New 4X Sid Meier's Colonization style game Treasure Fleet

[Blake00]

Has anyone tried this new Civ & Colonization inspired game yet? If so is it good?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1120280/Treasure_Fleet/

I'm thinking about hitting the button on it as it's currently on sale thanks to the steam autumn sales however there's next to no reviews on it. A presumably one man show making a game as complicated as Colonization is no easy task (eg the FreeCol project has been going for 20yrs haha) so it could be not so great lol. It sure as hell looks pretty cool though! The Col addict in me is super tempted to try it asap haha! I love the retro 90s Col & Civ2 feel in his pics..

[Hans Lemurson]

I've played it.

Nice graphics, and good presentation, some new ideas, but lacking in some areas as a strategy game.

The map is large and lush and great to explore, but it's basically impossible to settle more than a tiny fraction of it due to the game's lack of exponential growth.

It has the same modular population units that Colonization did, but changed how they work the terrain.  Instead of one colonist working one tile, the colony has a total "capacity" for food/lumber/cotton/whatever and each colonist uses their labor to harvest a portion of that.  This is a neat idea, but one consequence of this is that the "location" of settlements doesn't really matter.  You are constrained by labor, not by land, and your colonists produce the same amount of resources regardless of where they are located.  A rich ore deposit just means that it can be worked by 2 miners instead of 1.  You could also just build a second mining colony and have the same ore yield.  There's no search for bonus resources that would allow a few colonists to produce huge wealth, just more "production capacity" that you have to fill with labor from Europe.

There is no domestic population growth, so all labor MUST come from Europe, where it has to be purchased with your cash.  The price of each kind of colonist rises as you purchase them, which roughly balances out the increase in production from your colonies, preventing any sort of exponential or runaway growth.  It does make you question the validity of your whole enterprise though when you're looking at a 100+ turn payback period for a new colonist, but given that there are 4 turns per year this isn't as bad as it seems at first.

Shipping is a major bottleneck early in the game.  The cargo holds of ships are 10 times smaller than in Colonization, and the journey-time of ships is about TWICE as long.  This means that the total shipping capacity is a mere 1/20th of what you would expect.  Production numbers are smaller as well (fortunately), but not nearly to the same degree.  A non-specialist will produce 2 resources per turn, and a specialist will produce 4.  A caravel has room for 20 cargo, but a round-trip takes about 13 turns.  Your starting caravel can't even cover the production of a single colonist!  You will spend a lot of time in the beginning having your fur-trappers inefficiently harvest lumber for construction projects simply because there's no room on the ships.

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I'm not sure that the developer really thought everything through when designing his game systems.  It seems to be "different" from colonization in ways that didn't really consider why, or what the consequences would be.

That said, you can still have fun with the game.  The ship-combat is evocative of the original, and pirates can prey on your shipping and make you sweat.
Your Monarch will give you Missions from time to time, which are fun little mini-challenges for you to complete (and be rewarded for).  You have to be on your toes to be ready to see if he wants you to scout 100 coast tiles, build a Church, or sell him 80 units of Cloth (which can be especially challenging if you grow no cotton...).

The look and feel of the game is nice, but it doesn't quite scratch the itch for a game about growth and development given its numerous resource bottlenecks.

[Blake00]

I bought it but still haven't got to playing it yet so thanks, this was very useful. And slightly worrying haha! hopefully I'll still enjoy it!

[Hans Lemurson]

I wrote up a summary of its economy here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1987416179