Sid Meier’s Starships. It’s not a name that sounds particularly promising, is it? Sid’s a fan of pithy one- or two- word titles, and he’s used them to great effect in the past. What else would you call a game about the progress of human society through the ages except Civilization? They are usually appropriately descriptive; in Railroad Tycoon you play the part of an 1830-era railroad tycoon. Even the simplest ones were jazzed up by the addition of an exclamation mark: Pirates! is a little muddy as a descriptor, but you can at least tell Sid is very excited about it and thinks you’re going to have a lot of fun playing it. (And he was right.) Even the worst of his games, Railroads!, was saved by the exclamation mark and by the fact it did somewhat signal the transition from meaty business sim to playing with a virtual toy railway set.

Now we have Starships, however, a title so vague and humdrum they couldn’t even be bothered to give it a little pizzazz by calling it Starships! Maybe they felt like it’d be false advertising, since people would probably have expected a jauntily fun experience haring around the space-Caribbean rather than the second take on Ace Patrol that Starships really is. It has a very similar mechanical structure to Ace Patrol, splitting the game into two parts. One is the empire map where you order your fleet of starships to various planets in need of your assistance, which is rendered by completing some sort of procedurally generated mission for them.  Once you’ve selected a mission you’re then taken to a turn-based tactical combat segment in which you use the various weapons on your starships to blow an AI fleet into smithereens. Completing a mission successfully gets you resources and influence which you can use to expand your empire/federation/galactic hive mind on the empire map.

It’s that last sentence which signals the biggest improvement from Ace Patrol. Ace Patrol’s campaign was a painfully vestigial waste of time that had nowhere near enough variety or impact on the excellent tactical combat and which completely failed to provide it with any meaningful context, rendering the entire game repetitive and ultimately forgettable. Starships avoids falling into this particular trap by making its empire map far more than a barely-disguised mission select screen. Instead it’s a stripped down Civilization-lite; you can take over planets to expand your borders, build improvements to improve resource yield, grow your population by constructing cities and spend accumulated science points on technology upgrades that directly improve the effectiveness of your starships in combat. Competition is provided by a number of AI empires all tussling for the same territory, and even the victory conditions are ripped off wholesale from Civ.

In short, everything you’d expect to find in a Civilization game is present on Starships’ empire map, albeit in an incredibly basic, protoplasmic form. If Civilization is an oil painting then Starships is a cartoon — it’s still recognisably the same game, but it’s been reduced to only the barest essentials required to make it work. Take resources, for example. There are five resources in the game: energy, metals, food, science and credits. Each resource type is used for one thing, and one thing only¹: metals builds improvements and wonders, food builds new cities on your planets, and energy is used to build and upgrade starships. With the exception of the starship upgrades the things you build with those resources also do just one thing: each improvement increases the resource yield of a particular type of resource by a lot, each city increases the general resource yield of the planet by a little, and each tech you buy will increase your ships’ effectiveness in that tech area by a depressingly standard +25%.

This streamlined version of Civ certainly succeeds at being a more engaging method of setting up the tactical combat. It works as a system; I can even imagine somebody taking Starships’ empire maps and making a decent boardgame out of it. However I also think this aggressive streamlining has drastically reduced the decision space available to the player. Take the resource system I just described — since metals and food in particular are only used to increase resource yields it’s a no-brainer to spend all of your metals and food every turn to get more metals and food next turn. There’s nothing to save up for besides wonders, and hence no interesting decisions to be made. Energy and science are a little more engaging thanks to their effect on the starship combat (which we’ll be getting on to shortly) but you still end up spending as much as you can every turn since there’s no reason not to; the only real decision you make is which area you’re going to focus on, and then you just spend resources to maximise your return on that.

