Sid Meier's Colonization/Gameplay

This game is a blend between the Civilization series and a trading simulation.

The game sees the player being sent as an envoy of one of the four major powers in a quest to "colonize" a new world (which may resemble America or may be "made-up").

Time
The epoch starts in 1492 and spans indefinitely until the player has completed his goals and claimed independence. The manual claims that the game terminates by 1850, regardless of whether the goal of independence has been won by that date or not. You must declare independence from your initial sponsoring country by 1800 in order to have any chance of winning the game.

Features
The game allows production, trading, and transport of sixteen commodities, in addition to the usual search, build, and grow methodology common to 4X games. The player can choose between four European powers as their home nation. England, France, Holland and Spain. Each power has a different motive for colonizing the New World and the player receives an advantage in a particular area depending on which is chosen.

Maximum number of colonies
The unstated limitation of 48 colonies may be quite vexing for builder types who wish to create an incredibly extensive empire in the New World. This limitation also allows the computer players to "catch up" somewhat from a dismal initial start. The computer players can keep building on territory that is unclaimed while the human player is limited to destroying/disbanding one settlement in order to build another elsewhere to take advantage of more useful/more advantageous terrain; but a disbanded colony may be one captured from an enemy then emptied of cargo and colonists, so the outlook is not all bad.

Movement automation
There are limited automation options for movement of materials and units, by "Trade Routes" and the "Go" command. Sending ships to and from Europe is fairly simple, but the program may cause cargo-swapping in mid-Atlantic and spoil an otherwise good plan. The primitiveness of these systems may have contributed to causing this otherwise fine variant of Civ to remain relatively unknown and unplayed by even devout Civ fans.

Wikimedia links

 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_%28game%29