Colonization, then. It looks like Civilization, it’s spelled like Civilization, it’s even controlled in a similar fashion to Civilization. In terms of the way it plays, though, it couldn’t be more different.

There’s no tech tree in Colonization, and no science rating. There’s no taxes (well, there are taxes, but they don’t go to you). No settlers. No city maintenance, no corruption, no happiness rating. In exchange for all of these things you get a relatively simple yet powerful economic system that forms pretty much the entire basis of the game. As a game about the colonisation of a new continent, focusing on the economy to the virtual exclusion of all else was the perfect way to emphasise just why people would voyage over thousands of miles of Atlantic ocean to settle in a strange new world: land, money and resources.

It’s this last one that provides the driving force for the first half of the game. Like Civilization, you start a game of Colonization with just a handful of units. You have a basic caravel for making landfall and for sustaining your initial trade links with Europe. On that caravel are a soldier for fending off unfriendly natives and a free colonist armed with tools, ready to strike the earth and found a new colony in the location of your choosing. Where exactly that location is is going to depend almost entirely on the resources surrounding it. Unlike Civilization you don’t get to work the “fat cross” of tiles around a town. Instead you just get the nine tiles immediately next to it. This makes good colony placement even more important than Civ; you have to pick a site where those nine tiles provide everything a growing colony needs. Food to keep the colonists alive. Wood to construct buildings and develop your industry. And – not essentially, but very definitely preferably – some form of cash crop that you can cultivate trade with Europe to buy new colonists and new equipment to expand your colonial venture.

Aside from food in the form of crops and fish, there are five types of raw resource in Colonization: wood, ore, tobacco, cotton, sugar and furs. Forest squares hold wood and furs, hills and mountains provide ore, while the cash crops are to be found on the plains and savannah of America. When you found a colony you’ll get the usual basic resources from the colony square, plus one colonist – the one that founded it — that you can put to work in any way you choose, either gathering one of these resource types from the surrounding environment or processing them in one of the colony’s buildings. Wood is cut from trees by colonists working outside the colony walls, and then turned into raw production by others working in the carpenter’s workshop. Fur pelts hunted from the local wildlife are made into lovely coats at the fur trader’s house. Similar two-step chains exist for tobacco (cigars), sugar (rum) and cotton (cloth); the sole exception is the ore chain. Ore is smelted into tools at the blacksmith’s shop, and tools are very, very useful. Tools are used to equip pioneers to cut forests, drive roads and plow farms around the colony. You cannot build any kind of advanced building inside it with expending some tools. Finally, tools themselves may be used by a gunsmith to construct a third good: muskets. These aren’t so important at the start of the game, but good god are they critical to the end of it.

The point of Colonization’s economy is that you can at any time load any or all of these goods onto a boat and send them back to Europe to be sold in the markets there. The raw form of the resources gets you enough to live on at first, but the processed forms like cigars and rum are where the real money is to be made. The cash you get from this is your sole source of income, used for everything from rush-buying buildings to bribing educated specialists to make the trip over from the Old World so that they can live in a hovel in the new one. At the start of the game when you don’t have the industry to produce them yourself, money is used to purchase tools, muskets and horses from Europe. You can also buy more ships to transport a higher volume of goods — the starting caravel can carry a measly two slots’ worth, while an expensive galleon will do six and travel faster to boot – and even warships to protect your trade from the inevitable predations of the other colonial powers. The amount of money you have is the key brake on how fast you can expand. Colonies can be founded by any type of colonist without tools or any other special equipment, but it’s not much use if you can’t adequately populate it.

