The Settlers – what a great game. I believe in the American version it was called Serf City. It brings back so many memories of hours spent at the computer when I should have been doing chores.
The object of this game is to make a large settlement of your people, and steal land from your opponents by building guard huts and occupying them with knights. You must keep your knights strong or the enemy will attack you and take them over.
This is all done by balancing what you produce.
For instance, you need wood and stone to build buildings. You must build a lumberjacks hut to cut down trees, a sawmill to make the logs into timber, a stonemason or a stone mine, to quarry stone. Without these bare essentials, you won’t be able to continue for too long as you start off with only limited stocks of all the items. If you build mines to mine for gold (necessary to give your knights confidence, you will need a foundry to make it into coin, and a coal mine to use in the foundry. You will also need a farm or a fisherman’s hut to produce food to feed to the miners. Farms require that you build a bakery and
a mill to mill the corn into flour.
As you can see, everything you build in this game is dependant on other factors or buildings, so a lot of strategy is required.
I find the main drawback with Settlers, is the time everything takes to be made. You can’t just click on a building for it to be built – site clearers and transporters are necessary before building starts at all, and if your roads are blocked by a lot of stock or produce being transported too & fro – it takes a long time for the building to be ready. Slow & steady is the go, but that means you spend a lot of time looking at your little computer people going about their business.
If this is not a problem for you and you are not the sort that needs to get into a game and start beating up the enemy etc., then this is definitely the game for you.
Wonderful sound and great graphics. I still have the original game in its package with the manual, but couldn’t play it on XP as it wouldn’t play the music or save the game. Thanks Dosbox. I launch the game in Dosbox, and use quick as my command, so that I can play it in SVGA mode.
