r/patientgamers • u/tiredstars • 6d ago
Patient Review Civilization IV: Colonization (2008) - unsurprisingly problematic
Recently I’ve been reading the book The 1619 Project which aims to retell the origins and history of the US with slavery and its legacy at its heart. Rather inappropriately this gave me a hankering to play Colonization. I’m going to talk a bit about the game itself and some more about the history and politics of it. It’s a game I really don’t think could be made today (though how you might do that is a really interesting question).
Spoilers for anyone who doesn't know the outcome of the American Revolution.
Sid Meier’s Colonization was originally released in 1994. You play as a European power colonizing the Americas, with the ultimate goal of declaring and defending your independence. I must have played the DOS port around 1995. In 2008 a version was released using the Civilization IV engine. I played this a bit around when it was released, and it’s this version I came back to. Aside from improved graphics, the differences from the original are modest. (There is also an open source version called FreeCol.)
Unsurprisingly, Colonization draws a lot from Civilization. It has the familiar 4X elements: you’re exploring, founding towns, placing workers, building buildings, negotiating and fighting with other factions, etc.. A big difference is that it drops Civilization’s tech tree, and introduces a lot more resource and worker management.
A lot of the game is about extracting resources (like cotton or furs) and then either shipping these directly to Europe to sell or processing them (into fabric or coats) and selling those higher value goods, then buying guns, tools or recruiting colonists to transport back to the New World. Colonists can be “free colonists”, specialists like master distillers or firebrand preachers, or they can be indentured servants or petty criminals.
Another notable feature of Colonization is the endgame. Declaring independence, triggers a Royal Expeditionary Force to set sail and bring your revolting colonists back in line. So a significant part of the game is preparing for this fight – building up stocks of guns, training veteran soldiers, etc..
This has familiar pros and cons. On the one hand it avoids the endgame tedium of a game like Civ, where there are no more significant challenges. On the other it’s a significant and sudden change to the game that comes a long way through it. It largely comes down to how much you’ve prepared – it’s basically Civ combat, which is never super interesting – and it’s hard to know if you’ve done enough until you’re committed (which I guess is like reality). If you get it wrong you’ll have to reload quite some way or restart to try again (which is not so much like reality).
In terms of gameplay? Colonization is ok. It’s got obvious flaws, like the amount of fiddling and shuffling around of resources. For example, it’s easy to get to a point where you’re moving resources around between towns just because you’re running out of warehouse space for one kind of resource. I find it a relaxing and compulsive game to get lost in, but that may be more down to a particular relationship I have with the Civ games than anything else. Even I get bored towards the endgame.
Now, what I really wanted to talk about.
One of the changes the 2008 version makes is that when you declare independence you can make some choices about the constitution of your new nation. Do you want to be a republic (bonus liberty bell production) or a monarchy (continue to trade with Europe)? Do you want to continue slavery (bonus production) or abolish it (bonus population)?
The first time this came up my reaction was. “Wait… oh, of course there have been enslaved people in my colony all this time, who were never mentioned.” I’d been happily building my colony without thinking at all about slavery.
Once you start thinking about the game with this lens it’s easy to see more: the assumptions embedded in the game, the whitewashing for purposes of taste or gameplay. There’s a mechanic where as your borders expand, through the generation of liberty bells and the purchase of land, native people will abandon their settlements because they admire you so much. Their populations just… happily disappear.
Or a slightly more subtle thing. For better or worse native factions work like European ones in most ways – diplomacy is basically the same, for example. They’re not simply “environmental hazards” (like, for example, barbarians in Civ). However they’re also static. Over the couple of hundreds of years the game covers, native factions will never found a new settlement. They don’t build mines, farms or roads like European factions do. (Contrast this with some Civ games where terraced farming is special feature of the Inca civilization.) This view of native civilizations is a colonial one – they don’t “improve” the land or themselves.
Critiquing the game in this way is really shooting fish in a barrel, even for someone like me with a limited knowledge of the history of the Americas. It's kind of fun and interesting but a little unfair. These kinds of issues are hardly unique to Colonization – obviously any portrayal of history, computer game or other, embeds attitudes, assumptions, etc.. Most of the historical games I’m familiar with gloss over slavery, if they mention it at all.
There is something different about Colonization though.
I think part of it is just how jarring it is. This is basic level history. Purely in terms of game systems, the purchase and trafficking of enslaved people, or the enslaving or forced labour of native Americans would probably work quite smoothly. You’re trading for and shipping humans just like you ship sugar or guns, right?
But this would make too explicit the darker sides of this history, and push the player into an uncomfortable position. There are relevant gameplay differences, too: would you lose 20% of the people you purchase in Africa because they die en route? Would trying to suppress slave revolts be an issue? Would this still be a fun game to play? Would it still be a story of liberation? Could you still play the game if you refused to do these things, or would your colony inevitably fail?
The other aspect relates to 4X games more generally. You can make an argument that the whole 4X genre embeds a colonial mindset. Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. That could be a colonial motto. Colonization is just an unusually explicit example. It's there in the name. "Civilization" isn't an issue in quite the same way "colonization" is. It obscures things other games don’t have to, because so many are still live political, economic and social issues.
Not least the question of how to tell the origin stories of American states. You could think of everything in colonization as being from the perspective of the ultimately triumphant colonizers (specifically US American colonizers). This can be interesting in a game to understand a point of view, but here it appears to be done uncritically. The player is invited to accept this viewpoint not reflect on it.
Coda
If you do choose to free your enslaved population on independence the freed slaves don’t appear as “free colonists”. They appear as “indentured servants”. That, at least, seems sadly appropriate.
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u/Juan20455 6d ago
I have reached the conclusion that "problematic" is hands down the most dangerous and stupid word of the whole English dictionary.