FreeCol! The open source version of Colonization!

So, I was playing my old game of colonization on XP, with no sound, when it crashed, and I thought to myself--ahhh, that's why I quit playing it; because it was crashing without reason. Some improvements, I started to think, to Colonization would be (1) making it so it didn't crash (2) getting the sound to work in XP (3) a large number of game related quirks should be fixed.

So I moseyed around and did a few chores, vacuuming, taking out the trash, etc, and thought about angband, and how it was surely a much improved game because of its open-source nature, and how all of the problems of Colonization would be fixed by diligent fans, if only they made the colonization game open source. Surely this game has a following of really smart people that could make it better.

Eventually, I remembered that last time I had played Colonization, I had used a boot disk, which had fixed problem number one, so it didn't crash. (I never did get the sound-card to work right, with the boot disk though, so it didn't help with problem 2). I was just about to reboot my computer, but I decided to see what sort of comments I could find online about the game.

Very shortly thereafter, I found that indeed, someone HAS put out a free open source version of colonization, called FreeCol! I downloaded it, and started playing. At first I was really excited, because the opening movie, and then the ambient sound as I started my game were very impressive. Then all that sound went away, and everything was completely silent, which was kind of a let-down. I was further disappointed by the movement of the units--instead of sliding across, they teleport from one square to the next. Then, I could find no way to adjust the difficulty setting, and then every time I hit the Enter key to open up the city screen to load up a ship, it ended my turn!

Okay, so my first few minutes weren't so great, but then little improvements started becoming apparent. (1) Instead of having to write down on a piece of paper what each individual Indian village was trading, and what kind of specialty profession it trained, all of this was easily accessible by right-clicking on the Indian village. This is a huge improvement. (2) The go-to functionality, and path-finding has been greatly improved, showing not only the path the unit will take, but the number of turns to get there. (3) Goods can be set to report when they are LOW, instead of just when they are OUT; likewise, I think it will report when your stores are ALMOST full. (4) Whereas in colonization, after a building is completed, you have to go make a decision about what will be built next, in FreeCol, you may set up a building queue, and all at once state the next several buildings will be. (5) A minor but nice improvement is that when Indians tell you tales of nearby lands, they go ahead and tell you when those lands are adjacent to an ocean. Thereby, you don't send a scout all the way over to investigate one patch of unmapped territory, only to find that the whole thing is an inland lake.

Later, I went back to my colonization game from earlier that day and I was really surprised at how blocky the graphics seemed. The graphics, while perhaps not the ideal color palette, are much more detailed; being for a modern monitor, rather than the old 256 color VGA.

Finally, the game has a nice online community set up, and the program is being actively upgraded by its open-source coders. I hope to soon see additional tilesets, music and sound effects incorporated. There will probably also be better computer AI, but I'm not sure I'm an experienced enough player to notice that sort of thing. Otherwise, probably not too much because they are trying to stay true in most gameplay details to the original game, but they are also apparently working on a FreeCol II, which will not have the limitation of staying true to the original.