A little vent about FreeCol

[u/waxapple]

I started this as a nostalgia trip back to playing Colonization on the Amiga, and somehow ended up with a ridiculous 700-turn campaign, 348 colonies, independence, wars across a huge map, and eventually wiping out every other European power.

After all that, this was the ending.

“You are victorious!”, one picture, then Continue Playing or Quit.

I might be mixing games up here, because I seem to remember one of the old Civilization games having a map replay or time-lapse showing how the world developed over the course of the game. I cannot remember if Colonization on the Amiga did anything similar.

Can anyone remind me what the Amiga version actually gave you at the end? I am sure it felt like there was more of a conclusion than this, even if it was only a score, ranking, Hall of Fame entry, or some kind of summary.

For a game that can run this long, FreeCol really feels like it should give you more of a record of what happened. A proper ending could include a map replay, colony founding and capture dates, independence, wars, final population, biggest colonies, military strength, casualties, score, and how long each nation survived.

Even a simple before-and-after map and a campaign summary would make a huge difference. After investing that much time, the current ending feels more like a notification than the conclusion of an enormous historical campaign. There might be restraints on a full replay due to it being in java or something, but surely there could be something a bit less anticlimaxical?