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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