Saturday, March 24, 2018

The Settlers 2 Gold Edition (1996)


Date: 1996 (1997 for Gold Edition release)
Developer: Blue Byte Studio
Publisher: Blue Byte Studio

System Requirements:
 - 486DX/2 66 MHz
 - 8MB RAM
 - 30MB HDD space
 - 2X CD-ROM
 - SVGA capable video card

Where to purchase?
 - GOG.com


The Settlers 2 Gold Edition is a real-time strategy game with elements of city building and management.  I've never played any of the Settlers games, but I am a fan of similar modern games such as the Tropico series, the Anno series, and the Sim City games, so this seems like the kind of game I should love.  I'm surprised I never got around to playing a Settlers game as the series has been quite popular.  The original was released in 1993 and sequels were released fairly regularly, the most recent of which was in 2016 (renamed to a new IP).  The original Settlers 2 was released in 1996 and the Gold Edition, released a year later, added a new campaign, over a hundred custom maps, and a bunch of gameplay and graphics improvements.  I'll be playing the GOG.com Gold Edition version without any other mods or changes.  There was 10th Anniversary edition released in 2006 that is a full 3D remake, so if anyone wants to play an more modern version of the The Settlers 2, that would be the way to go. 

Prior to starting this post, I played through the first mission of the campaign to get a general feel for the game so I wouldn't be a complete mess starting out, but otherwise I have no experience with the game and I'll be going essentially blind.  Let's dive in to The Settlers 2 Gold Edition!  





- Development -

Blue Byte Studio is a developer and publisher that have made some great, and very unique, games.  Many of their games have a very "European" feel to them, which makes sense because Blue Byte was formed in 1998 in Mülheim, Germany by Thomas Hertzler and Lothar Schmitt.  Like many European developers, a lot of their early games were developed for the Amiga system and later ported to MSDOS.  Their first big success was the turn-based strategy game Battle Isle in 1991, which spawned sequels all the way up to 2013.

Battle Isle (1991)
The Settlers was released in 1993 for Amiga and later in 1994 it was ported to MSDOS.  In my home country of the USA, it was released by SSI as Serf City: Life is Feudal, which I've never heard of somehow.  The original Settlers was designed and programmed primarily by Volker Wertich, who wanted to make a city management game like Populous or SimCity, but with more emphasis on supply and demand and production of goods using natural resources.  The game was a massive undertaking for the still relatively small development team at Blue Byte.  In particular, the way each individual citizen interacts with the game world and economy required the computer to process a huge amount of data.  This kind of economic simulation was a new concept for a computer game and it required 2 years of work for Wertich and his team to finish and release the game.

The Settlers/Serf City (1993)


The Settlers/Serf City received great reviews on its release for both Amiga and DOS, but another programmer, Thomas Häuser, had some ideas on how to make it even better.  Häuser worked on the QA team for The Settlers and his list of ideas and improvements lead the Blue Byte management to make him the project lead for The Settlers II.  The team was still small, 4 people, and Häuser did most of the concept work and much of the actual programming.  Wertich decided to step back and was not involved with the sequel.  In an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Häuser states that he can't recall the specific improvements he wanted to make to the original game, but there was likely a lot of interface and player feedback issues he wanted to improve upon.  In the same interview, he recounts the long working days (20 hour days!) and crazy rush in the last few weeks to get the game ready and out the door.  Here is a link to the interview.

Much like its predecessor, the second game was a financial and critical success when released in 1996.  It received a lot of magazine awards, including PCGamer's Editors Choice Award among others.  The success lead to an expansion being released within a year, called the Mission CD, and a Gold Edition being released in 1997.  The game is so well regarded still that it received a modern remake by Blue Byte in 2006 titled The Settlers II: 10th Anniversary Edition.  Many people consider The Settlers II to be the best version of the series, and the best city management game of all time.  Blue Byte went on to use the same formula to create the excellent Anno series of games, which includes one of my favorite games of all time: Anno 1404.  


Settlers II: 10th Anniversary Edition

Given the reputation of The Settlers II and the pedigree of the studio that made it, I am looking forward to playing it, so let's get started!

