Not ready for prime time
Customer Rating: 
This is a product that screams inadequate beta testing or lack of real thought into some design aspects. It may become a good game after several patches but probably not possible.
As a preface, I am a long-time Civ player, but never played the prior version of Civ3 Colonization, so I am essentially a Colonization 'virgin'.
Some aspects of poor design to me include the following:
1) Recruiting of new colonists from Europe. The random selection of volunteer colonists is poor. These units can be 'rushed' but often cost as much as 5 times what it would cost to simply purchase the unit. This seems silly at best.
2) Inability to recruit 'regular' colonists who are not specialists, the rarity and inability to recruit indentured servants, and the handling of petty criminals (the European govt should be paying me to take them off their hands...).
3) Inability to retrain specialist colonists whose specialties are not useful in my settlements.
4) The education system that takes progressively longer to educate each subsequent student even when you upgrade the school facility. At one point it was going to take 70 YEARS to university educate a single student.
5) Rebel sentiment (the idea of the game is to gain independence from your European mother country) which does not increase with every tax increase from the homeland. Historically this was THE reason for revolutions in the Americas.
6) The rate of increase of the home country's expeditionary force that will be sent to defeat you when you are able to declare independence. I have seen ridiculously large forces that could not possibly be defeated, more soldiers than I had people...
7) The almost exponential cost increase of recruiting each additional military unit of a given type in Europe makes a competitively strong military virtually impossible.
8) The inability to shut off the AI governor in colonial cities. Even with the tools available to emphasize and de-emphasize aspects of production, I still find the governor doing things I don't want done and don't anticipate.
The early game play is the most interesting part but it drags due to lack of resources or access to resources. Once the colony is set up, however, the mid-game becomes simply dull and repetitious with far too much micro-management. The end game or revolution might be fun if I ever had adequate military to succeed.
This is one of those games that if you are an old hand fanatic, you might enjoy. For new or first time players who don't want to spend hours reading fan sites and blogs in order to play, give this one a miss.
