Sid Meier's Colonization

A game feature not properly explained in the manual neither any guide I have read (and I have read a lot), is that you can get an indian convert each time you attack a native village in which you have previously depolyed a mission. If the mission was set up by a Jesuit Missionary, or if you have Jean de Berbeuf, the chance of getting a forced convert is like 90% per attack, otherwise it's like 40% unless you have Gines de Sepulveda, which provides a 100%.

This game mechanic is what Spain's 50% bonus against indian villages is really for. Together with the fact that Spain always starts with a veteran soldier (even at Viceroy level), and that Spain always starts with a Jesuit Missionary in the Recruiting Pool (another undocumented feature), this means you can get a decent surge of indian converts very early on, which are very useful for new colonies because they have a +1 bonus to food production. The other three countries doesn't get the combat bonuses or the guaranteed Jesuit early on, so this strategy doesn't works so well for them (they have their own national bonuses, which are also powerful if properly applied).

Note that you doesn't need to burn the indian villages to get the converts, so you will lose no score. You can get as much as 4 or 5 converts from a village if the tribe is at least agrarian, without burning it. If you do burn it, however, you will get your missionary back.

If you follow this strategy, the natives will get annoyed at you very soon, and will burn down your missions. So you need to apply a carrot-and-stick approach, giving them free gifts after attacks to appease them (1 trade good or tool is enough, preferably to the tribe's capital).

The main drawback of this strategy is that each indian convert you get counts for the total number of colonists in America, and that will increase the cost of recruiting new colonists at the docks of Europe. This can be a problem early on, when you can get free specialists (or at least, low-cost) in the recruitment pool. Later on it's cheaper to hire specialists directly from the Royal University anyway.

Also, you will need to recruit Bartolomé de las Casas later on, as he is the only way to turn indian converts into normal colonists, who can then be taught a profession. The indian convert bonus to food production stops being useful when you begin to get Master Farmers.

Lack of documentation of this feature, togheter with the lack of documentation about Spain's real starting bonuses, is the fact why most veteran players of the game think that Spain's starting bonus is underpowered compared to the other colonial powers. It isn't.

Why the game developers designed Spain to be played this way, but failed to tell anyone about it, is lost to me. Apparently, the game designers felt it was less controversial to let people assume they designed Spain to be played as a mad indian burner and looter, instead of letting people know that Spain was designed for bullying natives into christianity at swordpoint.

But meh, we are talking about the people who made up flimsy excuses about why they didn't include Portugal as 4th colonial power, when anyone with a smigden of historical knowledge can figure out that they didn't include Portugal because they didn't want to feature slave trade in this game.

Do you really think I want to buy 30y old game on GoG and running it on DOSBox?
GoG is not paying a dime to DOSBox. They are thieves and vampires living from your nostalgia. Wake up and stop buying old games you already bought in the past.

All you have to do is unpack the raw data file into a binary shell and it can run on most current gen systems. No problem your welcome

@Larry you can get amiga .adf files from other sites, Planet Emu has a lot.

how are we supposed to play amiga version? when mr. gog gets the license of a game, all versions get removed from anywhere and he doesn't bother sell those versions, as well!

Looks like we lost our old friend again :(

AWWW... they even pulled the Amiga version!!!

Ben : there's a dosbox for linux don't waste your time with wine buddy.

I downloaded the game from Amazon for 1,79 and can play it in a Dosbox in Windows. However, I want to play it on my Linux laptops, too. I can play the Windows version over WINE which then starts Dosbox, but that's taking up too much ressources from my old acer D270. Therefore, I need a working DOS-Version of the game. Does anyone have one?

Another great game I also own. To bad the download button is gone. And I had made a better cheat some years ago for this game. Sneaky sneaky.
God Bless all!

it's glorious to see how people rate the game good and find that the download disappeared.
well, if you rate it too good then they start selling it, it's pretty simple, do not rate it good even if it is the best game in the world, that way you will always have it free for download

Not surprising to find GoG buying up the rights to abandonware then packaging it with Dosbox and selling it. If they didn't do that folks would be able to dowload games like this for nothing along with the free Dosbox and play them. What is slighly surprising is that GoG are a subsidiary of CD Projeckt Red, fucking shame on you guys, we expect better ethical standards from you.

This is a real shame... I own the GoG version, but it's shit and won't play so basically copyright is probably stopping me having a working version of the game. Fuck you GoG!

What no dos version? need a copy i think i have one still in my archives.

I love this game!!!

Figures that some jerkwads would "Buy" the rights to this game and sell it to keep it out of the hands of people who actually bought it when it was new. I wonder if they do actually buy the rights to old games or do they just charge for pirating software.

wow! So dissapointed it's unavailable for download. the new version they released is ok, but this game was always awesome! one of my favorite games before it got stolen!

The best game in the world