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Way, waaaay back in 1993, a German company released a game called The
Settlers for Commodore Amiga. I played the demo, and I've been hooked
ever since.
Put simply, the game involves building a thriving settlement. You don't
control the actual settlers (i.e., people) directly. Instead, you build
stuff. Put simply, each type of building takes one or more inputs and
transforms it into an output. For example, the goldsmith's hut takes
gold ore and coal as input, and produces refined gold as output.
Building an economy then consists of constructing the correct buildings.
Some items are easy to produce, while others require several buildings
to produce. Perhaps the hardest part of the game is remembering exactly
what all the buildings are and what they do; there's quite a few of them!
As you'd expect, it's not merely a case of constructing all the right
buildings, however. You also have to build an efficient network of roads
to connect them. The longer the road and the steeper the road, the
longer it takes for materials to traverse it. So ideally you want to
build related buildings close together. Then you can adjust the
priorities of which materials to transport first, which ones to store,
what percentage goes to each building, etc. (E.g., coal is used by
several buildings. You can set what percentage goes to the iron works
and what percentage to the goldsmith.)
However, some buildings harvest natural resources, which only exist in
certain places, which dictates where the buildings have to be put. And
you only have a finite amount of space available; sometimes there just
isn't room to put a building near the previous processing step in the
chain. And then of course, your land might not /have/ one of the
resources you need, in which case you need to expand your territory,
which requires a whole /other/ sequence of buildings. Or perhaps you can
/trade/ for the items you need, which requires yet other buildings and a
neighbour willing to trade.
Now it wouldn't be too hard to knock up a program which displays a grid
and lets you put boxes representing processing steps onto that grid, and
lets you draw lines connecting them, and simulates the flow of materials
through the system. But that would be incredibly dull.
Arguably one of the most captivating things about The Settlers is the
amount of detail the designers poured into it. Yes it's 1993, so the
graphics are a bit chunky. But every single building looks different.
Every single type of worker looks different. You can visually /see/
materials moving from place to place. And every single worker has a
different animation, and usually one or two sounds.
The woodcutter comes out of his hut, and walks to the nearest tree. He
hits the trunk 3 times with his axe. Bang. Bang. Bang. The tree falls
down. Crash. He then strips the branches off. He hits the trunk three
times, and a few branches fall off. He hits it three more times, and
more branches fall off. He hits it three more times, and the last few
branches fall off. He then picks up the trunk and walks back to his hut,
leaving behind a tree stump and a pile of discarded leaves. Over time,
the leaves disappear, and eventually so does the trunk.
Set a baker to work, and you get to see him pick up the sack of flour on
his doorstep and take it inside. Then through the window you see him
kneading the dough. Then he comes out with a loaf of bread on a wooden
paddle, and puts it into the stone oven. Then he stands there, paddle in
hand, watching as white smoke billows out of the chimney. After a while,
the smoke stops, and he puts the paddle in and brings the bread out. It
deposits it on the doorstep, and it continues steaming for a moment. And
then a carrier comes and takes it away to the next building.
The level of detail is staggering. This game comes on two 720KB
double-sided double-density floppy disks. (Double-density is the one
that came /before/ high-density. DD = 720KB, HD = 1.44MB.) And yet there
are animations for almost every single trade. Stonecutters cut at stones
with a pickaxe. Woodcutters fell trees. Farmers sprinkle grain on the
fields, and then reap it with scythes. Foresters dig a hole, deposit a
tree into it, and then carefully pack the earth around it. Windmill's
sails turn when they're milling bread. Sheep farmers release sheep,
periodically bring them food, and then gather up a sheep and bring it
outside.
And there are sounds too. As well as the in-game music [which is now
permanently burned into my skull like the INSERT CREDITS message on an
arcade video game], there is the constant sound of birds chirping, the
wind in the mountains, the babbling of streams, and other environmental
sounds. (Depending on where you're looking.) Then there's the hammering
of blacksmiths, the sawing of sawmills, the trundle of windmills
turning, the patter of farmers scattering seeds, the sound of charcoal
burners coughing their lungs up, the bleating of lambs at the sheep
farm, the sound of mining carts being driven, etc.
Once your settlement really gets going, there's so much happening that
sometimes you just have to sit back and watch in fascination as all your
settlers busily go about their work. It's mesmerising to watch
sometimes. And I should probably point out that a "quick" game is one
that takes "only" an hour. Games are measured in multiple hours. Once
you start playing, you utterly lose track of time...
It's actually quite impressive that this game is possible at all. As I
said, it comes on 2 x 720KB disks. The machine it runs on is powered by
a 7MHz Motorola 68000 (that's 16-bit, not 32-bit) with 1MB of RAM. The
game does not come with hand-crafted "maps". Rather, it uses a fractal
algorithm to generate a (repeating) map from a "random seed" number.
