![]() tobacco or sugar - either directly or through native allies - and a bigger one processing them into cigars). The most interesting parts of Colonisation to me were the management of cities, their very specific resources, the colonists/workers and their specialisations, and the necessary setup of trade/exchange links (both with AI and between your own colonies as you might have raw resource cities which are not amenable to extension and processing, so you'd have a small colony producing a ton of e.g. Sure but I don't think that's a very important/interesting part of Col, and you could always have that with mounted or mechanised units in other settings. While it isn't strictly historically accurate that, for example, dragoons devolve into soldiers when defeated, there's a certain amount of concreteness to the concepts involved (okay, you lose your horses before your guns) that makes a lot of sense. ![]() > Like, I think a bunch of the military dynamic in the game is tied to the pseudohistoricity of it. Alpha Centauri actively doesn't do that, but it was also designed by Brian Reynolds and he's a rather sharp individual. In addition to just not being a super-great game, I feel like the fact that it relies on transposing "familiar" concepts to an unfamiliar environment and just totally falls over in the process. It uses its setting to inform game features, not to merely dress them up in the way that, say, Civ does.)įor another example of a game that sort of falls down when it becomes so unmoored from something we recognize as reality, I'd like to suggest Pandora: First Contact. So I think you could make a more micromanagement-focused 4X, but I don't think you could really learn too many lessons beyond the very general ones from Col in the process just because so many of the game concepts are so tightly tied to the historical context around it. You totally could attach it to a different setting, but figuring out that setting is in itself tricky! Like, I think a bunch of the military dynamic in the game is tied to the pseudohistoricity of it. I'd love to take another crack at it someday. It's a really, really hard one to tackle. The best idea I came up with was the synthesis of a fake Wikipedia article after the end of the game, but that's going to be more of a lecture after-the-fact than a conscious exploration of player decisions as they progressed. The only nod in Col to the general shittiness of European colonial powers in the New World was a score penalty when you burned native villages, and that's not nothing, but it also isn't a lot given the game they were working with. And that's a really tough line to walk: on one hand, you do want to make it possible to dispace and wage war on the natives, because that happened, but that comes with its own ethical problems that I don't think a game is very good at exploring (and yet I feel needs to explore in order to treat the historical topic appropriately). Like, in retrospect, while I dearly love the game, Colonization is deeply problematic in the worldview it pushes (while the manual for the game is notable in being pretty up-front about the shitty behaviors of the colonial powers, the game itself plays as straight as "in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue") and I think, in order to ethically create a similar game, you have to challenge the default assumptions a lot more. ![]() I think the focus on making 4X games into multiplayer experiences is kind of suboptimal, but I think that's also what the playerbase seems to want.Īlso, the topic itself is kind of messed up for a video game, in that doing it justice is really difficult. The economics of the game are really cool, but balancing that against other players or modern-quality AIs (the AIs in the original are basically nonfunctional) is a tricky task. In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days I don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or concurrent environment. It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite Meier 4X title).
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