Colonization Bonus Episode Video – FreeMars HD Tour

This bonus video showcases in HD the amazing FreeMars fan game inspired by Sid Meier’s Colonization, Alpha Centauri and Civilization Mars scenarios. This episode is part of a special bonus series where I play Civilization and Colonization fan games. This fan game video series is a bonus sub series to my main how to play classic Civ and Col genre games in HD video series. As part of this series I’ll also be playing Civilization Mars Colonization scenarios too! To see more awesome Civilization Series / Colonization / Master of Magic / Call to Power / Alpha Centauri videos showing some of their best scenarios & mods, how to play each of them in HD, and how to play as Barbarians, check out the playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuUMmh82ROo&list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY

CONTENTS:
00:00 Video Series Introduction
00:49 FreeMars Tour Introduction
02:04 Civ Mars scenarios, Alpha Centauri & Colonization influences
02:48 FreeCol similarities
03:14 Starting and customizing a new FreeMars Game
06:53 New FreeMars game begins!
14:17 Mid game example & advisors tour
26:45 Late game example tour (with EF combat)
31:17 Final thoughts & future video series plans

Colonization Bonus Episode Video – FreeCol HD Tour

This bonus video showcases in HD the amazing FreeCol fan game based on Sid Meier’s Colonization. This is the first episode in a special bonus series where I play Civilization and Colonization fan games. FreeCol is fully playable, support modern HD resolutions & multiplayer, is very fun to play and is still worked on today. Thanks to 3rd party modders it also supports more maps (Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, full world etc), more nations (allowing huge 8, 12 or 16 nation super games), and more natives. This fan game video series is a bonus sub series to my main how to play classic Civ and Col genre games in HD video series. To see how I was able to play the original Sid Meier’s Colonization in HD see my main tour video here: https://youtu.be/JoAYn5LGq60?list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSfj_G4kA9g&list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY

CONTENTS:
00:00 Video Series Introduction
00:49 FreeCol Tour Introduction
02:53 Colonization today & it’s legacy via other games!
 – 02:54 Classic Colonization in HD  (Main Ep Preview)
 – 03:17 Colonization fan communities
 – 03:33 Civ 4 Colonization sequel & it’s mods (Future Ep Preview)
 – 03:57 How FreeCol bridges the gap between Col & Civ4Col
 – 04:18 Treasure Fleet fan game (Bonus Ep Preview)
 – 04:31 FreeMars Scifi Colonization (Bonus Ep Preview)
 – 04:52 Colonization mods for Civilization games (Bonus Ep Preview)
 – 05:11 My attempts to play as natives (Bonus Ep Preview)
05:33 Starting and customizing a new FreeCol Game
 – 05:51 FreeCol 3rd party mods
 – 06:23 FreeCol is VERY customizable
 – 06:57 More playable nations mod for supersized Col games!
 – 08:24 Huge custom maps & random map generator
 – 09:26 More natives mod
 – 09:44 Final disclaimers
 – 10:16 Oh wait.. there’s MORE customization!
10:31 New FreeCol game begins!
15:05 Mid game example tour
18:26 FreeCol Map Editor and Super Earth map!
22:58 Late game declaration example & advisors tour
33:28 End game example tour (with REF combat)
35:38 Final thoughts & future video series plans

Settle The World (Colonization like retro indie fan game for the Amiga)

Over the last few years a fellow named Christian has been working hard on an awesome Sid Meier’s Colonization fan game for the Amiga called Settle The World! Similar to the popular Civ 4 Colonization We The People mod this game adds many features expanding on the classic Col experience (shipwrecks & more exploration rewards, boats can travel up rivers, there’s more goods, jobs, buildings, terrains, units etc) with new but very familiar graphics and is filled with beautiful pedia and cutscene event artwork! He’s now released a playable development version for people to try out and is eager for feedback (Note: Game is still in a early state with minimal AI).

