![]() In comparison Freecol is just windows without accompanying characters. Also the original game included tons of pixel art: pictures of the advisors, the Indians, the Founding Fathers, etcetera, in a nice style. Right now it includes no music and nearly no sounds, but this may change. First of all let's make clear that the game, completely playable as it is, is still in development. In the long run you king will invariably increase taxes to unreasonable rates and you're supposed to declare independence, then the king will send his mucho army and kick your really sorry army if you haven't prepared really well if you defeat him, you just won the game.Īll the above about gameplay actually applies to the original Colonization as well as to Freecol which we're concerned with so it remains to discuss the game's furnishing and how it compares to the original. You're supposed to promote separatist sentiment in your colonies, to the extent that if you do you're rewarded with improved efficiency and if you don't you're punished with just the opposite. And, you can also found Christian missions in their settlements. And of course there are Indians, several tribes as well as the Aztec and Incan civilizations -whose cities make big cash to loot! It's up to you to decide to be at peace or war with them, although again they can decide on their own too, and they're not very patient. You're likely to be at some time or other at war with the other players (who can be pals multiplaying or the computer), either on their initiative, yours, or your king's even against your will. You play the role of the colonies of one of four European nations: England, France, Netherlands or Spain. The historical background is a very nice plus for the game too. You get the idea if you like strategy and you didn't know Colonization, you just have to try Freecol. The micromanagement doesn't get harsh, and you'll likely have few colonies before you declare independence and win the game -this isn't really an 4X game. And soldiers are just colonists equipped with certain commodities called muskets and horses that you must produce or purchase. Colonists are independent entities, not just population figures, and you can move them from one colony to any other. Say for example that you want to make rum: then you need to allocate one colonist onto one tile of terrain to grow sugar cane, and then another one as a distiller to process the sugar into rum. For example instead of collecting gross resources calculated out of population and terrain, it's up to you to manage every colonist and every commodity to be produced. From this point on, however, this game departs from the cliché and turns into much more than a Civilization clone with a colonial setting. The game starts in 1492, and it's about colonizing the New World with and a bunch of pioneers aboard a small ship, until much later your populous and mighty colonies don't need the king any longer and decide to declare independence - that's supposed to be the goal of the game.įor the ones unfamiliar with the original Colonization, the very basic ideas are similar to many "4X" and "God" games: build cities and fight with units. It was one of the descendants of world-famous Civilization, and arguably the most original of them, introducing in the field of strategy games concepts that regretfully haven't been revisited. Java is a very poor choice for any application/game where you have to wait for it to finish, like this end of turn.Some of you will remember Sid Meier's Colonization, back from 1994. It looks like it would be a great experience, but then stuff happens due to java (mainly really slow wait for next turn) and I end up never getting very far. Whenever I have done so I ended up regretting it.Īs for freecol itself. In short: I'm not touching anything written in java. Just look at openttd which can run on more or less anything. If the goal is cross platform support (the main argument for java), then C/C++ can do that too. It's great for performance as well as debugging and weird issues are always in your code. It is surprisingly easy to end up with code, which doesn't work identically on all platforms and since the differences appears to be internal issues in the virtual machine, they can get tricky to solve.Ĭ/C++ on the other hand is optimized code where the programmer have the full control. ![]() My experience since last century adds that "java runs on all platforms" is wrong. That is what I said in 1999 and it's pretty much how I view it today as well. ![]() Java adds a layer at execution time, which mean it executes slower, use more memory and the virtual machine can screw up in ways you have little control over. It has come far and has potential to be interesting, but it has a major flaw: it's written in java. ![]()
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