In spite of the vast improvement over Ace Patrol, then, I still found the Starships’ empire map to be very underwhelming. It’s been over-simplified to the point where it has next to no complexity and nothing to really get your teeth into — it’s so over-zealous with its training wheels that you’re not allowed to have more than one fleet, which is another major loss to its decision-making potential — and the most entertainment you’ll get out of it is in trying to find a particular combination of research and wonders that’ll break the game. (Which, because it’s so simple and has no room for finesse in its mechanical approach, is very, very easy to do.) The best of the empire map is experienced at the very start of the game, when most of the galaxy is unclaimed and you haven’t yet had time to invest your resources into making sickeningly overpowered starships; then at least the decision of where to send your fleet next is relatively taxing. Unfortunately because it is so simple you enter the steamroller phase far earlier than in other Civ titles, where you’ve amassed such an insurmountable advantage that your victory is inevitable and you’re just playing whack-a-mole with AI empires until one magic number or another tips over a threshold and the ending sequence cuts in. I spent nearly all of my time with it wishing I was playing something with just a little more depth to it, rather than just going through the motions until I won.

Now, the good news is that Starships’ tactical combat isn’t half bad. It’s a turn-based affair played out on a hex grid that’s liberally littered with asteroids that serve as cover, and the combat itself is, in principle, just as simple as the empire map. There are three main weapon types: lasers, which are terrible at range and which get blocked by asteroids but which guarantee some damage if you have a clean line of fire; fighters, which are disposable groups of ships that will often get one-shotted but which can do a lot of damage if they get in behind an enemy; and torpedoes, which are the most imaginative thing in all of Starships. Torpedoes are fired in a straight line away from your starships. On the turn you fire them they’ll run a certain distance away from the launching ship and then stop; you don’t get to actually detonate them until next turn, when the torpedo becomes active and you can detonate it at any point along its flight path. Torpedoes pass through asteroid fields and have a decent blast radius, and if you can nail a group of ships with one you’ll often take them out in one hit — but since the AI will frantically beeline away from any incoming torpedoes you’ll have to fire a spread from multiple ships to ensure something will be caught in the firing line. The AI does love to sit behind asteroids and fire pop-up shots with no chance of retaliation, so single torpedoes are useful for flushing them out of their cover, after which you can dispose of them with your searing beams of laser death.

Torpedoes aside, the rest of Starships’ combat doesn’t sound tremendously interesting on paper — like just about every other wargame out there the key is to shoot the baddies in the flanks or from the rear if possible, and you’ll rarely go astray. The fun part comes when you start upgrading your ships and researching techs to emphasise a particular weapon or strategy. In my first game I researched improved torpedo damage and built some wonders that made them move faster and let me shoot two of them per turn; this let me trap enemy ships in a criss-crossing web of dozens of torpedoes that were instant death to anything caught in the blast radius and which they had no chance of avoiding. In my second game I dumped a bunch of science and energy into stealth systems and got the Cloaking wonder, which automatically engaged my starships’ stealth at the end of every turn (usually you have to manually activate it instead of firing). Since you can only detect a stealthed ship by either making a sensor sweep or by moving inside the ship’s stealth radius, and since I both made sure to kill the enemy sensor ships first and had teched up enough that my starships’ stealth radius was smaller than one hex (i.e. they would have had to be physically in the same hex as one of my ships to spot it, which you’re not allowed to do with an enemy ship), this effectively made my ships untouchable. I used three super-cloakers to dismantle the 12-ship fleet of the galactic superpower — twice — and then triggered a Domination victory.

Still, I’m not sure how much mileage there is in finding new and exciting combinations of systems and tech to keep the starship combat interesting. The missions themselves are rather unimaginative – they’re dressed up with a variety of flavour text, but they still all boil down to protecting a civilian transport as it makes its way to the exit point or capturing and holding three space stations or whatever. Starship upgrades aren’t modular and you can stick any combination of upgrades onto any ship as long as you’ve got the energy to pay for it, but this also means that they’re disappointingly generic; once you’ve added the first laser, all adding more lasers will do is make your ships hit harder. As a result it’s impossible to make enemy starships that are memorable or which present an interesting challenge; they’ll do all the same things that your ships do, and so after the fifteenth battle or so you get the feeling you’ve seen it all and that there’s nothing more the starship combat can show you.

