more colonization

Bit of a non-weekend, truth be told.

I mean, I wasn't sat around doing nothing, but the stuff I did do was not particularly note-worthy. I'd hoped to summon up some willpower and do a load of scanning, attacking my last pile of "permanently unscanned" magazines. But in the end I was a bit fatigued after the horrible weeks I've been enduring recently, so instead I played a good wodge of Colonization.

It's an interesting game. One of the things about Civilization is that it's very open ended. There are always numerous ways to play and win - not least of all in the various victory conditions, but also different style of gaming. You can be aggressive and conquer your neighbours or work with them. You can spend all you time building up all your cities or you can focus on specialising each city. Or you can build a spaceship and fly off to Alpha Centauri.

However, colonization is much more focused. It's like a mod for civ with a cut down set of victory conditions and restricted rule set. It's not bad for that, it's just it's more limited. For example, in order to win you have to declare independence and beat the king's army. So you have to always plan ahead for that - you can't win in a peaceful way.

It's also in some ways strangely easy, but in others strangely difficult. It's easy because the best way to approach the game is to get lots of money. To get lots of money you need to do lots of trading and to do lots of trading you needs lots of resources. To get them you need to sprawl your settlements like a motheherfucker and build loads of wagon trains. You then only need to focus on having a few "manufacturing centres" in order to turn raw materials into processed goods that sell for much better prices.

But while that plan is pretty easy in theory it becomes a pedants playground of settlement micro-management. It's like it's best to have 1 city that you focus on tool production so you can have it pumping out loads of tools every turn. But in order to build stuff in your other cities (to do the manufacturing, for example) they need tools. That means you have to ship around all these tools, which can be mind-boggling complex given how many settlements the above mentioned plan suggests you need.

The good thing, though, is that I like the whole micr-management pedantry thing - it's why I love Civ - so I'm right in my element.