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

Challenge Accepted, notebook.

A netbook, unlike a tablet, is a full-fledged computer. It has everything a real computer has and that’s where its magic comes from. What you can do on a regular notebook or desktop, you can do on a netbook… except you’ll have to imagine yourself being thrown back to the early millennium, even though having Windows 7 Starter on the screen is not helping.

But it is true. A netbook generally has specifications that are similar to computers around 2003, except the miniaturisation of components over the years has allowed it to pack all that power into something of such size. Most netbooks are powered by an Intel Atom 1.66ghz processor, onboard graphics and has a measly 1GB of ram. But don’t discount this as a net-book as the name would suggest. It runs Youtube and Facebook well, but I can assure you that it will run games very well too, especially if you select them wisely.

Some helpful guidelines to get you started gaming on a netbook:

Manage expectations

Playing modern games on a netbook is like asking your old car to do 100mph. It can, but it will take time. In the same light, you’d have to take a few cues from this example. For one, don’t expect to run your game at full-on graphics. Try Low everything, no anti-alias, bilinear filtering. And be prepared to wait a significant while at the load screens.

Get rid of all unnecessary running apps

With only 1GB to spare, you need to manage the number of apps that are concurrently running in the background. On a stock HP Mini with its bloatware, 60% of the physical memory was used up by background apps, leaving around 250mb of RAM to run your games. That’s not good. It’s time to hit msconfig and disable large, heavy programs. A virus scanner is the first place to start.

Age does matter

You might have an Atom, and so do I. However, Atoms vary very widely in performance. From 800mhz to 1.9ghz, from single-core, to dual-hyperthreaded-cores, a newer computer might be more capable in playing a wider variety of games. Netbookist uses a HP Mini 110 to test the games here, which has the following specs:

• Intel Atom N550 (1.5ghz, dual-core, hyperthreaded)
• Integrated Intel GMA 3150 graphics
• 1GB DDR667 RAM
• 250gb HDD
• 10.1″ screen (1024×600 native)
• Windows 7

And… get a mouse when you wanna play games!