Speaking of population, the way Colonization deals with this is (I think) particularly neat. If one of your colonies manages to stockpile 200 food a new colonist will be born, but this barely ever happens until you’ve built yourself up a bit as a colonial empire. The real driving force behind your expansion will be immigration from Europe. Every so often a new immigrant colonist will arrive at the European docks, languishing there until you send over a boat to bring them to your rich new land of opportunity and adventure. Exactly what sort of immigrant you get is pretty much random, at first – anything from a dignified Elder Statesman to a wretched Petty Criminal who has been sentenced to penal transportation for his transgressions – but the key thing about these colonists is that they are “free”. You can pay to import specialists but the cheapest ones run a whopping 600-900 gold, and the most useful cost anywhere up to two thousand, making this impractical to do frequently. Most of your colonist workforce is going to be made up of these hopeful immigrants who just turn up on the dock, and the driving force behind their appearance is religious unrest in the mother country.

One of the first buildings you can construct in a newly-founded colony is a church. Stick a colonist in this church, and he’ll start producing crosses. If the colonist is a Firebrand Preacher, he’ll produce double. If you upgrade the church to a cathedral you get even more crosses. The crosses represent religious freedom in the new world, and make moving there a rather attractive prospect to any Puritan or Huguenot sick and tired of being persecuted by the state.  Bank enough crosses and an immigrant will move to the docks from the colonist pool. The total number of crosses needed to attract an immigrant increases each time so it doesn’t remain quite so easy to attract fresh blood. Building up your churches and preachers are therefore absolutely crucial for creating this constant stream of religious refugees.

The only problem with this approach is that you can often end up with a colony full of undesirable persons like criminals and indentured servants. These colonist types do well at gathering raw resources from the fields and mines, but they’re utterly terrible at any sort of intelligent work like processing those raw goods into something useful. You have two options for dealing with this.

1)      Ship all your undesirables off to the slave mines in the pestilent swampy interior of the continent, with their only contact with the outside world being the wagon train that picks up silver from the camp once in a blue moon . This is my preferred approach.

2)      Educate them into something useful.

This second approach takes a lot of time and effort. First you have to build a schoolhouse, then a college, then a university. Then you have to assign a specialist or three to the university to teach there. While they’re doing this they can’t do anything else useful for the colony, effectively functioning as so many extra mouths to feed. It also takes a while for education to produce results, depending on the level of educational establishment you’ve built. Eventually, though, any petty criminals present in the colony will be transformed through the power of education into indentured servants. Indentured servants in turn become unspecialised free colonists. And free colonists can learn the speciality of any of the specialists teaching at the university.

Education is something you are going to want to do sooner or later as your colonies improve and more and more native free colonists are born into the population. Free colonists can do any job, but they don’t excel at anything in particular. In order to make them genuinely useful you have to give them a specialty, and there are only two ways of doing this: either send them to an Indian village to learn a trade from the natives (more on this in a bit), or else educate them up using the specialist teacher-free colonist student method. It seems like a lot of time and effort to go to but specialists produce twice the number of goods in their speciality compared to basic free colonists – so an Expert Lumberjack will cut ten wood where a free colonist would only produce five – and so they’re essential for both making your colonies as efficient as possible and also circumventing that horrendous premium you pay back in Europe for attracting skilled specialists. It might cost you 1900 gold for that first Elder Statesman, but once you have him locked in your university he can educate any free colonists present into more Elder Statesmen.  Native-taught skills can also be hard to find since a given village will only teach a skill once, and so education allows you to disseminate that skill amongst your general population.

Once you’ve overcome the initial problem of founding the first few colonies and getting your economy going, the conflict and challenge of Colonization stems from two different sources. The first of these are the native inhabitants of the new world, who are already populating it very densely. This country is theirs. Not yours. Theirs. You can find native villages every seven or eight tiles or so which underline this fact. Your little band of colonists is encroaching on their land, and while they might start out friendly — giving you the land you initially settle on and occasionally sending small gifts of furs and sugar — any further expansion and development of their land runs the severe risk of pissing them off. If you settle next to an Indian village and want to use the tiles next to it to produce resources, you have to pay the resident Indians for their land or face a potential uprising that will easily wipe out your incipient colony. They outnumber you, even though you have guns and they don’t, and so they are best treated with a very light hand to begin with.