And you’d be right. Starships isn’t a particularly offensive game, but its ruthless amputation of anything that’s not absolutely necessary for its core concept to work means that it needs an incredibly strong core concept for it to work at all. Unfortunately the core concept of Starships isn’t particularly novel and doesn’t have the depth to sustain more than a couple of hours play in any engaging fashion. Past that point it’s just something you’re doing to pass the time. I could easily see myself playing it on an iPad during a long train ride for lack of anything better to do, but on the PC during the March game glut? Sorry, Sid, but I’d rather be playing Cities: Skylines.

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The post Thoughts: Sid Meier’s Starships appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Sid himself has been taking less of an active role in making Firaxis’ larger games these days (I think the last one he was credited in any significant way on was either Railroads! or the ill-fated Civilization Revolution), instead preferring to spend his time trolling would-be game developers and coming with prototypes that never see the light of day as fully-fledged games. Ace Patrol is the first title in half a decade that’s he’s properly responsible for, and I think it proves two things:

1)      Sid Meier can still design excellent gameplay systems.

2)      Sid Meier’s curious malaise which affects turning those gameplay systems into actual coherent games is also still a thing.

The writing was on the wall seven years ago with Railroads!, to be honest with you, and it’s repeated here with Ace Patrol: it’s a very elegant piece of design that hasn’t been pushed through the last few development steps required for it to be anything more than an interesting curio. Playing Ace Patrol is interesting and challenging, and yet at the same time oddly unsatisfying; it feels like the sort of game where I want more detail that it just isn’t willing to provide. And so, like Railroads!, what could have been yet another five-star game from Sid ends up being a rather cartoony and superficial experience.

Feh. Let’s talk about what Ace Patrol does right. Ace Patrol is a turn-based game about World War 1 fighter combat in the skies over northern France, and I have to say I’m deeply impressed at how well it makes its tactical combat mechanic fit what at first glance would seem to be a deeply unsuitable theme. Dogfighting is about outthinking the other guy, sure, and so there’s certainly enough strategic meat there to make a nourishing meal, but it’s still surprising how weirdly appropriate the turn-based system feels. Battles do play out like genuine air-to-air combat, sliced down into individual seconds of activity which can then be stitched together at the end of the scenario into a pseudo-real time replay that shows the entire engagement from start to finish. This replay looks like a real dogfight, as aircraft turn and weave and roll to avoid enemy guns while getting a bead on the opposing fighters themselves, which is quite the achievement considering that each of your pilots can perform a grand total of one action per turn.

What that action is is going to depend heavily on what the pilot’s skills are and what aircraft they’re flying. The difference between an experienced veteran and a rookie pilot is rather stark; the rookie will only be able to fly forwards quickly and will have to turn by banking their aircraft to the left or right, resulting in a loss of speed and an increase in vulnerability. As pilots get more kills they gain access to increasingly advanced sets of maneuvers that allow them more options in dogfights. Half-loops allow a quick reversal of direction, for example, while dive turns allow a plane to pursue a banking enemy without any loss of speed. There’s even super-advanced Ace maneuvers that can turn the tide of a battle all on their own; I learned to live in fear of the American loop-on-the-spot-while-firing triplane ace, while the one that could do odd drifting turns lasted a surprisingly long time against my twenty-one victory squadron commander.

More aerial agility means it’s easier to stay on an opponent’s tail and out of their gunsights, which is important because Ace Patrol also has a complex system for determining how much damage one fighter will do to another. There are no dedicated attack orders in the game; instead your fighters will automatically open fire on the enemy if they can and the damage they inflict will be a function of relative speed, relative heading, relative altitude and the aspect the target is presenting to you (a plane that’s banked towards you is like shooting a barn door). High-speed head-on diving passes are safe, since the enemy will not be able to turn and retaliate if you zoom in past them, but they’re unlikely to inflict significant damage. What you want to do is get in behind an enemy fighter and stay there, since the most damage is inflicted when one fighter is pursuing another in level flight and even if they try and shake you off you can gradually wear them down so long as your plane and pilot is better at maneuvering than they are.

