The Settlers: Rise of an Empire Review - PC

Despite the guy waving a sword on the cover, The Settlers: Rise of an Empire isn’t exactly a war game. It’s made in Germany, part of a long-running series from Blue Byte Software, and it has more in common with popular German board games, like Settlers of Catan or Puerto Rico. Direct confrontation is only a small part of a much bigger equation.

This is more of a game about economics – building a city, feeding and clothing your people, making sure they’re comfortable, protecting those outlying resource-gathering outposts, maybe doing a little trading with the neighboring settlements. Once the rest of that’s all taken care of, then you charge out to bop the other guy on the head.

The great mass of contemporary RTS players, raised on Starcraft and currently playing games like Company of Heroes, will probably turn up their noses at an experience with such a low violence quotient. Pacifistic types may find something to love here, though, a game with some depth that’s beautiful to look at.

Ye Olde Empire-Building Sim

Let’s focus on that for a second. Even though it doesn’t blow up anything, Settlers is darn pretty to look at. When you’ve managed to put together a big, built-out city, with lots of different buildings all arranged just so; it’s fun just to sit there and watch the thing go, like an old-world model train layout, as all the little peons run around and the weather changes with the seasons.

Part of the reason a town becomes so diverse is the game’s resource system, which is a lot more complex than just chopping wood and mining gold. Woodsmen cut timber, hunters catch deer, masons carve stone, miners dig ore, anglers net fish, farmers raise grain, shepherds keep sheep, and all these different resources go into their own specific production buildings. Some of them, indeed, go in more than one – those hunters, for instance, send meat to the butcher and skins to the tanner both. All of these different resources play a role in keeping the settlers happy, which is the sensible leader’s main goal. The masses have to be fed, clothed, housed, and entertained so they’ll keep on paying taxes.

All the different buildings are upgradable for a price, which increases their operating efficiency, but as for direct control over what they do and where their attendant settlers go, that’s more automatic than some players may like. Gathering and distribution of raw resources is centralized by the town’s single storehouse building, which takes resources from gathering buildings and then doles them out to producers. That simplifies things (since every little munchkin goes to the same place to get what they need) but it’s potentially less efficient than, say, working out different delivery routes for every resource. There’s strategy to working out the efficient placement of some kinds of buildings (for instance, keeping similar production buildings apart so they don’t cannibalize each other’s business), but a lot of the time, there aren’t so many hard decisions to make when it comes to city planning.

What Is It Good For?

When you’ve built as much as you can in your home province, expanding into new territory can be as simple as going out and planting the flag there. Spending stone and gold on an outpost claims an unoccupied province, allowing access to the resources located there as well. If somebody else already has a foothold in that area…well, you can be nice and trade with them or you can take some ore and start smithing swords.

On the military end of things, the game’s a bit less complicated. Besides the main hero, there are only five types of fighting units – swordsmen, archers, and three kinds of siege equipment for knocking down walls or climbing up over them. This means that while there’s some tactical depth to siege warfare, on offense and defense (important safety tip – shell out for stone walls), battles between troops in the field tend to boil down to a question of who’s got the numbers. All the micromanagement in the world won’t usually make much difference. The really complex part isn’t so much fighting the battle as it is picking up the pieces afterwards. Even a minor strike on your territory can do a lot of damage to the complex web of resource-generating buildings.

It’s probably easiest, in a no-holds-barred skirmish, to go for the military victory and simply steamroll an opponent with a bigger army. There are other victory conditions, though – players with more finesse may find it rewarding to use the advantages of the different hero units (six of them altogether, unlocked as the campaign goes on) and try for some of the different economic and social victories.

Break It Down

Nevertheless, you have to make a point of winning that way, which is the sign of a flawed design. From the perspective of the hardcore strategy gamer, this Settlers falls between two stools. (It’s already receiving a fairly harsh reception from devotees of the franchise’s old days.) The economic end of things isn’t as nuts-and-bolts heavy as it could be, while the military options available are pretty simple – many of the missions in the single-player game don’t even involve serious combat at all. Those looking for a whole lot of one or the other could leave disappointed.

That model-train aspect, though, has some real appeal. Like SimCity, it’s fun to wind it up and watch it go. It does demand a fairly hefty system to run smoothly, especially if you want to pull the camera back and take in a broader view. Once you get a chance to take in that view, it’s undeniably satisfying.

Review by: D.F. Smith
Video Produced by: Tim Jennings