Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization free Mac Game

The player's selection of nationality, made at the start of the game, affects the colony's standing in the world: the English receive an immigration bonus, the Dutch enjoy trade bonuses, the French diplomacy edge encourages more favorable relations with native tribes, while the Spanish Conquistador bonus favors conquest against the natives.

In addition to single-player campaigns, the new game has a multiplayer component.

Civilization IV: Colonization has many new gameplay mechanics. When starting the game, in addition to choosing a starting European nation, a player chooses between two governors, each with different advantages. In addition, national borders is a gameplay concept taken from Civilization IV. This means that rivals cannot pass into each other's land unless they have an open borders agreement — or they have declared war.

Unlike the original Colonization game, nations cannot recruit the same founding fathers. Each founding father is recruited by one and only one nation/player. Moreover, founding fathers will only join nations with certain criteria, namely a certain level of "points" obtained in various categories (political, military, exploration, religion, and trade).

After the player declares independence, players draft a constitution determining the government style of their independent nation. For example, if a nation chooses a monarchical system, then it can still trade with Europe during the war for independence.

Development

The game runs on an upgraded version of the Civilization IV engine with changes including enhanced graphics, streamlined code, and redesigned interfaces. With these enhancements, Colonization requires video cards that support pixel shader 1.1.

Reception

The single victory condition – declaring and winning a war for independence – has been both criticized and accepted by reviewers. Another criticism of the game is that it only has four playable colonial powers. The exclusion of Europe's other prominent colonial powers has been called a "limiting" factor in the game.

Variety video games reporter and reviews editor Ben Fritz criticized the concept of the game in his blog because of the injustices that occurred during the colonial time period. Firaxis has responded to Fritz's blog post with the statement, "the game does not endorse any particular position or strategy - players can and should make their own moral judgments." Trevor Owens contributed to the conversation in an article that considers the game's usage of different, arguably problematic elements, asking "wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, any game about that period in the Americas be racist and offensive, if it were even remotely faithful to that time period?"