- The Game -

The game installed and starts up with DOSBox without any issues.  After the title screen, the intro plays introducing me to the world I'll be playing in.  In it, a captain and his crew are sailing a ship across the "Sea of Storms", which right away sets off alarm bells in my head.  It would seem prudent to avoid any body of water with the word "Storms" in it.  But maybe he didn't have any choice in the matter.  I learn that this must be a Roman citizen since he mentions the Caesar Augustus in the monologue, so that puts the time frame around 0 AD.  The ship is not that big, it looks like an early Carrack or something similar.

    
As the name of this particular sea suggests, a storm soon sweeps over the boat and leaves the crew shipwrecked on an island.


As the island seems to be away from any regular trade routes, the captain guesses they are going to be here for a while.  Luckily, the island looks lush and bountiful so they had better make the best of it and start rebuilding society.  This is a surprisingly upbeat attitude for a recently shipwrecked crew, I like it.  Then I am taken back to the main menu:


The music is a nice MIDI beat that is very reminiscent of DOS games of the era, with a nice imperial/colonial theme to it.  I'll be playing the Roman Campaign since that is the more traditional campaign that should ease me into the game and it will continue the story of my poor shipwrecked crew.  The Options menu just gives me the choice of resolution, I'll be using the highest resolution which is 1024x768.  When I tried the game before, this didn't make the menus too intolerably small.  Alright, let's get started on the Roman Campaign.

The first screen shows a landscape with a headquarters tent in the middle of the screen.  Right away, a notification pops up as the "Diary of Octavius", which is my character as the captain of the ship.  I won't repeat all of the notifications, but I'll type out this one just to give a feel for the instructions during this early game period:

Fourth Day After Shipwreck.
Yesterday all the survivors met in order to discuss the situation.  Because there is no prospect of an early rescue, we decided to settle on this foreign island.  The items salvaged from the ship will be a great help to us.  The most important thing is to make use of the raw materials on the island in order to establish a settlement.  We urgently need accommodation for a woodcutter, carpenter, and stonemason.
Build accommodation for a woodcutter, carpenter, and stonemason.
This is very reminiscent of games like Tropico or Anno 1404, so I like what I see so far since I really like those games.

My diary is very detailed
The gameplay is superficially similar to a lot of city builders/RTS/management games.  I have a starting building, and from that I need to branch out and build up a thriving city.  In this game, all building must be connected by roads, and different plots of land support different levels of buildings.  Pressing SPACEBAR  brings up yellow icons representing what can be built where: 

Places where I can build on the map
The yellow flags indicate areas where I cannot build a building, but I can build a road.  The flags also represent a critical part of The Settlers II's gameplay: supply chains.  This was something I was completely unfamiliar with before starting this game, but I think its a great idea and it seems to work.  First, some historical context.  During the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, the government set up way stations every 20-30 miles along major roadways.  These waystations provided a place where travellers could rest and some even had Inns and food markets.  But most critically, they always had a horse farrier and stable to allow approved travellers to change to a fresh horse.  This was usually only for use by government agents, mail, and other important individuals, but it allowed for incredibly quick travel across the Empire.

The flags in The Settlers work the same way.  Placing a flag on a road creates a location where a citizen can pass along whatever they are carrying to the next courier, much like a relay race.  Citizens station themselves at the appropriate locations.  This greatly speeds up the movement of goods along the roadways and is necessary to have a functioning city.


In the above screenshot, you can see the blue flags I've placed along my roadways and the settlers stationed between each flag to do their part in the relay of goods.  I can't tell if I have a limit on how many settlers I have, but so far it doesn't seem like it.  Also notice in the top left corner is an "Observation window", which zooms in a follows a specific settler.  Right now it is following a geologist that I called in to survey the area around the northernmost blue flag to try to find iron, coal, gold, or granite deposits for mining.  These ores are only found on hill terrain like the area where my geologist is headed.

My city is surrounded by a border that limits where I can build.  I can expand my border by building a barracks, which is what I am doing at the very northernmost tip of my border right now.  So far I have built a woodcutter and forester (to replenish my trees) to the left of my central tend, a sawmill to the south of my main tent, and a quarry to the southeast.  I love the little animation of my settlers going about their jobs.  The woodcutter goes out and chops down trees and hauls the logs back to the road to be transported to my main tent, the stonemason goes and pickaxes at the rocks to mine rock.  All supplies go back to my central tent or go a building that requires them.  So right now the logs chopped down by my woodcutter are going to the sawmill, and the boards produced by the sawmill are going into storage at my central tent.  Good stuff.

