About time too. I have high hopes it’ll just be a refined version with modern potential, but leave the core game alone.
They’re publishing this as a Mod / Expansion for Civ IV, which is kind of odd, but not bad news for me as I already own a copy even though I don’t like it.
Colonization is the first PC game I ever played, and I loved it then like I love it now.
My PC may be eighty times faster than back then but a great game never looses it’s shine. Until they do a remake, it turns out great with new and sexy graphics with none of the bugs that come from running old games on new systems.
I didn’t like Colonization when it came out the first time. Regardless, I will buy it and probably not like it again. That is the power that Sid Meiers wields.
For the record, Game Informer says that you will not need Civ4 to run Colonization. I expect it’s using the Civ4 engine and just plugging in Colonization rules and stats. I can’t quite wrap my head around how they’re going to make that work, but I’m excited!
I haven’t gotten around to picking up CIV IV yet (although I just found my CIV III disk when I was unpacking, and am valiantly resisting the urge to load it onto my current computer. And I never got around to trying Colonization when it first came out. But this sounds interesting. I noticed in the OP link that it requires a video card that supports “pixel shading” so I guess I’d better make sure that mine does (I haven’t been doing much gaming the last few years, and when I bought this computer I wasn’t too concerned about the video card).
Civ IV is worth a shot, LurkMeister. I enjoy it – especially the way it does away with the painfully monotonous endgames from Civ III (move 900 tanks, stack by stack…). It forces you to scale your empire. Even though cities still occupy single squares, it’s more like your cities are just the seven or eight largest cities in your empire, surrounded by suburbs and lesser cities that you don’t need to manage. Critical trade resources are more important, and the religion mechanic is fun and interesting.
As for Pixel Shader 1.1, don’t worry: it is a ridiculously low bar. If you don’t have a graphics card that will run this, you can get one for less than $25.
Really? I heard about the new release a month ago and they said it was going to be a stand alone game. I’d get a cite but my ‘puters givin’ me 'tude right now. I’ll check again later.
I was kinda hoping they’d have an option to “Win” the game without declaring independence from the Mother Country.
I loved the original Colonisation- I still have a copy installed on my computer- but I didn’t necessarily want to declare Independence and then get into a Big War with the Mother Country. I wanted to play the game as Sid Meier’s Imperialism, expanding all over the New World and kicking the ass of any other European or Native power who was silly enough to get in my way, all whilst planting the British (or French, or Spanish, or Dutch) flag everywhere in the process…
Colonization (the DOS version) was one of my first PC games…I still have the original 3.5" floppies. I loved it enough I went out and bought it for Windows 3.1 on CD when I made the big change. I’ve been a bit more than peeved over the past three or four years that I haven’t been able to run it on my XP or Vista machines.
I read about the new Colonization about a week ago - and have been having small fits of “c’mon…hurry up…isn’t it fall yet? How about now?” ever since. I downloaded FreeCol last week to try to fill the void - still not the same.
Run Colonization using one of the DOS emulators. Works just fine.
I never really bothered with it, because while it was fun, I much preferred playing Europa Universalis if I wanted to play pretend colonizing. *Age of Empires III * also has an interesting take on the concept.
However, *Colonization * using the Civ IV engine might well be worth speding some hundreds of hours buried in.
Oh, and for what it is worth, Civ III was the worst of the iterations; Civ IV is WAY better. If you like Civ III, then you definitely need to pony up for Civ IV. (Don’t worry about the pixel shader thing: Civ IV does just fine on my Dell E310 with it’s relatively old (now) Intel Graphics chipset).
I really enjoyed Freecol but it wasn’t near complete when I played it. I also enjoyed cranking up Colonization on my Amiga a while back. It’s a great game indeed and since I own Civ IV, the only PC game I own in fact, I am doubly certain I shall be purchasing the new Col. Yowzah!
