Sid Meier's Civilization was one of my favorite franchises
WAS
0/10 deleting all 2k games right the ♥♥♥♥ off my PC cause the new terms of service are kernel levels of criminal.
not letting you mine my data

3/10

I hate this game so much.

There are three hard checks that arrive at predictable times: you have to be strong enough at sea to repel a privateer; you have to have enough troops to scare off your fellow Europeans early on; and you have to have enough troops to beat the natives in the late game, when they have lots of population and not enough land, and decide that now is the time to take back the land you stole. (And if you don't steal their land, by generating Liberty Bells to poach Founding Fathers from your enemies, you'll never win!)

So, again and again, I'm having a blast with the game, and then the time comes for the game to declare, out of the blue, "Nope, you've had enough fun for one session, time to start over."

But the minute-to-minute game is more fun than the hour-to-hour game is irritating. The game uses a unique, very stylized "pop" model for your settlement populations; you have a unit that represents some large chunk of your population, and you click and drag them to assign them to different buildings. Or you can take them out of the settlement entirely, to equip as soldiers, missionaries, or pioneers, or to send to another settlement, or to found a new settlement with. It's a lot like a worker-placement boardgame, and it brings a big smile to my face. So I keep playing, for as long per session as the game allows me to play.

I wish that the developers of something like _Old World_ or _Millenia_ would adopt the pop model for a game. The modern style of game design warns you when these hard checks are coming. Colonization isn't a malevolent game, just an under-designed one. It would warn you about these hard checks too, if it weren't...

17 years old?! 2008 was 17 years ago? When did _that_ happen?!

(Also, I use the mod TAC, The Authentic Colonization, and I've experimented with Colonization 2071. I recommend these over We the People, which is a more ambitious mod but also a more bloated one, like Caveman to Cosmos for the main Civ IV.)