These days most Amiga emulators are quite easy to get working and come with the free opensource AROS kick Rom which Christian has just kindly modified his game to work with, meaning NO illegal Amiga boot roms required, so anyone can easily play this game now! The game supports multiplayer via hotseat and even over the internet (via Steam remoteplay). Christian has kindly written a setup guide and I’ve also made one over at CivFanatics here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/682077/

You can download the latest dev build and follow Christian’s dev blog here: https://theotheoderich.itch.io/settle-the-world

Screenshots:

For those that don’t wish to mess with Amiga emulators Christian has also filmed a huge gameplay demonstration video here:

Colonization Bonus Episode Video – How to play as Natives

This bonus video shows our attempts to play as the normally unplayable Indian Native faction slots via hacks and cheats in Sid Meier’s Colonization. This episode is part of a special bonus series where I try to play as Neutrals/Barbarians in every Civilization genre game I can. The play as Barbarians in Civ video series is a bonus sub series to my main how to play classic Civ genre games in HD video series. To see how I was able to play the original Sid Meier’s Colonization in HD see my main tour video here: https://blakessanctum.wordpress.com/2021/11/03/civ-video-series-ep-02-colonization-hd-tour-col-fan-games-mods-scenarios/

VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/oMh1vzXFzps?list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY

CONTENTS:
00:00 Video Series Introduction
00:49 Col Playing as Natives Introduction
02:30 Playing as Natives in Civilization Col scenarios
02:50 Differences between native & regular factions
03:26 EdBigHead taking control of Natives in the 90s
04:42 My forum threads about playing as Natives
05:20 AyCe’s new attempt at playing as Natives
07:40 ColWin different to ColDOS
08:33 Final thoughts, how to contact, & future plans

NOTES:
– Unfortunately our success was very limited (compared to the great success we’ve had in Civ games) and it looks like playing as a native faction is not really possible. However if you’d like to try yourselves then please me know if you have any breakthroughs!
– “Barbarian” is the actual in-game name of the non-aligned and normally not playable 8th faction slot in Sid Meier’s Civilization games. My use of the word is purely in regard to the in-game Civ faction and certainly not anything in the real world.

THE SERIES:

• Attila’s Conquest 1 – Play As Barbarians in Civilization 1
• Play as Natives in Colonization (You are here!)
• Attila’s Conquest 2 – Play As Barbarians in Civilization 2 (Coming soon)
• Attila’s Conquest 3 – Play As Barbarians in Civ2 Test of Time (Coming soon)
• HYKGOMP 2217 – Play As Aliens in Alpha Centauri
• Attila’s Conquest 4 – Play As Barbarians in Civ Call to Power (Coming less soon)
• Attila’s Conquest 5 – Play As Barbarians in Call to Power 2 (Coming less soon)
• Attila’s Conquest 6 – Play As Barbarians in Civilization 3 (Coming not so soon)
• Attila’s Conquest 7 – Play As Barbarians in Civilization 4 (Coming very not soon lol)
• Play as Natives in Civ4 Colonization (Coming very not soon lol)
• Civ5, CivBE, Civ6, FreeCiv etc (Who knows when!)

Theocracy (Civ 1 & 2 like retro 4X indie game with some MoM & Col influences too)

Recently found out about a retro ‘Civ like’ 4X indie game recently released called Theocracy which the author Marcel Strbak describes as his personal homage to Sid Meier’s Civilization 1 & 2. Much like with Civ you start in ancient times and work your way into the modern era with tanks & infantry etc however interestingly he has also added mythology & magic into the game with “miracle” spell casting & monster summoning which Master of Magic fans will likely find interesting too. It appears you can play as a number of native American cultures exploring the new world and competing for control of the Americas or as Europeans racing across to get there as well which Sid Meier’s Colonization fans may like too. The game supports easily accessible and very Civ2 like rules & graphic files making it good for modding and Marcel plans to add scenario creation tools and possibly unit animation (presumably Civ3 & Civ2 Test of Time like) in the future too. The game is currently part of the Steam strategy sale until Monday (not currently on GoG though).

Steam page (not currently on GoG):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2195530/Theocracy/

New fan Colonization recreation project in development announced!

New fan project detected! While FreeCol is an excellent recreation of the Sid Meier’s Colonization experience that we highly recommend due to it’s many features, enhancements & modability there are some that still wish for a 1:1 recreation of the original Colonization and it’s classic 2D graphics that works on modern machines, allows modern viewing resolutions (like Col for Windows does), and has easy modability. One of the Col fans FB group community members David has announced that he’s working on such a thing, so we wish him all the best! Here’s some info he shared with us:

“[A faithful recreation of the original] is already in progress, it’s been in active development for about five years now by myself, currently sitting at around 150k LOC. It is not associated with any of the existing versions of the game nor their developers. It is a faithful remake of the original in terms of rules and gameplay, all the way down to things like replicating the original prime resource distribution algorithm and the same market price fluctuation mechanics. Graphics wise, it will return to the original style, namely 2D tile-based pixel art graphics, MIDI soundtrack with re-arranged versions of the original tunes, etc. But will also have some modern features, like scriptability/modability in Lua, and supporting different monitor resolutions and aspect ratios while preserving original look. Pre-pre alpha screenshot attached (note, still with some placeholder graphics). Realistically, it will probably be another two years until it reaches the alpha stage. Get ready for a true modern Col DOS revival in the not-too-distant future!”

