Settlers (Serf City)

I love a good strategy game. I also love a good management sim. So it is no surprise that my list of favorite games is populated with titles like PowerMonger, Railroad Tycoon, and Sim City. My favorite PC game combines elements of all of these and is not made by Bullfrog, Microprose, or Maxis. Settlers was in fact developed by a relatively small company known as Blue Byte.

I could spend this entire review just using adjectives to describe Settlers. Here, I'll get it out of my system right away: Addictive, fun, cute, intensive, extensive, intuitive, and playable all come to mind. When I first bought this game over two years ago, a friend of mine literally camped out at my house to play it. We couldn't pry him away from our computer until he finally decided to purchase it for himself. My wife and I still play Settlers regularly and we have both been eagerly anticipating the sequel.

Juggling act.

In the game of Settlers, you have to balance the resources of your land in order to support your army. Building guard huts can expand your territory which in turn gives you access to more resources. The object of the game is to continually expand until you have taken over an entire map. Did I forget to mention that you will have some competition? Whether playing against a friend, computer opponents, or both, conflict is the only way to resolve who wins. From your perspective, you are good and all of the other players are evil.

The perspective is a down-view at a tilt (not quite isometric), with a look similiar to Sim City, only far more organic. Each individual settler is animated and instantly recognizable for their role: prospectors have white beards and pick axes, soldiers wear the armor of their rank, etc.. Thousands of these cute little citizens can inhabit your domain. You do not control them directly, but they will do as you wish, whether it is to build a windmill or to attack a pesky neighbor on your border.

The management model of Settlers is complex yet intuitive. Follow this portion of the formula if you can... To assign generic citizens to specific jobs, they need the appropriate tools. Tools need to be manufactured by the blacksmith who requires iron and wood to make them. Iron bars are made by the iron smelter who requires raw iron ore and coal to stoke the fires. Iron ore and coal are mined from the mountain. Miners get very hungry and require bread, fish, and tacos. The model continues like that for each industry. They all provide and require to/from each other in a vast melting pot of synergy.

As well as making sure that your industries are kept in production, there are some other things you will have to attend to; i.e. soldiers need to be trained. New ore deposits need to be discovered to replace the depleted ones. All of the goods need to be hand carried from place to place and that means you will have to have a good network of roads. Each section of road has a flag at either end and a "carrier" settler who will move goods back and forth across that section. Traffic jams can be a real problem in Settlers. Goods can pile up at one flag and the poor carriers can get overworked and confused if you don't build enough routes.

Large scale dueling.

Warfare in Settlers is very gentleman-like. You cannot attack another player until you are direct neighbors (you must share a border). When you do give the order to attack, you do so by targeting one of his/her guard buildings. Depending on your preferred settings, a number of your soldiers will march out to the enemy building and line up single file. They will attack the defending guards one-at-a-time until (hopefully) all of them are defeated. Your soldiers will automatically claim the guard building, burn all of the rest (very satisfying sounds go along with this barbeque), sound a horn and voila: you have expanded your property at the expense of the other player.

Depending on the amount of RAM in your computer, the world size can be set to ridiculously huge maps. Each game starts with a race between the players to find the sweetest spot on the map to plant your initial settlement. You will want to start off with as much access to all of the resources possible right away. The hunt for the perfect valley is almost a game unto itself. Maps are randomly generated with seed values from the main menu. A third party map editor is available for the Amiga version of Settlers.

The sounds in Settlers are mostly meant to be cues to inform you of what is going on. This is why there is an option to separate the sound in two-player games so that each player can have their own speaker close to them. Everything is so cute, the soldiers groan when they are hit and the bang of the swords are distinctly different from the chop of the woodcutters axe. I'm not fond of the music in Settlers; in fact it is so repetitive that there is a general rule in our house that if you play Settlers you play it with the music OFF.

PC or Amiga?

I originally played Settlers on my Amiga 1200. There are trade-offs between both the PC and Amiga versions, so it is hard to decide which is better. The PC version has a Hi-res SVGA mode that is not only beautiful, but is very useful for seeing more of the map on screen at one time without scrolling. The Amiga version has no troubles getting two players working because of built-in plug-and-play support for two mice (you'll have to mess with IRQs and COM ports on the PC). As to be expected, the scrolling is much smoother on the Amiga. Another benefit with the Amiga is the ability to connect two monitors (one RGB, one composite). The game is always split-screen for two players, but having a second monitor attached means that you both don't have to bunch up around the same screen.

If you don't pay enough attention, your Settlers world can get out of hand and become a confusing mess. Control is what this game gives you and you do need to exercise it in order to get very far. Settlers is the game for the control-freak and warmonger in all of us.

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