That saves on disk space, but the computer's RAM still has to hold the
entire map.
Let's consider for a moment what the map contains.
- The location of every individual tree, and its state of growth. (When
you plant new trees, they start off tiny, and gradually get bigger,
until they're ready to be felled.)
- The location of every tree stump and pile of leaves, and how long
they've been there so they can be removed after a while. (Remember, when
you cut a tree down, the stump and the leaves stay there for quite some
time. And no, not just if it's on-screen. Scroll to a woodcutter you
haven't looked at for 20 minutes and you'll see tree stumps and piles of
leaves around the place.)
- The location and size of every stone pile.
- The location and maturity state of every wheat field.
- The location of all the fish stocks and how depleted they are.
- The location of all the mineable ores and how depleted they are.
- The location of every individual unit of every type of material you
currently possess.
- The location and animation state of every building and every
individual settler.
What's more, not only is 1MB of RAM enough to actually /store/ all this
data, but the puny CPU is man enough to /update/ it all in realtime.
Quite apart from all the things that can get depleted or that mature
over time, and all the animation cycles that need to update, just thing
about route-finding.
If I build a goldsmith, every unit of gold ore that I possess will be
diligently transported towards the new goldsmith's hut. If I build two,
every unit of gold gets transported towards the "nearest" one. Bear in
mind that "nearest" means taking into account my road network, which
might actually make it quicker to travel to a goldsmith that's
physically more distant because it's topologically more close. (Or
because the roads are flatter, so there's a lower route cost. Or because
one route is more congested than another. Or...)
When I finish a new building, one settler is selected, walks to the
nearest place where a suitable tool can be found, picks up that tool and
turns into the specified type of worker, and then walks to the new
building. That's a fairly hoopy piece of AI right there, if you really
think about it. I've got 200 settlers; how does the game engine decide
which one to pick, which warehouse to get the tool from, and what route
to walk to the warehouse and then how to get to the destination building?
On top of all that, the game gives you detailed statistics about your
performance. You can see exactly how many units of every possible item
you have, and view a history of standing volume for the last 5 hours.
The game is /storing/ that data somehow. Then you can see how many of
each type of building you have, and navigate to each one. You can also
see how many are built, and how many are under construction. You also
get a complete breakdown of which types of workers you currently have,
and again a historical graph over time.
It's perhaps worth mentioning that it's impressive what you can do with
32-colour graphics. The game runs at TV scan rates (depending on whether
you bought a PAL Amiga or an NTSC Amiga), with a screen size of 320x256
(PAL) or 320x200 (NTSC) pixels, and any 32 colours from 4096
possibilities. The Amiga does of course have digital sound, which is why
the geologists shout "yipee!" in a quirky chipmunk voice when they find
gold, rather than just producing an electronic bleeping sound.
Because of the way the "food chain" of material processing is set up,
the game tends to progress forward in stages. Much like the human body
is made up of different "systems", the game has buildings or groups of
buildings which perform different functions. There are systems for
generating building materials, for mining ores, for building weapons and
tools, for producing food, for storing surplus materials, for trade, for
expanding territory, and for warfare. Many of these systems depend on
what natural resources you have access to.
You begin the game with a single building planted in the middle of
nowhere, and a small stock of materials. Your land consists of
everything within a certain radius of your central castle. Everything
outside your borders is black; you cannot see what's out there. Like
everything else, you expand your territory by constructing buildings -
in this case, guard huts. When a knight occupies one, your border moves
outward, and after a second or two the darkness gradually lifts. Now you
get to see whether you've obtained anything worth having.
Usually you quickly run out of swords, and so cannot recruit any more
knights. At this point, you can no longer expand. If you haven't found
iron ore, you have a problem. If you have, you can make more swords and
continue your expansion.
If you're playing against a non-zero number of opponents, then at some
point you'll expand and realise you're now up against an enemy border.
Or maybe they'll expand and come into your field of view. (You can see
slightly beyond your border, but not very far.) This is usually when you
realise that they're doing way, way better than you are, and you're
going to get wiped off the map. ;-)
This situation then develops into either a trading relationship, or
(more usually) into a warfare situation. In war, whoever has the most
knights and the most gold wins. (Although the defender always has the
advantage over the attacker, all else being equal.) Usually the enemy
can kick out knights at a seemingly endless rate, while you just can't
produce them fast enough. And so you loose.
If you do win though, you can capture their guard huts, whereupon that
territory becomes yours, and any buildings on it graphically burn to the
ground. (So that's /another/ thing the game engine has to track.) After
a while the buildings start disappearing, and you can build on the land.
Note that if your enemy captures your land, and you almost immediately
capture it back, your buildings are still ruined. This is especially bad
if you're struggling for building materials.
