A tip: a successfully colony always successfully decolonises.
Civilization IV: Colonization is a game with a simple concept: you are the leader of a colony, and you’ll bring your colony through its steps – which means eventually decolonising. Everyone likes to feel powerful and in Civ IV: Colonization, you get that same feeling when you develop your colonial empire successfully and sack the Indians (or cooperate with them), and then sack your parent country from the face of the New World. Yes, although this game is about colonisation, it brings you through the whole process of being a colony: from settling the first city to eventually telling your parent country to copulate off.
Civ IV: Colonization is a bit different from Civ IV in a sense that it is more focused on colony political economy, rather than empire building. And because you are going to start in the New World, you’ll deal with the likes of the native Indians, and it is your choice whether to do it as the Spanish did or to be nice and work alongside them, both with their pros and cons. However, as your colony becomes big and egoistic – you’ll want to tell your European parents that it’s time for them to leave, especially since they’ll be taxing you as if it doesn’t matter. Then a big war ensues.
Traitors of the Fatherland: Unite!
But before all that, good management of the economy will allow you to build good warring calvary and soldiers, which eventually assist you in the fight against the English, Dutch, French or Spanish who’ll be shipping their more advanced troops from Europe. You’ll also be able to rope in the Indians to assist you, if you get on their good side.
Fixing your Civilization
I know of two kinds of people: die-hard Civvers and people who play it casually. If you’re the latter group, then installing Civ IV might not be the most ideal to think about, because there are some compromises in playing it on a netbook. Nonetheless, if you really want to play it on a netbook, there are a few tweaks that you can do to get it right, although you’ll still be chugging along at some slideshow framerate (5-10fps). It is still very playable if you can ignore the low-sharpness, low-res texture, and basically, eye-hurting graphics. But hey, Civ IV is that good to ignore it, eh?
Initially, my game had no problems loading the game up to the point where you closed the Royal Charter at the start of each game, and then I’ll get a crash-to-desktop. This was annoying. My method of solving this was simple. The problem lies in the fact that Civ 4 requires a minimum resolution of 1024×768 and that’s not supported by netbooks, at least, until you hack it.
If you are using an Intel GMA chip, head over here to find the fix.
Do as the Spanish did: bring a gun to a knife fight!
Alternatively, people have also been getting good mileage with this fix.
Head to Documents -> My Games -> Sid Meier’s Civilization…. (game folder). Open CivilizationIV.ini and modify the variables ScreenHeight and ScreenWidth to 600 and 1024. Search for FullScreen and change the variable to 0. If you would like mouse scrolling in this windowed mode, you’ll need to modify MouseScrolling to 1.
Both methods worked for me. Although the second method allegedly would allow you to get a perfect fit, it didn’t work for me as the game was still stuck in 1024×768. By double-clicking the window, you’ll force the game to stretch to the screen’s width.
Screenshots: CivFanatics
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