Intelligent Game Reviews

The Settlers is an interesting case study in the differences in the European and US game markets. It has been wildly popular in Europe, with more than one million copies of The Settlers and The Settlers II being sold and translations offered in many languages. But in the US, the games have done poorly against other real time strategy offerings. Will the third time be the charm in North America for Blue Byte?

Basics of Play

The Settlers III is a real time strategy game. While you can’t change the speed of the game, it plods along at a constant, somewhat slow pace, it otherwise behaves much like many other games in the genre. You have to construct buildings, gather resources, and build up armies to wage war and annihilate your opponent. Victory is always based on destroying the other guy to the last man… or settler in this case.

There are two primary modes you get into in The Settlers III. In the first you must build up your economy to generate military units. In the second you mass these units to lay waste to your enemies. And these are distinct phases in the campaign, more or less, due to the way the scenarios are set up. You generally start with a few settlers, a tower, and a few troops as a garrison. The computer player has a large, entrenched setup you must destroy to complete the scenario. A few troops at a time won’t do any damage to your opponent, so you’ll generally need to build up your economy in order to generate the troops you need for a mass campaign of looting, burning and mayhem.

And the economy is pretty detailed. Settlers come in several flavors: carriers, diggers, builders, and specialized workers that chop trees, turn logs into lumber, mine ore, etc. Unlike many real time strategy games that have resource gathering, the model here is much more involved. In order to get weapons for your fighting men (one weapon is needed per soldier) you pretty much need to build a complete economy. You start out with a small supply of tools (the correct tool is needed for each profession your settlers can work in), lumber and stone. You can then decide what sort of building to construct and where, your settlers will automatically begin work to construct it. Building a lumberjack house will attract a settler to pick up an axe, move in and start felling trees.

He’ll do this automatically. But, you can’t use the logs yet. They’ll stack up for a while and then the lumberjack will stop working and start napping in his house. You’ll need to construct a sawmill. This will attract a settler to pick up a saw and move in. Carriers will take logs from the lumberjack and deliver them to the sawmill where the worker will saw them into lumber you can use to build more buildings.

The rest of the economy works on similar lines. You don’t direct individual settlers, only decide what structures to build. The economy works on its own after that… with one important exception. It is possible to deplete resources, especially wood and the three minerals: coal, iron and gold. You can plant new trees, but you need to search for minerals using special prospectors. Once resources have been found you can build a mine. But, you need to smelt the iron into ingots for use by the tool maker or weapon smith. And these guys need coal to do their jobs as well.

The intricacy is nice but the pattern is always the same. You always have all structures available in every scenario, so you build up your economy the same way pretty much every time. Sure, you might substitute fishing for farming but more or less it is always identical. And, you’ll have to constantly be micro managing the production of coal, iron and gold. Gold is important since the more you mine the tougher your troops are when fighting outside your own territory. Iron is critical for weapons so you can recruit troops. Coal is used to smelt iron and gold and in forging tools and weapons. The problem is mines run out of ore really quickly, so you have to constantly fuss with your supply lines, something I found incredibly tedious.

Another twist is that you can’t just build anywhere. You can only construct buildings and harvest resources on your own land. Settlers won’t leave that territory, and in fact will die slowly if they do end up outside your borders due to an attack. To expand your territory you can slowly claim land with special settlers or build military buildings that grab an area around them as your own.

This little fact is crucial to combat. Once you’ve built up your army you can sally forth to enemy territory. By attacking towers you can capture them. This will take control of the land around the tower and destroy enemy buildings inside that area. Settlers will retreat back into their own borders and you can now pick up any resources that might be on the ground, provided you can create a path back to your own town through your territory.

Combat is thus a scorched earth exercise… you send in the troops, capture a few towers and either hold them to try to keep the goods, or tear them down. Generally the enemy AI doesn’t rebuild stuff, though it will build towers, and is pretty inept at even defending things. They tend to start out with a lot of towers, buildings and troops to make up for it.

There are three moderate length campaigns, each with a different civilization: Roman, Egyptian and Chinese. The civilizations have some minor differences in units and buildings, but they are essentially the same. And, while there are both land and sea units, the sea units are used only for carrying troops or goods, they never get into combat.