Later on, though, even if you’ve tried to keep on the natives’ good side, the demands of developing your colony to its fullest potential ensures that things will get ugly sooner or later. If you’re a complete dick you can systematically eradicate and enslave the native population surrounding your colony, but this requires a substantial military buildup that costs you time, money and manpower. The other option is to buy them off with regular deliveries of guns and booze, which still leaves me feeling tainted despite being the “good” choice. One way or the other you end up destroying their culture and their civilization to make way for yours, for no other reason than that they happen to be in the way. Colonization may have sidestepped the issue of slavery but it does do a good job of making you feel like a shit about the destruction of an entire people.

(One of the reasons the 2008 remake sucks so much is that the natives happily hand over their villages without a fight if you haven’t antagonised them, removing any hint of necessary conflict with the native peoples and sanitising the entire experience.)

The second threat to your burgeoning colonial government is the mother country itself. At first everything is hunky-dory; they’ve rid themselves of unwanted members of their population, you’re selling them dead animal skins and drugs and shit, everybody is happy. Eventually, though, the King of the country in question will start to do this:

Taxes! They are in the game but they are a decidedly bad thing. The King starts raking in a take off the top of every single bit of income you make selling goods to Europe. He won’t just implement one tax, either; instead he’ll hit you with tax after tax after tax until you’re forking over 40-60% of your money to him after every sale. Remember when I said that your money supply was the main brake on your colony expansion? The taxes make it even worse. Combined with market prices that fluctuate in response to supply and demand (so flooding the market with Rum will drive Rum prices into the ground) it can make things intolerable for you. Eventually your only option will be to throw off the tyrannical yoke of the King – and all his taxes – and declare independence.

There are two major barriers to doing this, though. First is that you need to get a sufficient number of your population to support a bid for independence. The colonists you star the game with? Those are Tories. They support the King. Everyone else who comes over from Europe is also a Tory who supports the King. In order to foment a dissenting opinion you need to stick Elder Statesmen into your town halls to produce liberty bells, which are Colonization’s way of representing rebel propaganda. Liberty bells do two things: they attract “great” people into your Continental Congress (the quotation marks are there because some of these people were demonstrably monsters) who provide empire-wide bonuses like not having to pay the Indians for their land any more, and they also slowly convert the population into members of the Sons of Liberty. The Sons of Liberty are a group who would be labelled as a terrorist organisation if they existed today, but in Colonization you want as many people to be members as possible. If 50% of a colony belongs to the Sons, they get a production bonus. If 100% of a colony are members they get an even larger production bonus. Producing liberty bells both puts you on the path to independence and maximises your economy to the fullest extent possible. Once 50% of your entire population joins the Sons of Liberty you can declare independence.

Of course the King isn’t going to take this lying down. He has a small army sitting on your doorstep – the Royal Expeditionary Force – and the turn after you declare independence they’ll land on your coastline and start invading your colonies. The regulars and dragoons making up the REF are the equal of your very best colonial forces, and they get a passive bonus for attacking colonies to boot. The only way to take them on is to fight them in the countryside where your forces’ familiarity with the surrounding countryside gives you a passive bonus. You’re also going to need an awful lot of guns, which is why industrial-scale musket production comes in rather handy at this point. My battles for independence usually see me starting out with a core of Veteran soldiers but quickly deteriorate into me handing a gun to colonists conscripted from the fields and churches.  Because of the way combat in Colonization works – probably the game’s single weak point – it’s numbers that will carry the day, not the quality of your troops or their positioning or anything like that, which is why the ability to create a soldier using any colonist and fifty muskets comes in rather handy.

