The Settlers

At the start of each mission you are required to first of all select a knight. At the beginning of the game, you have only two to choose from, but as missions are successfully completed, more knights join your Round Table. Each knight possesses a talent that is uniquely his, which is particularly suited to certain missions. For example, it is useful to make Markus the leader, if you want to graze enemy strongholds to the ground, because he can equip his soldiers with new flaming torches. When good trade conditions are required, Elias is the right choice because he possesses special negotiation skills and gets goods more cheaply. Naturally it is difficult to judge at the beginning of a mission which knight might be the best choice, but at least the descriptions preceding the missions provide some hints.

No matter whom you select, with the right strategy, any mission can be carried out and completed by any knight. A mission always starts in a predetermined area; the bare minimum in terms of infrastructure is already present. That means that there are always a castle, a church, a village square and, of course, an indispensable storehouse to begin with. Apart from that, you are also provided with some raw materials for the construction of your first buildings. Depending on the landscape and climate (polar, temperate, subtropical or tropical desert) a different approach is required regarding the sourcing of raw material and food and any mistakes in building and planning are perceived sooner or later.

In the initial stages of each mission, the raw materials present in the surrounding area have to be utilized. Obviously you have to build the appropriate buildings and thus you invariably start with the construction of logging and hunting cabins, fishing huts or crop farms. Apart from achieving the goal of building a functioning and flourishing settlement and infrastructure, you also have to work towards the promotion of your knight. A promotion can be achieved as soon as a certain number of settlers live in their own small town, clothing or other goods are produced and certain buildings like the castle, church or storehouse are extended. In some cases, promotions also help to improve contacts with neighboring villages and trade partners.

The larger the settlement and the higher the rank of the knight, the more options open up in terms of potential buildings and goods. To begin with, you might only manufacture leather garments in the tannery and process looted meat into sausages in the butchery, but you are able to progressively offer a wider variety of food. Given a herd of cows or sheep, cheese can be produced from their milk and clothing from their wool. This is desperately needed, because the demands of your settlers for food grow ever more. In colder climates or seasons they demand warmer woolen clothing. Consequently, you cannot always use the same resources and with time they also inevitably dwindle. There is a cool feature that allows you to identify the needs of your people at any point by zooming in on the scene of action and looking for small symbols and speech bubbles. Thus you always have some guidelines on what to build or produce next.

The reputation of the city is dependant on the well-being of your settlers and is very crucial for their motivation to work and the morale of your army. If the settlers do not get what they demand, it can lead to a strike, when they abandon all work and demonstrate on your village square. Then you have to act quickly before the settlers that are still working also become dissatisfied that their needs are not met. Sometimes this can lead to a critical situation. The consequences could be catastrophic if, for example, warm clothing is demanded due to cold weather conditions and you neither own sheep nor have established trade relations with a settlement that has sheep. The person who thinks ahead keeping the climate and surroundings in mind, has won half the battle and gets the kudos. By the way, these can be set individually, as can the soldiers’ wages (if you happen to have any).

Apart from targeted cultivation of territories, trade relationships are the crucial factors. To develop these, you have to render certain services to the surrounding settlements. These include special tasks, like lighting signal fires, obtaining and supplying required goods, driving away wolves and bears, or lending support in matters pertaining to wars. Once the trust of the leader of a particular settlement has been won, you can trade with them and count on their support in difficult times. The different leaders appear in a window at the bottom left of the screen whenever they need something or have a task for you. Unfortunately, the protagonists of different camps frequently resemble each other. However, they usually have a good voice delivery.

To become militarily active one naturally needs an army, and it can only be set up if your knight has reached a certain rank. In addition, a blacksmith or a bow-maker as well as appropriate barracks are required. You can only train swordsmen and archers and, at a later stage, you can also build siege weapons such as rams or catapults. The battles are not particularly profound in terms of strategy, but that is not required for a game like Settlers, where warfare rather takes the back seat. We liked the options that allow the use of transport carts, give our heroes the protection of a group of swordsmen or allow the manning of city walls with archers.