The different building icons represent how large of a building can be built on a specific location.  Small buildings can be built on the small house locations, medium buildings on the medium sized icon, and the biggest buildings on large castle-looking icon.  Another important thing to point out is that building roads and buildings takes up space from the surrounding building areas.  So if I build a road too close to a large building area, that large building area will be reduced to a small building area, or may be eliminated completely.  So it takes careful planning to plan out where I want my roads and buildings to go, because I end up sacrificing potential build areas whenever I build a new road or building.

Whew, OK with all of that out of the way, lets continue on our journey with our settlers.

I need to build an iron mine, smelter, and armory next.
Here is the game in action.  Here you can see I've completed a barracks and my borders expand as soon as a soldier, who I am following with the Observation window, enters.  There's not much action, but it is fun to watch all the little settlers go about their day.  Also notice how I can move windows and menus around the screen, that is super convenient.  Also nice is the fact that I can hover my mouse over some items and get a description of the item.

The GIF looks sped up because I deleted every other frame to try to get the size down to a more reasonable size.  Since I'm playing the game at 1024x768, the GIFs are quite a bit larger than my previous games, so I'm resizing the window and cutting out every other frame to make them smaller.  It went from 40MB to 8MB.

Super speed settlers!
My headquarters tent is where I can check on my supplies and settlers.  Here is what my supplies look like right now:

My supply situation
I have 0 logs and boards, so I built another woodcutter.  I also have 0 iron ore, but I just finished building an iron mine that you can see right above the supply window.  Also notice the mining symbols to the north indicating places where I can build mines.

There is also a menu with all kinds of different statistics for my settlement.  I won't go into all the details, but here is a graph for my current population:

My country has 489 people
Sometimes the road building in this game can be really annoying since I can only build roads where there is space for a flag.  Look to the left of the statistics screen in the above screenshot.  I am currently building a hunter in that plot of land, but the only way to connect it to the rest of my road system was to have that crazy look of a road going all the way out to the beach to the west then back again to connect to a road system way up  to the north.

Also, here is a good example of how a building can take up a lot of potential space for other buildings:

I am going to build a large farm where my hand cursor is just to the right of the center of the screen
Look at all the space it took up!
That farm took up the space of potentially 8 or 9 other buildings.  That shows how I really need to plan ahead so I don't build myself into a corner by using up all my real estate.

After some more building projects, here is my supply situation:

I'm out of food and still out of wood
I've run out of food, but I don't know what the significance of that is.  It doesn't seem to be affecting my settlers at all, they are still going about their business, so I'm not sure what impact running out of food has on gameplay.  I would assume its bad, since most people need food to live.  Maybe it decreases production?

Checking out my gold mine
I see some greyed out fish, bread, and meat when I look at some buildings, so I think that indicates its requirements to be working at high efficiency.  But my gold mine above has none of its requirements, and it is still producing, so I don't know.

I've expanded off to the west and found a lake and some dinosaur bones.  I've built a mill and baker so I can make bread, a pig farm to make pigs, and a mint to create gold coins.  So far everything is going smoothly.  It's a fun and pretty relaxing game.  It sure  does go slowly though.  If I have more than two constructions projects going on at the same time, it can take a long time to finish a building.  There's probably a speed up key but I don't know what it is yet.

Burning down my forester
I decided to burn down my forester's hut because he was deciding to plant a forest right in some prime real estate where I wanted to build more buildings.  I haven't figured out how to remove trees or direct where I want the forester to plant trees, so it seemed like the easiest thing to do was to burn down his home.  Poor guy.

I've found something interesting:


It looks like a stone arch which, if I remember correctly from my first trial run in the game, is a portal to another island.  I'll build a barracks near it so I can get it within my borders:



After finishing a barracks to get the gateway in my border, I was prompted with this message:

Stargate?
When I clicked Enter Gate, my game crashed.  But luckily, I can now select the second chapter from the Main Menu, so no progress lost!  Let's get going on mission 2!


