The Settlers 2 10th Anniversary Edition Review - City Builder

 Good mornin-afternoo-vening dear readers!

Towards the end of my Banished review I told you how playing that game reignited my passion for city building games and that I’ve started building whishlists. Well, thanks to the various winter sales on both Steam and GOG - I’m not made of money after all - I’ve amassed quite a sizeable number of city builder titles so I’ll start going through them as this year goes on.
So let’s start this year’s city builder reviews with Settlers 2 10th Anniversary Edition.

I have never gotten around to playing any of the Settlers titles, for whatever reasons, and whilst doing some research into which title to get as my first venture into this franchise, it was suggested that Settlers 2 has the most city-builder type experience of them. And since that’s what interests me most when it comes to these titles, I got the 10th Anniversary Edition.

The game starts with a very nicely narrated runthrough of the story background, making use of some pretty well illustrated images which I think reflect the not-quite realistic proportions of the Settlers quite well, they’re dwarfish cartoon characters. But something struck me as a bit odd, the images of the female Romans - apparently the settlers are Romans - they’re a...they’re a bit a… they’re a bit more sexualized than I would’ve thought would work with the overall design and proportions of the Settlers. I mean, whatever dwarf fetish floats your boat person who illustrated, it’s just something that stuck out to me.

But that very minor and personal piece of what-the-fuck?! aside, that same great voice narrates and explains the tutorials as well, which are quite quick and not very painful to go through. After which you can either start playing through the campaign or go for some freeplay. This being my first time in the game, I started playing through the campaign.

The campaigns are nothing special, pretty simple expand till you reach a certain point on the map goals, but things get more complicated once enemy settlers appear. It’s kind of difficult to get through later campaign missions without a couple of map restarts since once you’ll know where you find the various resources that are crucial - coal, iron and gold when it comes to the maps with enemies, you’ll restart the map so you can quickly expand into that direction and then can see to your steady domination and conquering of the map.

In terms of building options and types, Settlers II offers quite a wide array of different buildings and most of them are part of a much larger production chain, so you’ll need to build several different building in order to get end-use product. This is quite reasonable however, the skill lies in how and where you place these buildings so that you optimize the speed with which raw materials get transported from one link in the chain to the other.
This is where setting flags, arranging and rearranging roads come into play.

Whenever you’ll set a flag onto an already existing road, you’ll basically be creating a way-station for your carrier settlers. The more segmented a particular road is, the more materials can be transported by the carriers in something of a relay race methodology.

Also, there’s an unlimited number of settlers your headquarters can produce - these being all males, I still don’t understand how that particular piece of cloning works with ancient Roman technology, but if I’m ok with the dwarf fetish, I’ll let the Roman cloning pass this is hardly a realistic game to begin with. Anyway the idea being, you don’t have to pick and choose which roads get more carriers.

But now onto roads, not only because this is an important gameplay aspect of city builders, but also because they tend to get the least amount of attention in terms of, what people talk about when relating things about city-building games.

The great thing about Settlers II is that you can always destroy and rebuild roads, sometimes this becomes necessary because of slow movement of goods, some others you’ll have to do it because you’ve destroyed a particular building and all of the roads that went around it can now go straight through where the building used to be.
This is something that tends to happen a lot to woodcutter buildings since you need them in order to clear space for other constructions. Once the particular patch of forest is cleared, the woodcutter building has no more reason to exist, so down it goes, and roads have to rebuilt.

This constant cycle of building a settlement, then destroying different parts of it as they become obsolete and then building different things, as well as restructuring roads to optimize the flow of goods is where the major crux of the game exists. The smoother you can make your raw materials go from the building that produce them, to those that need them, to the units that require the finished product, the faster you’ll develop your settlement.
One thing that you can do in the game to improve your transportation speeds is to build yourself a donkey farm. They even move like tiny motorbikes when they’re in their stables, so you know they’re fast.

But actual city-building aside, the game does also come with a combat component and whoo boy, it’s the most awkwardly implemented mechanic in the game, since the game wasn’t really built with combat in mind, at least I hope it wasn’t. You have no direct control over what your soldiers do, everything is automated and the only things that you can do is play around with some features to make sure you always have soldiers ready for the front lines. There’s no real strategy to speak of to the combat here.

Also, once the first skirmishes start, you’re pretty much locked into fighting until one of you loses. And if you hadn’t had time to secure sources of coal, iron and gold by this time, you’ll undoubtedly lose. Because you can’t have soldiers without weapons - which require iron ore and coal, and you can’t upgrade your soldiers without gold coins, which require coal and gold ore. So this leads to several games having to be restarted simply because you expanded into the wrong part of the map, because there’s no means of trading for resources you’re lacking. It’s just not great game nor level design.

Remember when in my Banished review I said that what kept that game from being even better was the lack of an actual theme and more links in the production chain? 

Well, even though Settlers does have a theme, and more links in the production chain, the theme part isn’t that engrossing and due to the really poorly executed combat component, it pretty much brings the entire experience down quite a few notches. Also, the needs of the Settlers are almost never really important, only miners and soldiers consume food and beer, so there’s very little to manage in terms of food, morale or natural disasters and such.
So while I enjoyed playing Settlers 2 10th Anniversary Edition, I feel the need for something even more thematic, I feel the need to rule and manage something more grandious, something like….maybe an empire.

And that’s it for my Settlers 2 10th Anniversary Edition review, thanks for watching and I hope you found it informative.

 

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