Economic Game Progression

Table of Contents

These describe the phases and progression of an economic game with, say, the English.

Landing

Goal: Stability
The landing phase is where the player founds the first colony and tries to survive.
Because there is no infrastructure in the beginning, everything is inefficient and becomes a puzzle that requires a lot of micro managing. It feels unstable and uncertain. Resources from Europe have to be provided in order to ensure survival.
In order to make this not too hard for inexperienced players, on easy difficulties the player is given a enough money so that those decisions become not so troublesome. We will need some kinds of recovery mechanisms like loans, or potentially asking the king for more support in exchange for a tax raise.
The phase ends when the player successfully has established the first colony with 4-5 colonists that can support themselves without being near death constantly.

Goal: Surplus
Now where the player has established a foothold in the new world, he will try to improve efficiency in order to produce a trade surplus and make the whole endeavour economically sustainable. This probably includes building some useful buildings in the main colony, forming the land around it and founding 1 or 2 nearby small support colonies.

Goal: Growth and Automation
Challenges: Conflicts with natives and pirates
This is probably the longest phase and describes the mid game. Now that the colonies are producing a surplus, these resources can be invested in growth by founding more colonies, speeding up immigration and in general increase production significantly. This will almost certainly lead to conflicts with the local natives and attract pirates, so the player is forced to build at least a small army and navy to defend his colonies.
In this phase the player has quite some choices to direct his attention: He can try to build up all industry necessary to survive and be self sufficient without trading with Europe. He can try to massively grow the raw good production in order to become rich. This can of course be combined. The high level buildings for automation help dealing with the vast number of colonists and trade routes, that are necessary to run the colonies. The handful of colonies have become a complicated system, that needs to be monitored and managed on a larger level.

Goal: Politics and power structures
Now that the player is thriving in the new world and the game has become more and more systematic, structural changes matter more than building another colony here or there. The automation level has made direct changes a not challenging experience anymore. Instead, we want to force the player to look at structural changes:
Internal structural changes...
The king will raise taxes, the church will want influence and may have demands, and the investors from the old world want their share. The political struggle will become about giving the colonies a structure that is independent from the old world and, eventually, deny the demands of the old world leading into the independence war.

Goal: Win the game
Tensions have risen so high, that the king sends his expedition forces. The player needs to win the independence war and will win the game. If possible it would be good to avoid the phase in the original Colonization I game, where first educate a small army of statesmen to get every colony to 100% freedom and then build soldiers and artillery forever to finally declare independency. Instead it would be good to give the player reasons to develop these things automatically, so that he finds himself in a position where the independence war seems like a reasonable choice or kind of happens to him.