Flawed Execution:
While game is vastly improved from the original, Settlers formula is far from refined and perfect. Series had lost its way with third instalment and lost its way. From game of an year it became to an obscure title about which nobody cares.
10’th Anniversary Edition is a reimagining of original Settlers 2. It largely follows series philosophy and systems, but has new graphics, engine and ton of improvements and changes everywhere. Those changes are mostly for the better, but ancient formula is primitive and isn’t really that good. Original Settlers were only good, because back then there weren’t any good games. So anything passable became a cult hit. That was Settlers 1 and then refined Settlers 2. 10’th Anniversary Editions is even further refinement on that formula. However, you cannot make something out of nothing and original Settlers formula, once revolutionary, nowadays are just another game in need of deep changes.
Prologue
I remember how I downloaded demo of this game when I was a child. I was fascinated by its graphics. How settlers were everywhere, working. I was even more amazed by economic system. How each thing had to be physically transported by your guys. Even more by how they were walking across the paths which you needed to cleverly design in order not to choke up your lines. I quitted demo without completing it, but it left such a strong positive impression in me that I always wanted to return to it and now I did.
Cut-throat combat: precisely what casual city builder needs!
The most awful thing about this game is its combat system. Settlers aren’t made for combat or multiplayer for that matter. If you want to compete (which game is hyper focused even in its campaign) then you have to rush territorial expansion with barracks. Scout map for gold and immediately start producing coins. Then you have to see enemy first before it sees you and build Stronghold to create a chokepoint. Cancel all support of lesser military buildings to funnel troops and more importantly coins there for efficiency. Then you will get edge as your troops will level up from gold coins which is immense in this game since there aren’t any other advantage to be had. You have sizeable amount of inexperienced troops, there is no advantage in quantity and making new troops is very expensive and long process.
This is where entire sweaty nature of a game manifests. You need to rush coin production, because once established near AI’s borders, it will send everything it has at you and will bleed itself dry. First contact with the enemy is incredibly intense after which AI just falls flat on its face and from that point onwards, it’s just a long and tedious process of cleaning up. Likewise, if you fail initial struggle, your entire settlement can be just rolled up easily and you lose the game. If you end up losing war of attrition then there is nothing you can do. Enemy will just roll you up. Game is incredibly swingy and reliant on rushing for gold and early aggression. It’s incredibly focused on early aggression and expansion mixed in a casual and relaxing city builder. Game doesn’t know what it wants to be or rather, designer was too incompetent to properly balance its mechanics.
How to do it properly
Game needs to de-emphasize its warfare. First, it should be more about constant pressure rather than immediate. To achieve that, game should lean more to its siege mechanics. Strongholds should not be normally taken, but rather sieged. An opponent would have to first starve out defenders. Defenders could use stronghold as a stockpile for food. When sieged, soldiers would consume food. Likewise, attackers would consume food at elevated rate. Together they would need to make siege equipment. They would be making ladders, rams, catapults. All for the show of course, just put animations to look it realistic and nice. These things would be necessary to Siege a Stronghold and they would require wood, stone, metal bars, craftsmen and tools. It would be a big deal to siege one Stronghold and it would take a while to break it if it’s well supplied.
To balance it out, while siege lasts, its controlled territory is not destroyed, but disabled. Enemy however cannot just bypass it and attack points behind it. Such system would massively slow down pace of war and would refocus the game on building economy first. Of course, cost of a Stronghold should be massively bigger and it should control a lot more territory, preventing any other defensive buildings being built nearby, especially other Strongholds. The effectiveness of a Stronghold should be primary measured by how much food it had before the siege (naturally, you cannot resupply during siege). While attackers effectiveness would be limited by their industrial output. This would solve another problem of rushing gold mines and spamming troops. Under this system, you could crew a Stronghold with Rookies and they could hold off Generals. Even more clever is asymmetric requirements of resources. Food is used to fuel industries. Mines are incredibly food intensive which then gives ores for metals which you need for an attack. Defender on the other hand can skip this entire part and just use lower tier resources like Wood and Stone. It also skips entire late game supply chain by allowing it to turtle up early and forcing aggressor to ramp up its economy first. This design puts halt into this rushing meta and allows you to actually play this god damn game. Like, building a successful economy? Now, it’s all in the background as AI is incredibly aggressive and you need to be even more aggressive to win.
Campaign – The meat of the game
It’s good and bad at the same time. The issue is that it’s barely a campaign. There is very little information or story in it. It’s also tough as nails hard. Most players quite (GoG average) at 15 hours and 42 minutes. My completionist playthrough was 35 hours and 48 minutes. Players quit at around 5’th island where game becomes tricky and hard. It’s when you start facing Chinese and game puts you into situation where you can possibly face two of them at once if not careful. Hence, why most quit with this difficulty spike.
However, another reason is that game doesn’t have enough ‘meat’ as it’s quite simple game, but drags out its gameplay relentlessly with huge maps filled with several AIs which you have to beat. Game also becomes harder and harder from that point onwards. These old school games have this problem where any casual game is hard as nails and Settlers is no exception. A relaxed city builder is a multiplayer sweat-fest, but in single player. It has that old-school charm, but it’s a tradition which modern games had forsaken for the better.
As you go through the campaign, you will be forced to learn how to play this game. That is a charming part of the campaign, it naturally forces you to ‘git gud’. You will learn that you need to rush coins. How to build more soldiers. How to rush Stronghold buildings and choke the enemy or how to relocate soldiers. Even continued expansion of economy is necessary in this game as you cannot win without you learning how to operate the entire game from sustainable wood harvesting, food supplying mines and tools & weapons manufacturing. Game for me was immersive and I always wanted to return to it and progress further. There was that hook which makes a great game and the old magic of Settlers is still in it.
Economy – Lifeblood of the settlement
Game has a brilliant economy model. You need various tiers of resources which you have to transport across the map and manage your logistic lines. However, there are some issues with it.
First, your Settlers aren’t too bright in what they do. If they need a stone block, they won’t take one from there they got it to nearby construction site. They will carry it all the way back into storage and from it back to construction site. While that might be part of a design, that doesn’t make you feel any more better when your buildings lie forever waiting for materials. You can’t do anything to control what is being built first and your settlers are stupid even in this. Instead of trying to focus on one thing, they try to spread building materials across everything equally. This results in every building getting stuck on construction forever and them all finishing at the same time. That could in theory be more efficient as there is small downtime between building receiving resources and builder needing time to build up. However, that delay is way too small compared to time gap between building materials reaching building site.
Game has a massive issue with readability. There is no way to tell what resources are in the mountains. Sure, you can send geologist and it will place a sign for you. However, that sign disappears on its own after a short while. What is even worse is that resources can run out and you won’t have a clue where they ran out. You will still be able to build mines on them. There will be no indication outside of temporary geologist survey. This becomes problem with mines and all production buildings. They can easily stop working and never tell you why. One thing are resources, but at the same time, it might not work, because there aren’t food in them. Worker doesn’t have a tool. They might possibly even break or worker won’t be available without any explanation of why. When resource building doesn’t work, you can only guess why. Farms for example need land around it to function, but it never say what land it needs. How much plot it sees available to it. It becomes annoying when production efficiency of buildings can just drop randomly without any explanation of why. For a city builder, economy is very simplified and lacking in tooltips/data/feedback.
Brokeness – Just ship features for their own sake!
Game has many features which do not work properly or at all. Ships, rafts, menu settlement options, logistics. Game was never fully completed and vast majority of gamers never really played this game enough or paid close enough attention to notice. As for devs, they probably are happy to just put a checkmark on another bullet point in their TO DO list and move along. Thus the circus continues.
Lack of any prioritization is an issue in this game. Logistics can get strained as your settlers will continue prioritizing needs of economy like transporting goods rather than building materials. This prevents you from quickly building any buildings you set up to. Not to build any buildings…in a city builder. Likewise, your settlers aren’t clever. If there is a shortest route, they will insist on all moving supplies through there even if it’s hopelessly congested and won’t move anything in a parallel path. That simplistic game system might be part of a charm and challenge, forcing you to make your industry amongst different nodes. That is further inhibited by game’s settings who simply doesn’t work and aren’t properly programmed in this game. Since nobody complaining, nobody even is using those settings hidden in menus. However, you can set priorities which can be transported first. This is bugged and doesn’t work properly in this game. Construction to me was always top priority. However, in congested lines supply movement like food to storage and mines always took priority and settlers ignored and picked building materials at random.
Ships and rafts is something which functioned even in original Settlers poorly. Here, I played 35 hours and never needed a ship. Once I built them and they moved on their own. Not sure what they were doing, possibly just carrying stuff from harbor to harbor. Same problems applies here too. You cannot see anything relevant when pressed on a ship. No cargo information. No tooltip. It just sits there, poorly implemented. Rafts however are even worse. I saw them work once or twice, helping to ferry goods. However, they do not function when you want to move builder through water passage. Hence, no builder means that there is no need for supplies to come through and thus these water roads become largely useless as you cannot establish infrastructure through water gaps. Even with harbors, they usually are far away from your main base, harbors are located where you don’t gather resources to and hence usually sit empty. Those two features could be removed entirely from the game and nobody would notice.
Likewise, when this game is upscaled to 4k, menus in this game are tiny. Artwork also lost a lot of its charm as it lack fidelity to look good at such resolution. Originally it was never intended to go past 1080p if even that. Now game looks dated as everything needs to be scaled properly and not just stretched. However, for what it’s, game aged remarkably well. It’s perfectly playable game today and it still looks good. I only wish that I could had played the original version all the way back, it would looked far better on a small screen and I would be amazed at its graphics and animations, spending as much time watching my settlers go as I would be building and discovering game’s systems.
The Verdict
This game is the peak of what Settler series has became. Originals are too old and just inferior to this product and newer games don’t know what they are doing. Game aged incredibly well, its graphics are still pretty and runs well on modern systems. However, Settlers is one of those series who had failed to innovate and you are basically just playing Settlers I from 1993. Its formula is refined and polished as much as it could be polished. However, you cannot make a turd shiny. While it’s not a turd by any stretch of a word, the base game is archaic, filled with conflicting design directions and lacking in substance. It’s the absolute best that 90s gaming were and brought to the modern era. There is only one small issue, 90s have nothing on games from the future!
It’s one of those cases where old game is actually good and is worth playing if you are in a mood for something like that. Likewise, coming back for nostalgia’s sake. However, it’s also a game which will bore most people before it’s even halfway through. It’s also a great test study of how games from 90s actually play today as it’s the same original, legendary formula polished to perfection and presented in a format which held up considerably remarkably from 2006. This is a good game to take a look at old games mechanics without all the limitation of graphics or learning pains. Just pure, polished game systems working to their fullest in an appealing package. And all this package reveals gameplay which while competent and fun, is rather unremarkable in a modern gaming landscape. People who swear by the old game are once again proved to be out of touch dinosaurs reliving their old memories and lacking any passion or vigor to make new memories filled of joy and passion for modern games. Thus, they swear by their nostalgia, only replaying them out of memory rather than their computers.