Credit where it's due: while the original Colonization (which I agree was brilliant) was sold under the "Sid Meier's" label, its lead designer was actually a colleague of Meier who would go on to become a celebrated designer in his own right, Brian Reynolds (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reynolds_(game_designe...).

Brian Reynolds doesn't seem to quite get the credit for the impact he had on the PC gaming scene. He was the lead designer of Civ 2 (in my opinion, the best one), created Alpha Centauri, and later made Rise of Nations. I wish he stuck to deep, strategic computer games instead of working for Zynga after he left Big Huge Games (Mark Pincus was such a big fan of Rise of Nations he hired Reynolds as Chief Game Designer).

Really love the guy's work, he has a lot of credits. What really saddens me is that Rise of Nations had such a bad follow-up that they never continued the series. RTS games always seem to have a tough time it seems, but I'm really loving that turn-based strategy games have made a huge comeback in recent years.

I was playing Civ IV: Colonization just today (through Wine). It is not the same, but better than nothing.

You can get the original (running in dosbox) from gog.com for a couple of bucks. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I preferred the original too.

There is also freecol

http://www.freecol.org/screenshots.html

You can run it in an emulator in-browser from Archive.org for free: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sid_Meiers_Colonization_19...

Although it's a 300MB download, so I haven't tried. Not all of their emulations work perfectly.