Sir Meier’s Civilization 4 Colonization – We The People Mod release 4.0

The modders of the popular Sir Meier’s Civilization 4 Colonization mod “We The People” have released the latest version of their mod, after more than 2 years of development since the previous release. This new version includes new terrain types, terrain features, resources, an overhaul of building requirements, limitations on shipping, and a many many more improvements.

We The People (WTP) is by far the largest and most active mod for Civ4Col to this day. WTP has had a long impressive 15 year history and includes the features of many great and popular Civ4Col mods that came before it like Religion & Revolution (RnR), The Authentic Colonization (TAC) and others.

UPDATE: The guys have released a v4.0.1 bug fix release as people reported some troubles. So if anyone is currently trying v4.0 make sure you go get the update!

Announcement thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/683126/

Full change list: https://github.com/We-the-People-civ4col-mod/Mod/releases/tag/4.0

FreeCol v1.0.0 released!

The big moment has arrived for fans of Sid Meier’s Colonization! After all these years FreeCol has just delivered it’s big version 1.0 release!

“On this very day, 20 years ago, we made the first public release of FreeCol. Our releases have until now been marked as alpha/beta even though the number of downloads for our game has long been counted in the millions. We are extremely proud to finally announce FreeCol 1.0.0!”

Download and more details here: https://www.freecol.org/news/freecol-1.0.0-released.html

Players can interact with the FreeCol team here: https://discord.gg/CHcH75s

If you’re new to FreeCol then you can check out my ‘old’ (even though it was only posted a year ago lol) video that has none of the new features lol but still shows a lot of cool stuff in the game.

FreeCol (Colonization) 0.13.0 stable release is here!

Wow! It wasn’t long ago that I was posting to fellow Sid Meier’s Colonization fans about the big FreeCol 0.12.0 release that was the first stable release in many years, well now we’ve got a new 0.13.0 stable release and there’s been some big changes!  Stian & the team have added lots of new features including music, a new interface along with animating oceans, clouds and rivers that really bring the game to life! More details here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ColonizationGame/comments/vvmj4c/freecol_0130_released/

If you’re new to FreeCol then you can check out my ‘old’ (even though it was only posted a few months ago lol) video that has none of these new features lol but still shows a lot of cool stuff in the game.

FreeCol (Colonization) 0.12.0 stable release is here!

Big news guys! The long lasting fan remake of Sid Meier’s Colonization known as FreeCol has finally reached it’s big 0.12.0 stable release. While there have been many test nightly releases over the last few years this is the first official stable release since good old 0.11.6 back 2015! I help the team out occasionally with a few things so I’ve watched first hand how Mike and the gang were slowly building towards this release, but then original FreeCol admin Stian returned along with some new helpers resulting in things really getting busy and before we knew it FreeCol 0.12.0 was here!

There’s been a huge amount of changes since the last stable release which people can check out a list of here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/wiki/0.12.0%20Release%20Notes/

And of course people can download the new release from here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/freecol/files/freecol/freecol-0.12.0/

Please note that the game requires Java 11 minimum, so the regular Java 8 runtime most people have will not be enough! EDIT: Due to this issue they’ve released a new special version of Freecol 0.12.0 with the required Java files included here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/freecol/files/freecol/freecol-0.12.0/freecol-0.12.0-with-java.exe/download

Mazim’s Extra New Nations mod (that adds 4 more playable European nations allowing for 12 player games) is still not included (I’ll see about getting that added) but he’s released his final 1.4 version which can be downloaded from here and added into your FreeCol/Data/Mods folder:
https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/141200/thread/658935e76f/?page=1#7bac

If you’ve never seen or played FreeCol I recently released a HD video tour of the game showing off most of it’s coolest features. Although even just in the last few months since I posted this video even more changes have been made and the latest game actually looks quite different now due to animating oceans and 3D art! The way things are going the next 0.13.0 release might look like a different game!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSfj_G4kA9g&list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY