Im sure some of you out there will like myself remember this game when it was first released. Back in the day it was quite simple, fun and a good way losing a few hours in harmless historical fun and not much has changed.

The basis of this game is basically casting you into the role of the first colonists of the Indian inhabited New World, you build and develop your settlements recruiting or training a plethora of colonists into a variety of roles to make a colony run, grow and grow propserous.

you take on the role of either the English the Spanish, the Dutch or the French and in any game there are also many NPC Indian Tribes (Sioux, Cherokee, Arowak, Iroquois, Aztec, Incans etc..etc..) all of whom have different outlooks and methods of play fo thier own. It is possible to trade, learn from, establish missions, conquer or form treaties and alliances with all factions in the game including the natives.. and if they like you they will continually gift you resources as a… more »

Im sure some of you out there will like myself remember this game when it was first released. Back in the day it was quite simple, fun and a good way losing a few hours in harmless historical fun and not much has changed.

The basis of this game is basically casting you into the role of the first colonists of the Indian inhabited New World, you build and develop your settlements recruiting or training a plethora of colonists into a variety of roles to make a colony run, grow and grow propserous.

you take on the role of either the English the Spanish, the Dutch or the French and in any game there are also many NPC Indian Tribes (Sioux, Cherokee, Arowak, Iroquois, Aztec, Incans etc..etc..) all of whom have different outlooks and methods of play fo thier own. It is possible to trade, learn from, establish missions, conquer or form treaties and alliances with all factions in the game including the natives.. and if they like you they will continually gift you resources as a sign of friendship..but dont grow too complacent because if your influenc ecovers too much of thier land or your method of play conflicts with the AI's method for them they will soon declare war and drive you off the continent with arrows and guns in the later stages of the game.

On top of contending with other nations and the natives each faction also has a greedy monarch at home who frequently demands tax increases or monies from you and failing to pay these requests can cause embargoes on trading some items or anger the monarch.

The aim is to make enough colonies and increase opinion with regard to independance enough that you can declare independance from the greedy home country and monarch and become a nation in your own right all the while developing and protecting your colonies both from the neighbours, and natives and later from your home nations forces while also recruiting founding fathers who will give various bonuses to you... however this is neither quick, easy nor entirely unproblematic.

the game has many options and settings and the ability to create custom maps and scenarios, play solo, multiplayer and even Hotseat a game.

The graphics and music are very much in the line of those of Civilisation 4 in quality and nature, later when the screen and game gets busy things can run quite slow even on a decent PC.

This game is fun, historically oriented in nature and a nice way to spend a few hours if historical games or civilisation style games are your cup of tea.

It does however have a few issues, the slow down mentioned above is one, another is the native monarchs tendency to pretty much cripple your ability to make money easily long befoe you have enough support to declare independance. Also your home nations builds up forces to fight a revolution as time goes by and independence sentiment rises but with some settings such as "Time" switched off for victory conditions by the time you have a dozen colonies with maybe half a dozen units to protect each the home nation has a force of thousands to face you, which is completely undefeatable and your colonies will fall in turns.. the obvious means to combat this would be to declare independance early before the home nation builds up too much of an army to face you but you are prevented to start a revolution until you have at least 50% support for independance which takes a very veyr long time to get in this version of the game.. so some tweaking to how the home nations works under varying victory conditions needs patching into it to prevent it from getting silly.

for the price though there is little to complain about so check it out and see for yourself.