Eventually this huge war of attrition will end one way or another; either the REF will take all your coastal colonies, cutting off your ability to continue trade with Europe, or you’ll succeed in exterminating every last one of the REF’s land forces. Either results in a game over, but winning the war of independence understandably confers a rather large score bonus when the game determines how well you did, naming an object after you depending on how future generations perceive your performance. Then you start fretting that you probably could have expanded some more, made more use of the land, declared independence earlier. Then you start a new game. That’s the curse of Colonization; it is, if anything, more addictive than Civilization if you’re interested in the time period at all (and if you’re not the game will get you interested), and it’s aged far more gracefully to boot.  I’m sure it’ll show up on GoG sooner or later, but for now you can download the DOS version from here and use it with DOSbox. You might end up losing days of your life to it, but I guarantee you won’t regret it.

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Or to give it its full title, Sid Meier’s Pirates! We’ll chuck the “Sid Meier’s” part – since it’s more of a trademark these days, kind of like Uncle Ben’s or Potatoes O’Brien – but we’ll keep the exclamation mark. In the case of Pirates!, it’s actually justified.

 Talking about Pirates! gets a little complicated because the game has been remade twice. The original Pirates! was released in 1987. It looks more than a little bit primitive. I’ve never played it, but I understand it was excellent for its time. Then there was the first remake, Pirates! Gold (or Pirates! for Windows) in 1993. This is the version I played to death about ten years ago; as far as I know it’s identical to the original in almost every respect save the graphics and the absence of what sounds like an unutterably tedious navigation minigame. And then finally came a “modern” remake in 2004 (which is looking rather long in the tooth itself now) which made a whole host of minor changes and additions to the gameplay, with the result that it plays appreciably differently to either of its predecessors. It’s this last one that I’m going to be writing about here, but you should keep in mind that while all three games have similar basic gameplay goals they’re not really the same thing at all, and it’s possible to like both Pirates! Gold and the Pirates! remake for entirely different reasons.

So! You’re a pirate set loose on the Spanish Main at some point in the 17^th century. You name your painfully generic-looking avatar (one of the major missteps this game made was in not letting you customise it at all, forcing you to stare at this horse-faced buffoon for approximately 50% of your playing time), you pick a starting date (affecting both the relative power of Spain as the major colonial power and the overall military power of all four nations with a presence in the Caribbean) and a speciality (Fencing, Gunnery, Sailing, Dancing or Medicine, depending on what you’re worst at), and then you choose a starting nationality which nominally determines whose side you’re going to be on to begin with. Then the game hands you a tiny sloop of war crammed with a couple of dozen men and leaves you to get on with it.

Pirates! is divided into two main gameplay sections. There’s the overworld, where you sail around on a rather gorgeous blue Caribbean ocean docking at various towns, trading for goods, recruiting crewmen and searching for juicy, poorly-defended prizes that you can seize in battle. Then whenever you actually do a thing – attack another ship, invade a town in a land battle, romance a governor’s daughter etc. etc. – you get chucked into a very quick and simple minigame, the difficulty of which is determined by how good your setup on the overworld map is. If you’re outnumbered by an enemy crew two to one then the subsequent fencing minigame is going to be very tricky for you; your opponent will be lightning quick and you can’t afford to make many mistakes before getting dumped into the drink and losing the battle. If on the other hand you outnumber them heavily then there’s a good chance they’ll simply surrender outright after a single broadside.

 This heavy reliance on minigames would be rather obnoxious if they weren’t so quick and if they had no relation to what you were actually doing on the overworld. Fortunately at the time Pirates! was made Microprose were starting to specialise in this kind of minigame-based game design quite heavily — see Sword of the Samurai, Covert Action, Hunt For Red October etc. — and in Pirates! they struck just the right balance between the two extremes of having the minigames be a pointless waste of time (Bioshock, any other game where you have to hack something) and having them take so long that the simple concept outstays its welcome (Spore). By having the outcome be a combination of both your performance on the world map and your performance in the minigame, Pirates! allows you to both make your life easier by stacking the deck in your favour before you even start a minigame, as well as succeeding when the odds are against you by excelling at the minigame itself.