If you have extended some of your buildings and consequently made it possible to accommodate more workers, it is necessary to connect them with roads to ensure faster progress. Not all raw materials are found in your territory or in the immediate surroundings. Therefore new territories have to be opened up and conquered by constructing outposts which might initially seem expensive. To do that, you have to send your knight to the relevant area where he can order the construction of an outpost. Once that has been built, the raw materials and resources that are found there are at your disposal. If a herd of sheep grazes there, it automatically walks into your enclosure (if you happen to have one). Sometimes the transport roads leading to your storehouse are very long and it takes a lot of time and patience until the required stones, or the missing iron become available. Fortunately there is a possibility to accelerate the game’s progress by two or three times, but unfortunately the transport carts sometimes choose a daft route. We had a situation in which a transport cart (sent by us) traveled the entire way on a road (built by us) only to turn off near journey’s end to circle around a building standing on a meadow...

If the settlement grows into a town you have to become correspondingly more versatile in terms of construction and trade. The inhabitants demand cleanliness, so soap and broom makers are wanted. It is no longer enough to throw a party now and then in the market square - soon a tavern, a bathing house and, if the city holds a high rank, a theater is needed to keep the mob at bay. Holding mass in the church now and then strengthens the faith and self-confidence of the settlers. In the later stages of the game, buildings can even be decorated and embellished, which ups the charm factor. Some buildings require a certain infrastructure as a pre-requisite. Hence a tavern cannot serve mead if there is no beekeeper to supply the honey needed for its production. You cannot always be expected to get all raw materials yourself and so you have to go on a journey using the level map and find out which settlements offer which goods. Of course, a friendly relationship has to be established first. Depending on the type of relationship you might have to send your knight to purchase goods or you might be able to obtain these by a single click on the storehouse of the settlement. Once the city has reached bigger proportions, you would do well to build thick city walls to keep away unpleasant warlords, bandits or predators.

Although the game progresses at a fairly leisurely pace, there are moments when it becomes hectic. If you have decided to plant grains to produce bread and run a fishing hut along with a smokehouse, you face a problem once winter sets in. Since grain does not grow in winter and the rivers freeze up, it is necessary to quickly find new sources of food to prevent a hungry and angry mob from gathering in the village square. Also, in situations where there are battles and you have to, for example, intercept a cart, fast action is required if you wish to avoid finding yourself in the opponent’s bastion to which the cart has quickly retreated. Nevertheless such moments help to get better grip on the game and to proceed and act depending on the situation.

The game also provides a multiplayer mode, in which up to four people can compete against one another. The principle is the same as in the single player mode. First of all, you have to take care of raw materials and food. Before the game begins, the goals that have to be achieved for victory can be specified. In this mode, battles are part of life. Once you have the necessary infrastructure to keep your settlement going, you should quickly build a wall and set up an army. The faster you rise in rank, the greater is the chance of success, because then you have, at some point, siege weapons at your disposal which can prove really helpful in the multi-player mode. In most cases, there is yet another neutral, computer-controlled village on the map with which trade can be carried out. On top of that, we had to repeatedly listen to threats from a neighboring Viking tribe (also computer-controlled), which demanded a tribute payment. Although we did not pay them several times and their leader assured us that he would burn our village to the ground, nothing ever happened. At some point we paid him when our good financial situation allowed it. Initially the Vikings were our "blood enemies", but immediately after paying we were assured of military support in case of emergency...

In terms of graphics, The Settlers VI – Rise of an Empire is really beautiful to behold. It is a very lively world thanks to the animals that keep flitting and prowling about, the waterfalls and, not least, the busy settlers themselves. You can click on a building to look at it and, with another click on the appropriate button, watch each worker. So you can watch as a female worker with a wooden jar on her head and a kind of smoking lamp disperses bees from the beehive to take the honeycombs. Then a tavern worker walks into the apiary, and fetches the above-mentioned honeycomb to further process it into mead on his site. Unfortunately, there is no monitoring of collisions, which means that the workers and residents often amble through each other. Furthermore, we were somewhat shocked to discover that the game is pretty jittery in places. When we moved the cursor over a thronging town or drew a wall around our own, the action was often irritatingly delayed. We cannot find an explanation for this as the game should not make too many demands on the processor.

The music is also good, although it stays rather in the background. Medieval sounds with flutes and drums in the background prevail. As you go on, the music begins to pall but it is never distracting as it does not try to grab your attention. In special situations like battles or feasts it changes to fitting variants. As already mentioned, the spoken parts are great and all sound effects well done.