That is, unless they have wingmen helping them out. They will always have wingmen helping them out, but then so do you; combats therefore become the aforementioned furball of bucking, weaving fighters trying to get the drop on the other side. The AI in Ace Patrol is reasonably competent and its effectiveness will largely be determined by the difficulty level (and thus how good its pilots are), so no matter your tactical genius it’ll always be able to present you with some sort of challenge and some memorable dogfights. It’s good at using cloud cover (fighters hiding in cloud cover are invisible, although they can only do basic maneuvers) and good at making use of whatever special abilities it has access to; while I’ve won most of my battles there have been occasions where it’s managed to inflict significant damage by isolating and worrying individual planes down to the point where I’ve had to withdraw them from the map. It’s less good at making use of friendly flak and avoiding your flak, happily charging over hostile flak zones that inflict damage every turn they finish inside of it, but otherwise I have no complaints about the AI, or the underlying systems governing tactical combat. Even the control system works far better than it did on iPad ¹ despite being pretty much a direct port. The problems lie in, well, everything else, or rather the startling lack of anything else.

For starters the dynamic campaigns are just about as shallow as it’s possible for anything to be. Each time you want to take to the skies you get a selection of three randomly selected missions from a list of about a dozen; these further boil down to “destroy a thing”, “protect a thing” or “destroy all the things”. Since you can automatically win by shooting down all the enemy fighters and get more points and experience for doing so this becomes the default win condition, which will often be accomplished well before the AI bombers/recon planes/whatever have even reached their targets and means the mission variety is narrowed even further. About the only things you pay attention to during mission selection are how many opponents there are and how many planes you can take into it, since being at a numerical disadvantage is kind of a big deal thanks to the wingmen thing. Sure, some missions are worth more or less points, and you get more points if you’re playing on a higher difficulty level, but as far as I can tell this points value doesn’t actually do anything aside from fulfil a basic scoring function.

The campaigns themselves are split up into eight-mission offensives, but all that means is that every eight missions you’ll get a prisoner exchange and your wounded pilots will heal free of charge. They are functionally identical to one another with no sense of progression, simply existing because sticking thirty-two random missions together and calling it a campaign would probably have been too much even for this game.  The issue with this is that without that sense of context, that sense of purpose that drives other tactical strategy games such as XCOM or Jagged Alliance, you start to wonder why you’re bothering with it in the first place. The tactical battles are diverting enough to begin with,  but after you level up your pilots a few times and they’re still flying the exact same missions they were twenty levels ago it becomes apparent that Ace Patrol isn’t going anywhere; it just wants you to keep playing that tactical segment over and over in the hope that you won’t get bored of it too quickly. And as elegantly designed as it is, I don’t think it’s anywhere near strong enough to carry Ace Patrol all on its lonesome.

It’s funny, really, because Sid used to be the master of precisely this sort of contextualision. Pirates, Covert Action, Railroad Tycoon, even the lesser known games he worked on like Red Storm Rising and Sword of the Samurai, and even some of his later titles like the Gettysburg games  – all of them traded on their ability to fix otherwise repetitive actions and minigames into a wider frame of reference that made them far more compelling than they would have been otherwise. Ace Patrol could have joined that list if someone had just said “Nice combat mechanics, Sid, now all we need is an actual game to embed them into.” Instead it goes on the other list; the one with Railroads and Civilization Revolution already chiselled into it, where a good idea has clearly been had but hasn’t been allowed to properly mature. Ace Patrol’s budget price means I’m not complaining too much, but I would have happily paid twice as much if they’d given just a bit more thought to their inter-mission gameplay. As it is I feel curiously unsatisfied and a little bit cheated, and since I’m firmly in Ace Patrol’s target market (history buff and Sid Meier fan) I suspect you will too. I can’t recommend it.

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The post Thoughts: Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

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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