I should probably talk about how the minigames work given that they’re so integral to the game’s structure. There are four main ones, each controlled with the number pad (good luck playing Pirates! on a laptop, by the way). There’s the sea battle, where you exchange broadsides with an enemy ship while trying to get the weather gage and avoid rocks and shoals (which, awesomely, are visible on the world map allowing you to attack from a good position if you can swing it). If you close with and board the enemy ship you get dumped into a fencing minigame against the enemy captain. First you pick a sword which dictates the speed of your attack and defence, and then you have to stab your opponent right in his face while avoiding his ripostes. Stab him enough and you’ll win the battle outright, but if he’s particularly tricksy then the advantage bar at the bottom of the screen will start to swing in his favour and your crew will begin haemhorraging men at a truly ghastly rate. If you run out of men, you lose. If he runs out of men he loses, but in practice fencing ends with him either being chucked off the ship or being able to last long enough that your crew gets massacred. There’s also the land battle minigame, an incredibly simple strategy experience that would be unbearable if the AI wasn’t dumber than a sack of rocks and thus incredibly easy to beat, and the dancing minigame.

The dancing minigame is one that’s come in for a lot of criticism over the years from idiots who think that it has no place in a game about Pirates! Personally I don’t see a problem with it – after all, how else are they going to gameify romancing a governor’s daughter for trinkets and booze – although I suspect I might start to agree with them if I weren’t completely awesome at it. “Completely awesome” here is something of a relative term since the actual minigame mechanism involves pushing buttons in response to your partner’s hand prompts, but whatever. I’m the best at pushing buttons, and anyone who says any differently is a filthy liar. Do well here and you can get free items, tips on bounty opportunities or secret treasure, and even ask for the daughter’s hand in marriage.

That’s what you spend most of your time doing in Pirates!, then. But what is it you actually do in Pirates? As in, what’s the point of the game? The answer is – like all the best open world games – there is no real point. You set your own short-term goals and try to fulfil them without your ship blowing up or your crew mutinying or something. The game tracks your progress through Fame points which are accrued by doing a whole bunch of different stuff – amassing wealth and land, getting noble titles, taking out other notorious pirates, marrying a particularly attractive governor’s daughter¹, finding the long-lost members of your family and so on – and like most Microprose/Firaxis games your Fame will determine your score when you finally choose to retire, but these are rather vague, long-term goals that you pick at for a while before moving on to something else. What I find more engrossing are the more personal end goals determined by the player, like bringing the entirety of the Carribean under the flag of Holland or trying to achieve the maximum rank possible for all four nation states. These are genuinely difficult things to do and have no reward when you finally manage them, but I enjoy them nevertheless because all I have to do is look at the world map to see what I’ve managed to achieve so far in the game. Pirates! is one of those games where the world is almost entirely at the player’s mercy. It’s kind of like Minecraft: the game doesn’t direct you to do one particular thing, instead opting to quietly give you the option to do anything.

This is very much aided by how organic the whole thing is. Those ships you see sailing around on the ocean? Those are all doing something. Maybe they’re transporting reinforcements to a town. If they get there the town will have more soldiers and will be harder for your (and other) pirates to sack, so if they belong to a nation you don’t particularly like it’s a good idea to mug it before it makes landfall. Other ships move around governors or immigrants, increasing the size and economic prospects of any town they successfully reach. Spanish trade galleons are ubiquitous, and if you’re lucky you might even run across a treasure ship transporting a couple of thousand pieces of eight. Excellently you can induce a lot of these events yourself – Jesuit missions dispatch immigrants to the destination of your choice, smaller settlements will send governors to take over larger towns, and you can even persuade pirates and Indians to raid certain targets, often softening it up for your own attacks. If Pirates! does have a goal, it’s “Do as much stuff as possible,” but this is tricky when there is just so much of it.

