In The Settlers explores, colonizes and conquers new islands embedded in a believable, medieval-inspired fantasy world. The campaign can be played solo, as well as cooperative, with arbitrary side missions. Every step in the production chain, every single product is visualized.
Thousands of settlers follow their daily routine on every map and inspire the player with manifold emotions. It was originally released in Ubisoft Entertainment publ Dawn of Discovery is a strategy game developed by Related Designs. Ubisoft Entertainment published the game. Slitherine published the game. It came out on When materials are scarce, you can alter the relative importance and priority of individual goods and even prioritise production.
Knocking down your own buildings to free up resources is also more tactically important than in other games of its type. In contrast to Civilization clones there's no such thing as automatic production in this game and it does make you think. In fact, it's perfectly possible to stall a settlement completely simply for the lack of one tool or a bag of ore - at least it is if you've set the priorities badly. It can be frustrating in the extreme to watch six bags of coal sit on the ground right next to the building that you desperately need to turn out a scythe for example.
To get a metal ingot with which to create the tool, you need to get your miners to work, but they won't if they don't get some bread.
And they won't get bread until you farm the grain - with that bloody scythe that you haven't got You also control five specialists -geologists to look for mineral resources, pioneers to expand your boundaries, priests to cast spells and ask the gods for help, gardeners to counter the Dark Tribe's doings and thieves to pinch other players' resources and to scout around.
Plus soldiers to recruit - swordsmen, archers and medics as well as unique units for each race. Settlements in S4 have a fixed boundary, and to expand you'll need to either create pioneers who will slowly push the borders back, or build towers and castles.
To ensure you have enough manpower, you'll eventually need to build small, medium or large residences to hold more settlers. In military terms, soldiers can be created at first, second or third level of capability, but they can't be promoted, so making the right initial choice is essential.
Adding squad leaders boosts morale, or you can pump them up with war machines such as catapults and warships or add specialist military units unique to each race.
New to the series is the fact that your military might is tied closely to your economic power. You can have more soldiers than your rival but if he's ahead in production, his men will fight that much harder. Priests are another fascinating settler type, useful for casting offensive spells and beneficial ones, like shortcuts, which open paths through previously impassable terrain.
Along with the direct link between military capabilities and the economy, there are three races: Romans, Mayans and Vikings, each with their own features, building costs and weapons. There's also a new enemy, the Dark Tribe, that bring in different game strategies as they ruin all the land they settle. In Age Of Empires and Civ-type games, you move through several eras, gaining new units and buildings, but that's never been part of the Settlers ethos.
You'll need iron, coal and gold in the ground if at all possible but since you can only mine in the mountains, you'll need to be near them and you'll ideally need to have some trees and water nearby too, for chopping down wood and catching fish. The idea is to expand your village, taking over the land of the opponents around you, while still maintaining a solid balance of provision and utilisation of goods within your own community. There are a number of computer opponents to choose from, ranging from the hippy, do-goody types to the absolute lunatics and there are also a number of ways to select exactly who you'll be playing against, so you can set the difficulty levels yourself.
You can play up to three others at a time, or play a human opponent. The size of the world map on which you'll play can also be selected at the setup screen: the larger the map, the less chance there is that you'll have an aggressive neighbour waving his sword through your castle window right from the start.
It's a complex game but there are training lessons in the manual to take you through the basic principles. They show how to achieve certain objectives and ensure you have the materials to do so. This is an essential facility with a game of this degree of intricacy, but it's the one good thing in an otherwise poor manual.
It's rather like Sim City because it has an emphasis on city planning, except that although your city expands in size, it doesn't develop through time - it's always rooted in Mediaeval times - and anything that becomes available to you weapons, and so on will always be of that time.
Otherwise you'd soon have converted transit vans all over the place and it would be called The Crusties. Road layouts are as important to you here as they are in Sim City, because your ransporters, the people whose full-time job it is to lug all the materials back and forth along them, can't get past if their way is blocked by six tons of Athena posters on their way to the knight's new bachelor pad.
Thus, a well-planned spider's web-style network is essential. Unfortunately, you don't have the same devil-may-care, bulldozers-away facilities in your road-building that you do in Sim City. Trees, rocks and other areas of natural beauty cannot be demolished simply to make a link road to Do It All and, if you run out of wood, you have nothing to build with, so you have to plant trees as car well.
Land can't be flattened either, so it's best to build meandering roads that are flat rather than straight ones that have t-in-3 slopes: deliveries take much longer on steep paths, slowing the town's expansion.
Don't think that just because it respects the rights of trees it's all nicey-greeny-environmentally-sweet, though. There's a bit of Powermonger in there, too - a Serb content, if you like.
The idea is to put together armies, expand your territory and eventually wipe your neighbours off the face of the earth. Except you can only attack military buildings in this. The forerunner of the "precision attack", obviously. And, of course, no game of this sort could fail to have elements of Civilisation in it, too: your little Settler folk are hard at it, producing tools and weapons and diffuser hairdryers and other items essential for survival in Mediaeval Europe. Except, unlike in Civilisation, you can't control their development.
You can't ask Mediaeval scientist-types to aim their work in a certain direction in the hope that they'll invent the Ladyshave. A restricted imagination means they only build scythes and stuff although I suppose they are the precursors to the Ladyshave.
You can tell the game's set in the past because every one of your little characters has a career ahead of him. Within the game there are construction workers, carpenters, bakers, millers, butchers, farmers, fishermen but thankfully, no fishers of men , knights, forest rangers, lumberjacks, carpenters Strangely, they all seem to be male, which raises questions about how they came into being in the first place.
Maybe there's one woman who stays in the castle having sex and giving birth all the time. Who knows The nice thing about the game is that you can actually sit back and see all this stuff happening.
Usually in games of this type, you're told in the manual that a certain development or event leads to another and that this chain of events leads to something else. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it smacks of programmer bullshit, but usually it's so far under the surface of the game that you can never tell which.
With The Settlers, you know it's true because you can see it all happen in front of your eyes - and listen to it happen as well.
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