion. The only way to win is to keep a small colony (or have lots of small cities) and burst liberty bell production - another screwed up mechanic is that the longer it takes you to rebel (i.e., the total number of bells producted), the larger the Royal Expeditionary Force gets -- and it grows exponentially. You can literally be making no headway (or going backwards, as I was, since my colony was expanding) but the REF will expand exponentially until you have next to no chance of being able to defeat the thousands of units coming your way. Contrary to all logic and common sense, this is how I could have won: in order to boost Independence to 50%, I could have just killed off all my colonists, slaughtered my specialists, and just had nobody left alive but statesmen and my army. Then, with my colonists all pissed off at the king, for whatever reason, since I killed their next door neighbors and crippled their economy, could have bursted Statesmen, hit 50% Independence, and steamrolled their weak military since I wouldn't have produced bells up until that point. It makes no sense, and I refuse to play it that way. It's really painful to say, but Firaxis really screwed up royally when they developed the mechanics for this game. They set one goal to the players -- develop an economically successful colony -- which is actually counterproductive to the real goal -- declare independence and defeat the REF. As a side note - the way the original Colonization did it worked differently - the more money the King got in taxes, the larger the REF got, which actually made some sort of common sense. There's plenty of other issues as well: -There's next to no reason to be mean to Indians - they're like these fairy godmothers that give you free resources, train your colonists, and serve as massive sources of money. -There's next to no reason to be mean to the other colonies. Since you can do everything you want in the game with 1 to 3 cities (and cities take up half the space they do in Civ), there's really no competition for land in this game. There's also no military victory; in fact, if you waste your time fighting the other colonies, you're pretty much guaranteed to lose the game. Worse, you have to pay your king off in order to go to war. -When Indians like you so much (via a culture push) that they convert their cities to your cause, they destroy their city and all commit suicide. If that doesn't make any sense to you, you'd be right. -There's exponential decreases on everything in the game - colleges train settlers slower and slower over time, churches recruit less and less people, taxes go up meaning you get less and less money, prices of cannons go up meaning you can afford less and less. It gets to the point where you say, "What's the point of it all?" -City defense is pretty much pointless. While there's all sorts of things to boost your defense percentage while in towns, the REF has units which get 150% to attack towns, meaning that all that stuff is useless, since they just slaughter you in a town. What's the point of waiting 50 rounds to train a guy to be a fisherman in a game with only 300 rounds overall? This game will continue to be deeply flawed until Firaxis or some fans come out with a patch for it overhauling the mechanics. IMO, it needs the following: Complete overhaul of the REF / Revolution mechanics. A bit more detail on the military units. Maybe allow buying Man O' Wars, or building forts, or capturing cannons. Have money actually mean something. Economic, Military, and Loyalist victory paths. Fix the rather stupid Constitution process - most of the choices have only one answer that players are interested in. Again, I'm kind of amazed at reviewing a Sid Meier game this low, but in essence, don't trust the high reviews of this game - most of them haven't played it enough to see how badly designed the game is.