And while you’re stuck in becalmed waters in the middle of the Caribbean time is ticking slowly by. You start out as a fresh-faced 18 year-old so you have a while before old age starts to kick in, but eventually your health will start to decline and things will start getting harder. Your fencing movements will become more sluggish, you won’t be as sure-footed when dancing and pirates are more reluctant to follow an old man whose best days are already behind him. While you can extend your active life through medicine items or the Medicine special skill, eventually you’ll have to retire. This adds the pressure of time to your considerations; for an inveterate power gamer like myself it’s a real challenge trying to figure out how to cram as many achievements as possible into the twenty-odd years of your pirate’s active lifespan. Pirates! does the old Microprose thing of telling you what you went on to become after retiring depending on how well you did during the game, making it a bit of a slap in the face when you barely manage to make Pig Farmer after decades of effort and giving you an incentive to go for a nice high score.

 The last thing I should mention is the difficulty mechanic. Pirates! takes something of a unique approach to difficulty levels; there’s the usual selection of five ranging from Adventurer (insultingly easy) to Swashbuckler (almost unfairly hard), but the game’s masterstroke is to link the amount of money you personally receive directly to the difficulty level you’re playing on. As time goes on the morale of your crew slowly declines because they haven’t actually laid hands on any of the ill-gotten gains you’ve plundered from the merchant ships of the Caribbean. They’ll gradually become more and more mutinous, forcing you to periodically divide up the plunder and fork out shares of the money to every surviving crew member. The amount of money you get from this depends on how daring you’re being. Timid Adventurer captains get just 5% of the hoarded money, while Swashbucklers take home a whopping 50%². However, you’re not locked into one difficulty level for the duration of an entire game; every time your divide the plunder you have the option to progress to a higher difficulty level, taking more risks but also getting more loot. This allows new players to find their feet during a game without making them feel like they’re wasting their time, and it also lets more experienced players get into a good position on a medium difficulty level before attempting the frankly ridiculous³ Swashbuckler setting.

I think the main reason I like Pirates! so much, though, is because it’s a slightly different take on the Elite-style open world trading/fighting game, a genre which has kind of died a death these days unless you like badly translated Russian attempts. There’s less of the trading and ship outfitting going on, but that’s because the game is concentrating almost completely on its open-world mechanic. This is something at which it succeeds very, very well, and while it’d be nice to have a few more options in how I play I don’t think I can really complain. It’s a game called Pirates! and it lets you be a pirate. A very arcadey sort of pirate in a rather cartoony world where nobody ever dies and everyone speaks in a peculiar – if rather excellent – dialect of gibberish, but while Pirates! might not be that deep it makes up for it by being extremely broad. If I were a better writer there’d be some sort of cunning nautical metaphor there wrapping up this little retrospective; as it is, though, you’ll have to settle for me telling you it’s £6 on Steam, and even cheaper during the perennial sales. While it’s not a perfect remake I think it’s good enough for it to be a shame that it gets rather unfairly overshadowed by Firaxis’s main cash cow, and that more people should give it a go, especially if you like open world games. Pirates! is one of the best.

1. One of the things that has always bugged me about Pirates! is that it directly correlates female attractiveness with the size of their cleavage.
2. The Pirates! Gold manual rationalised this by saying that the easier difficulty level was down to the quality of your ship’s officers. Good officers meant smoother sailing, but they’d also demand more pay. Which I thought was a fairly neat way of justifying it, really.
3. Swashbuckler is so hard, in fact, that the game starts to become rather unfun in places, usually when you’re fighting a named baddie with a special duelling skill that you can’t hope to counter. I once fenced against a Captain of the Guard for a solid quarter hour; he couldn’t land a hit because my defence was so good, but even when the advantage bar was full I couldn’t hit him either because the game made it physically impossible to do so with a cutlass. This is why I spend most of my time on Rogue difficulty

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