There are four types of military units to construct. Archers, swordsmen, spearmen and priests. The priests can call on the gods to help you in various ways including frightening the enemy, though in hand to hand combat they are useless. Archers have low attack power, but can shoot from a distance. They also have a minimum range, so if bad guys close, they are defenseless. In the end though, all you’ll ever really want are swordsman. They are the toughest and the variations in military units are so small as not to matter, making the different types moot since it takes the same resources per unit to construct.

In the end the complexity of the economy is fun to play with for a while, but it gets tedious in the end. And, with only a small number of units, mostly ones you don’t use, combat is so simple as not to be of much interest. It is just a matter of who has the bigger army first in multiplayer and a matter of wearing down the AI in the campaigns. You’re likely to enjoy the game for a while, but I thought it lacked long term appeal because of these limitations.

Weirdly enough, game options are set outside the game. This means if you want to change the display resolution, scroll speed, or other options you have to exit the game to do it. I found this odd, but the annoyance is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that there are only a few options and once set you aren’t likely to fuss with them too much.

There are other oddities in the interface as well. For example, you can’t load a game from within a game, you have to exit and restart. Annoying, but livable I suppose. Then there is the way the screen scrolls by default. You have to hold down the right mouse button to scroll, and even once you fix that, you can’t highlight multiple units and scroll the map at the same time.

One reason for the game’s popularity outside the United States in its previous installments is undoubtedly the fact that it has been translated into thirteen different languages including French, German, Italian and Korean. It’s rare for a game to be translated at all, let alone into so many languages. The success of The Settlers games may point the way for other developers to take the plunge.

Playing Against Actual Humans

New to the series this time is multiplayer TCP/IP network s
upport, which allows for play over the Internet. Blue Byte has a dedicated matchmaking server in Germany so you can find opponents pretty easily which is great. Game play was solid over the network for up to four players, but I did not try any more than that. Host connection rate, as with most games, is an important factor in how smooth the game plays of course.

I preferred the multiplayer experience to that of the single player game. You don’t have to contend with the inept AI when playing against real people, and the game pace seemed faster since more happened in the same amount of time when a cunning opponent was playing against you. Based on the multiplayer experience, you can catch a glimpse of what might have made the first two games so popular, although I suspect that translations into many European languages may have contributed more.

Graphics, Sound, etc.

The graphics and animation of The Settlers III are the best part of the game. Each side has a unique building style and unit dress. You can run the game in 640×480 up to 1024×768 resolution, and on the higher resolution the game is far more playable. This is because the size of the units and buildings is pretty big, they are highly detailed and great looking, so at lower resolutions it’s hard to see enough of your map to control things adequately.

There is a ton of animation in the game. Each different type of Settler has it’s own special animations, all of which look really good. As they walk around doing their jobs it looks like a very cool cartoon village come to life on your screen. Excellent!

Sound effects are unique, with funny little cries of agony when your units are killed. The crash of a tree when it falls and other building sounds are generally quite nice and add to the feeling that you are building a living community. There are three different music scores, one for each of the civilizations. They are nice enough, although how the Night on Witch Mountain, I think that is what it was, has anything to do with the Egyptians I will never know. Unfortunately the music also gets repetitive rather quickly, there is only the one track per civilization in a constant loop.

The printed manual is completely inadequate. A few sparse pages in the CD case doesn’t cut it for a game of this complexity. There is an HTML based online manual which is more lengthy, but even then it isn’t the best manual I’ve ever read. And it is also annoyingly formatted in such a way that unless you have your display resolution at 1024×768 or higher you have to scroll right and left to read a line of text! This makes getting the information you want a serious chore.

The Verdict

The Settlers III is a fun game for a while. The great graphics and the emphasis on building as well as destroying are nice. On the other hand, tedious micro management of mining, the slow pace of play, and the completely hopeless computer AI make the single player campaigns more than a little bit disappointing. Multiplayer is a bit better, but it can’t ultimately save the game in my book. If you’re looking for a slow paced, relatively economically involved real time strategy game, it might be worth your time. Otherwise, there are a lot better options out there.

The Settlers III Screenshots

An early, and ultimately fruitless raid on an opposing Egyptian outpost.	Getting your economy rolling is critical in the early part of the game. Here you can see my busy Settlers building several new structures.
Multiplayer might be the best part of the game. There are lots of maps and up to 16 players can play at once.	The printed manual is inadequate, but a nice online help system is available. Too bad the HTML requires a 1024×768 display to read properly.

If you're using the above images on your website, please link back: <a href="http://intelligames.nodblog.com/the-settlers-iii-review/">The Settlers III Review</a> Thank you!