Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization
Fair · Strategy · 2008
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 11.1h
- Value
- $1.80/hr
- Reviews
- 87% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, DirectX 9.0c-compatible 64 MB video card with Shader 1.1 Support or better, 901 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization is the third offering in the award winning Civilization IV series. A re-imagining of the classic Colonization game Sid Meier created in 1994, Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization is a total conversion of the Civilization IV engine into a game experience in which players will lead a European...
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
January 2013 is where it bottomed out, at $4.99. It has been discounted 46 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 9 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 9 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 7 percent on value. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 90 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI ($59.99, scores 72) beats it on value, while it beats Sid Meier's Civilization®: Beyond Earth™ ($39.99, scores 9).
Of the 387 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 1 comes from a buyer who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 56 percent of the 106 reviews written there were positive, against 87 percent overall, and those are 8 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 11.1 hours; clearing it takes 26, which is 2.3 times the campaign.
Players
244 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Good game. A nice unique spin on the normal civ 4 formula, but good lord, are the trade routes a nightmare to do manually; It'd be nice if it had a filter or something when assigning individual routes, but it's an older game, what are you gonna do?
I really like this game, especially the We the People mod. My suggestion would be that it would be even more interesting if commodities like corn, fish, cassava, and so on were not only converted into food but could also be sold as commodities themselves. For example: maybe we could sell fish to Europe, corn to Spain,
For those who played the original Colonization and for the slow games passionate. A wonderful experience. Slow, meticulous strategy.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization scores 60/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/16810/sid-meier-s-civilization-iv-colonizationThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.