This time I start with a fancy building as my headquarters instead of just a ragged tent.  Looks like I need to start by creating a metalworks.

My growing city/country
After a few hours, I've expanded to the north and east.  I'm finding the roads to be slightly annoying to lay out, as they tend to eliminate a lot of potential building areas.  I guess that is part of the challenge of the game though.  Here is an example of how my roads can get pretty convoluted:

Look at that mess of roads
Around this point in the game, I came across my first enemy, the Nubians, and received this message:


Looks like I have to fight my way to their gateway.  The only problem is I have no idea how fighting works in this game.  I've seen my soldiers march into my barracks, but that's the only fighting unit I've seen.  And I don't have direct control over any of my settlers.

Soon after getting this message, I made the mistake of starting too many construction projects at the same time.  I had something like 15 buildings being constructed at once, and my economy slowed to a crawl.  I completely ran out of stockpiles of supplies.  Instead of cancelling some of the projects, I sat there and let the game run for a few hours until everything got caught up.  To make matters worse, I started building a fortress, which is a large building that houses soldiers and expands the borders.  Even after most of my buildings have finished, I am still critically low on supplies.  I have no wood, lumber, fish, bread, ham, or coal stockpiled.  Without the food, I've discovered that my mines don't work very efficiently, and I rely on the mined metals to make iron and weapons.  So this could be a problem.

My border with the Nubians

While I was stuck trying to finish all my support buildings, the Nubians have been busy building guard towers and other offensive looking buildings right on my border.  I guess it's time I figure out how to fight these Nubians and find that gateway.  I have to say I like some of the Nubian's buildings.  One of their buildings is just a giant elephant head.

While I try to get my economy rolling again, I've decided to try an attack on a Nubian building.  I think the way attacking works is that I can only attack enemy military buildings, and only if  I have one of my military buildings within a certain distance and my military building has garrisoned troops.  Here is my first attack:

My watchtower is fulled garrisoned

Attacking the Nubians (look at that elephant head building)
After taking over a Nubian building, I capture it and all Nubian support buildings within the military building's sphere of influence burn down.  I think I greatly outclass the Nubians because I completely dominated them in this small attack.  Also, notice the different colored swords in my garrison screenshot.  Soldiers automatically upgrade if they get gold coins from my mint, and the different colored swords represent different levels of soldier.  I've been hoarding gold coins, so many of my soldiers are the highest ranked "general".

The first battle of the Roman/Nubian war
It was 2 of my generals vs 3 of their tribal-looking warrior.  After capturing their watchtower, here is what the map looked like:

All your Nubian buildings are belong to us
So that went smoothly.  After this first battle, I pretty much steamrolled a bunch of Nubian outposts until I had conquered a good 4/5 of the map.  Here is another devastating outcome:

 

I've discovered some important concepts regarding the economy in the game.  I built up a bunch of military buildings like watchtowers and guard posts, but I realized I wasn't producing any more soldiers.  I read in the manual that new soldiers require weapons and beer, but my brewery wasn't producing any beer.  Beer comes from grain and water.  I had 2 farms producing a lot of grain and well producing enough water, but I also had some mills and a pig farm that was using my grain.  I had to go into a distribution menu and give my breweries priority for the grain, which is a nice feature.  After I did this, I started pumping out soldiers at a high level. 

I also discovered that natural resources like mines and fisheries eventually run out of their resource.  I realized I wasn't producing enough iron, which requires iron ore and coal, and I discovered a lot of mines had run out of metal to mine.  So I had to send out my geologist to look for more good mining spots.  The same went for my fisheries.  I did find plenty of gold for gold mines, but iron and coal were harder to find.

I have always seemed to be running out of food and I'm not sure how to remedy that.  My pig farm doesn't produce that much ham, nor does my baker seem to produce much bread.  Maybe I am supposed to build more bakeries, but I have 2 of them and that, along with the breweries and pig farm, uses up all of my grain.  So maybe I just need to ramp of my economic and resource-producing buildings and build more of them.  I'm getting by right now, but it just takes a long time to build buildings. 

I created a hodgepodge compilation map of what my city/country looks like after a few hours of play to give a general idea of how I expanded and developed:

My full city/country
The Nubians are confined to the upper right corner, I've got them surrounded.  I like this big map version. 

