Is The Settlers THAT GOOD? You bet your agnus, The Settlers IS THAT GOOD! The Settlers is a German game (pal only) created by BLUEBYTE software. If you are an MS-DOSer (heave, retch and hurl), look for the game under the name Serf City by SSI; the game is the same, only the name has been changed to protect the innocent. The AMIGA version comes on three disks which are NOT copy-protected (yes Yes! YES!), and ARE Hard-Drive installable (most excellent). If you've ever played POPULOUS (a personal favorite), then you know the basic plot of the game; develop a cozy, little settlement for your loyal followers where they can be happy, prosperous, and comfortable, let them build houses and multiply, and live a life that is care free and wonderful. Oh yeah, there are also a bunch of blokes across the valley who are attempting to do the same thing, but since they wear different colored shirts (how DARE they), they must be obliterated, annihilated, decimated and e-rat-i-cated (I love my thesaurus and it shows).

You start the game with a large castle which you can just plop down on what YOU consider to be the absolute BEST piece of land on the map. Your Royal Geologist will assist you in picking a good spot with an abundance of minerals. Your castle must be in close proximity to lakes, trees, granite boulders and mineral rich mountain areas in order to reap the land of it's precious resources. Having constructed your turret-flanked dream hideaway, now comes the expansion of your domain. Your area of "ownership" is laid out by a little staked border, and by building one of three different guard houses, you expand your horizon, provided you have enough knights to occupy them (a threatening border, empty huts do not make). From there you construct all the other necessities of your village. A woodcutter, a quarryman and some miners reap the land of resources, providing goods for foundries and sawmills, who in turn provide materials for the tool, weapon, and boat builders. A fisherman and some farmers provide meat and wheat for the butcher, the baker, and the local grain maker. Other buildings and occupations include warehouses, forest ranger's huts, and even a Wal-Mart or two (humor). In fact, there are 25 different occupations in all, with each "Settler" possessing a different look and building. Connect everything with roads and place people on them to transport goods, and you've got yourself a tight little economy.

What is probably the most rewarding part of the game is watching the day to day life of your settlers. For example, when a building is constructed (with the exception of the castle) it doesn't just "POP" onto the screen (as in Populous). First you select the area to build and connect it to your settlement with roads. The steeper and harder the road is to traverse, the more difficult it is for transporters to get construction materials to the site. Soon a leveler will arrive with a shovel and grade the area for building. He is soon replaced by a carpenter who waits patiently for transporters to arrive with stacks of lumber, which he methodically uses to construct a building frame. The transporters soon arrive with granite blocks and the outer walls of the building are constructed (and NO, you don't have to wait for some lackadaisical building inspector to give you a certificate of occupancy, this is an advanced culture). Upon completion, the carpenter saunters on back to the castle and is replaced by the occupant of the building, who puts any materials brought to him to good use, depending on his particular trade. The game is full to bursting with detail of this kind. The geologist does a flip and "Yahoos" when he finds a vein of ore. The lumberjack will actually cut down trees on the map, remove all limbs from them and lug them off to the sawmill where they are turned into planks, while the forest ranger replants trees behind him. The miners (who will actually strike if not provided with sufficient food), go down their little elevators and drag large chunks of ore out of the ground. I could go on all day (and all of the night) about these little animated tidbits, this is a game that must be seen to be appreciated.

The game has many different menus for controlling who does what with what in your little community, and they can be a little intimidating at first. The manual is basically laid out in a tutorial fashion and coaches you through the six different training tutorials provided. Unfortunately, this makes things hard to find when using the book later on for strictly reference. The fact that some buildings and occupations are called one thing in the manual and another on the picture reference card doesn't make for happy camping either. The game menus control resource priorities and distribution, as well as dozens of other things. The default settings of these menus are good enough so you don't really need to change much in the early scenarios to get by, letting you concentrate on game controls and just staying alive. By the time the more advanced levels roll along, you've learned them inside and out.

Combat. What would a quaint little fantasy village be like if you didn't have knights bent on hacking each other apart? As with most strategy games, a large portion of the game is combat oriented. Once a working society is in place, you then send your knights out to conquer and destroy. You have five different types of knights to command, each one a wee-bit stronger than the others. Upon command they will attack the castle or guard building of your choice, kill (in as lighthearted a manner as killing can be) any other knights they encounter, and take over conquered guard huts, thereby giving YOU more land to control. Any other buildings in the way they burn to the ground, sending their occupants wandering the hillsides in a mindless stupor (something I've been known to do myself on occasion). It would have been a nice feature if you could KEEP an enemy castle after overpowering it, but alas, these must also be torched. As I've stated earlier, the knight battles are extremely lighthearted; no blood and guts, just a LEMMINGS-like little squeak and the defeated knight scurries away with his helmet rammed down to his ankles.

Another nice feature is the fact that nothing in The Settlers stands alone. EVERY occupation is perfectly meshed in with the entire community as a whole. You cannot create a society without having the PERFECT balance of EVERY profession, which must also be in just the right locations for your road system to work properly. The wheat farmer grows wheat which goes to the miller and becomes grain which goes to the baker and becomes bread. Bread goes to the miners who mine gold which pays the knights who protect the land for the farmers to use and the whole thing goes around and around and around. The entire game is a perfect meshing of gears, an intricate web of interconnecting strings, a nicely defined balance of yin and yang, a flawless fusing of fantastic.......well, you get the general idea.

Another nice feature of the game is the several different styles of gameplay. There are six training scenarios which cover everything from combat to exploiting natural resources. There are randomly generated worlds for 1 or 2 players to compete against each other and the computer opponents, 10 different foes each with his or her own style of play and different levels of cunning. There is even a demo mode which you can set up and then let the computer opponents "have at" each other. The main play mode though is MISSION, 30 increasingly difficult missions against various computer opponents in pre- determined worlds. Upon achieving 75% of the land and 75% of the overall combat strength, you receive a password for the next level. You can play these missions alone or in two player mode, with two players giving it a team effort instead of going head to head. Each of these worlds has it's own set of "problems". For example, there is one ugly little spud of an adversary called Kumpy Onefinger, an unpleasant little chap who loves gold above all else and will try to attack near your gold mines. The problem in one level against him however is that gold is a very rare item. In another level trees might be rare. Each level presents a new challenge.

The Settlers is (in my humble opinion) one heck of a game. Strategy games are nothing new of course, but The Settlers pulls ahead in ways others have fell short. The original SIM CITY was interesting for a while, but after several hours of watching flea sized cars putter around and your lone helicopter come-a-whirlin' onto the screen now and then, it seemed like the payoff was a little disappointing. Once a city got to a certain size, the fun came to a screeching halt (I hate when that happens). In The Settlers however, once an enemy is wiped out it is still interesting to keep your economy balanced, or to just watch the little dudes go about their daily routine. Many levels I have continued long after obtaining the password for the next level. This game really seems to come across with an almost perfect mixture of "lots to SEE" and "lots to DO". Aside from the awkwardness of the manual, The Settlers is a prime example of a well thought out game. If you're sick of mindless games and want to sink your teeth into something juicy, bite off a big old steamin' hunk of THE SETTLERS. Chew every bite thoroughly and Bon appetite!

Dr. Torgo