Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not ready for prime time
Comment: This is a product that screams inadequate beta testing or lack of real thought into some design aspects. It may become a good game after several patches but probably not possible.
As a preface, I am a long-time Civ player, but never played the prior version of Civ3 Colonization, so I am essentially a Colonization 'virgin'.
Some aspects of poor design to me include the following:
1) Recruiting of new colonists from Europe. The random selection of volunteer colonists is poor. These units can be 'rushed' but often cost as much as 5 times what it would cost to simply purchase the unit. This seems silly at best.
2) Inability to recruit 'regular' colonists who are not specialists, the rarity and inability to recruit indentured servants, and the handling of petty criminals (the European govt should be paying me to take them off their hands...).
3) Inability to retrain specialist colonists whose specialties are not useful in my settlements.
4) The education system that takes progressively longer to educate each subsequent student even when you upgrade the school facility. At one point it was going to take 70 YEARS to university educate a single student.
5) Rebel sentiment (the idea of the game is to gain independence from your European mother country) which does not increase with every tax increase from the homeland. Historically this was THE reason for revolutions in the Americas.
6) The rate of increase of the home country's expeditionary force that will be sent to defeat you when you are able to declare independence. I have seen ridiculously large forces that could not possibly be defeated, more soldiers than I had people...
7) The almost exponential cost increase of recruiting each additional military unit of a given type in Europe makes a competitively strong military virtually impossible.
8) The inability to shut off the AI governor in colonial cities. Even with the tools available to emphasize and de-emphasize aspects of production, I still find the governor doing things I don't want done and don't anticipate.
The early game play is the most interesting part but it drags due to lack of resources or access to resources. Once the colony is set up, however, the mid-game becomes simply dull and repetitious with far too much micro-management. The end game or revolution might be fun if I ever had adequate military to succeed.
This is one of those games that if you are an old hand fanatic, you might enjoy. For new or first time players who don't want to spend hours reading fan sites and blogs in order to play, give this one a miss.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice game - Sucky DRM (SecuRom)
Comment: You know, I have always enjoyed Sid games, all the way back to the C-64 days. Absolutely loved Pirates. Now comes Colonization, love the old version and tought I could get into this one. Prices are fixed, the indian know how much stuff sells for and what the purchace prices are in the empire and do not give you a fair shake at all. I don't see how a person could win at this game. Now for the really horrible part, SecuRom!!! It is a menace to computers and just about locked me out of my own computer because I loaded a map making program. What gives, a map program? Getting tired of not being told what form of copy protections are on a program and then find out the hard way that it is using a service more intrusive then MicroSoft.
My recomendation is not to buy it and not to buy ANYTHING with SecuRom on it. Sure you might have to wait and see, but your computer will love you for it. Get console versions instead.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Limited playability
Comment: Heavily based on the original Colonization, you, in the person of Dutch, English, French, or Spanish adventurers, discover, explore, and colonize the New World. Along the way there are native peoples with whom you trade, build alliances, and occasionally fight. You compete with other European powers for the best territory. Your missionaries provide converts who augment your painfully slow population expansion.
Fun game but unlike the other games in the Civilization franchise the predetermined ending for the game, a war of independence from the Mother Country, limits playability. This tends to reward gaming the underlying game mechanics rather than pursuing a true quest for colonization.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you loved the original Colonization, you will love this one more.
Comment: As a fan of the original Colonization, I always wondered why they never built a sequel or had any type of continuation to the game... well with this release I am pleased to say that Sid Meier and Firaxis have done an outstanding job of remaining true to the original game while significantly enhancing the game with improved graphics on the CIV-4 Engine.
For those of you who like playing with the game settings to allow your cannons &/or other pieces to move more than one space, this is still contained in a file that can be modified to play with these settings. Most of the code seems to be contained in XML and Python, but it isn't difficult to figure out if you like messing with this stuff.
The game itself has a very high replay factor, though I will advise with High Graphics settings, and if you manage to take over the whole world with lots of pieces in play, you may experience some significant delays in processing a round, but I still consider this game worth every penny.
Customer Rating:
Summary: good game ! like usual.
Comment: very good game. the new interface is really nice.
Only negative point : very hard to win the game. king army is really strong
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