I also discovered how to zoom in:



The Nubians are now limited to just a small area around their headquarters, and its time for me to attack.  I've built a bunch of military buildings within range of their headquarters, so I can have a whopping 7 soldiers assault their last stronghold at one.  It will be a slaughter.  Here it is in action, zoomed in:

My cinematic final battle
There was only one Nubian to eliminate and I was able to take control of and destroy their headquarters.  But after I did, something...strange happened:

Nubians!  Nubians everywhere!
Destroying their headquarters released every single citizen of theirs all at once!  All of a sudden there were 100 Nubians walking around the map, it actually slowed my PC down a bit.  It also made me laugh out loud because it looked so ridiculous.  But I loved it.  After this I shows a message indicating I had found the gateway:

Ending the mission
So here's the thing: I'm going to wrap up my playthrough of The Settlers II now that I finished this mission.  It's not that I'm not having fun with the game, I think it is great and I'm still enjoying playing it.  The problem is that I don't think it's a very interesting game to write about.  I've played the game for a few hours now, and not a lot happens to make things interesting to talk about.  There are long periods of just building up the economy and expanding the road systems, which doesn't make for very interesting stories.  So after finishing the first 2 missions of the campaign and playing the game for around 8 hours, I feel comfortable calling it a day.  But damn is the game fun and addicting.

- Review -

Even though I quit The Settlers II after only the second mission, I still think the game is great and I may even keep playing it off and on after I moved on to my next game for this website.  Much like Ascendancy, it is a game that I tend to think about when going about my day not in front of my computer.  I find myself thinking about strategies of expansion and how to improve my economy or what new buildings the next missions might unlock.  And to me, that is the hallmark of a great strategy game, a game that gets you thinking about actual "strategy" even when you aren't playing the game.  It is an addictive and genuinely fun game to play, even it tends to drag a bit while waiting for the economy to catch up to your expansion.  

The Settlers II is a surprisingly modern-feeling game and I can see the impact it had on future city-building games.  The interface is pretty intuitive and should be familiar to anyone who has played these kinds of games.  I always appreciate when an interface allows the user to hover the mouse over an item to see a description of it.  The graphics, while typical for the mid 90s, are colorful and fun and it is easy to see the differences between the different buildings.  I also enjoyed little animations of idle settlers.  

The interplay between natural resources and production is very reminiscent of the Tropico and Anno games, which makes sense since Blue Byte created the Anno games.  It was gratifying for me to set my distribution of grain to favor the breweries and see new soldiers get produced as a result.  This gave me a sense of really having good control over the economy, instead of it being some abstract layer that doesn't affect gameplay.  And although I was annoyed that my mines and fisheries ran out of resources, I soon realized that this adds a critical sense of urgency and creativity in how I expanded my city.  I could not just sit back and turtle away around my resources hoard since they were eventually going to dry up.  It forces you to think about how you expand and plan ahead.  The same principle applies for the limited space available around each military building that expands the boarders and the space roads and other buildings take up.  Expansion is absolutely necessary and turtling is not a viable option for the most part.

Not everything is perfect with the game though.  I got pretty bored during the middle part of the levels while I waited for larger buildings to finish.  Sometimes I found myself browsing the internet for 10-15 minutes waiting for a farm or bunch of mines to finish construction.  It also seems like it was relatively easy to get myself into a hole where I was running out of certain resources and was not able to dig myself back out.  I seemed to perpetually low on food and coal, but that could be my poor understanding and planning of the economy when I started the missions.  In fact, this is the more likely explanation.

The combat is also kind of obtuse or abstract.  It was difficult to know which of my buildings were going to provide soldiers to attach their buildings when i opted to attack.  Sometimes it seemed like I had plenty of soldiers in a building within range of their building, yet I could not get any other them to attack.  It would have been nice to have a little more feedback regarding combat.

But on the whole the game is really, really fun and I can see why it so well regarded.  I wish I would have played this game when I was younger, but at least I can play it now.  And I think that's what I'm going to do right now.

     


1 comment:

  1. Like many European developers, a lot of their early games were developed for the Amiga system and later ported to MSDOS. OSRS GoldTheir first big success was the turn-based strategy game Battle Isle in 1991, which spawned sequels all the way up to 2013.

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