When land is captured, all the settlers on it run to find safe
territory. If the last scrap of land belonging to a team is captured,
the settlers wander around at random. If a settler stays off friendly
territory too long, they die. They emit a little chipmunk squeal, and a
little white ghost flies up into the air and vanishes. So if you capture
all the land of a large settlement, after a while you get treated to the
spectacle of mass settler death.
(It's a bit like Lemmings. You know, the bit where you trap fifty
thousand lemmings in a space twenty pixels wide, and then select "nuke".
And they all cry "f-f-five! f-f-four! t-t-three! t-t-two! o-o-one! OH
NO!!" and start frigging /mining/ down to the center of the map. Don't
look at me like you never did that. ;-) We all know you did...)
Later, they made several versions of The Settlers for PC. These were
imaginatively named The Settlers II, The Settlers III and The Settlers
IV. I'm fairly sure my dad and I have played them all.
With each new release, the graphics and sound got better, and the
program reliability got worse. All these games still use a fixed
isometric view with fake 3D perspective. In the later ones the graphics
are clearly offline 3D rendered rather than hand-drawn.
Each game has different buildings with different production chains. Each
time you play a new one, you have to spend a week or two relearning
which building does what and which goods you need, etc. However, the
core gameplay itself remains nearly identical.
They're been back and forth over whether you need to manually build
roads; in some versions, the settlers work out their own routes.
Gradually the walking of feet wears down the grass revealing bare mud.
Further walking causes the path to callus over into a paved road.
(Because that's how you build roads, right?) If a path isn't used for a
long time, it gradually reverts back to mud, and then grass grows over it.
Most later versions of TS require you to build "residences" in order to
produce settlers themselves. Depending on the version, settlers die or
at least stop working if there are insufficient residences. (In TS1, you
just got more settlers whenever you built more stuff.)
Some versions of The Settlers let you play as several different races.
For example, TS4 has the Romans, the Mayans and the Vikings. Each race
uses construction materials in different proportions, and each race uses
a different food in which to worship the Gods, having a different (but
functionally similar) production chain. There's a forth non-playable
race ("the dark tribe") who are always AI-controlled.
TS4 was also nice in that it comes with a level editor. Which doesn't
suck that much, surprisingly. But sadly, TS4 quit working once I
installed a dual-core CPU. The same instantly crashes on launch. As it
is, you have to search around the publisher's website and manually
download and manually apply several "patches" to fix some of the
ridiculous launch-day bugs the game had. Stuff like certain buildings
not actually being functional. (!)
And then The Settlers: Heritage of the Kings came out. The newly-styled
title tells you that something's up. Now I've never actually played or
even seen this game. But I gather that fan reaction to it was
overwhelmingly negative. As I say, the previous four games have all been
more or less identical but for the cosmetic details and the fine detail
of the individual building types. But this release was apparently quite
radically different.
So it was with some trepidation that I started playing The Settlers 7:
Paths to a Kingdom.
The first thing I noticed is that because it's now published by Ubisoft,
it was that utterly retarded DRM system which /insists/ that you must be
connected to the Internet at all times or it won't let you play. Urgh.
So you have to create an online user account before you can even /run/
the game.
The next thing that I noticed is how hard it pushes all the online stuff
in your face. It /demands/ that you create a globally-visible online
player profile, and screams at you about how you could be playing online
/right now/ against a real human opponent.
No thank you. :-P
I'm not the slightest bit interested in online gameplay. I'd much rather
play offline. Fortunately that is still an option... for now. (I have to
wonder for how much longer, however.) Even then, if still screams at you
about how there's all this DLC you could be buying. And if you get an
"achievement", it demands your Facebook username and password so it can
spam all your friends. (Fortunately, you can cancel out of that.)
In short, it's been smothered in a crockload of corporate bollocks. But,
if you try hard enough, you can still get to the actual /game/.
It used to be that you typed in a random seed number, got planted in a
new randomly generated map which in all likelihood no other human had
ever played, and started exploring the blank canvas. Later games had
"missions" with human-crafted levels with vague open-ended objectives
for you to complete. You sometimes even started with more than one
building already built (which usually irritated me).
In this latest instalment, it begins with an epic prerendered scenematic
about how you've been sent to retake the old kingdom and make it once
more great... or some lame nonsense like that. I wasn't really paying
attention. Essentially you're playing a series of tutorial levels. Which
is what a game of this complexity could do with, to be honest.
You remember Clippy, the Microsoft paperclip? He of the infamous "It
looks like you're writing a letter! Would you like me to completely
bollocks it up for you?" Well this tutorial has one of those. His
character animation just repeats mouthing the same words over and over
again, while some bad voice acting delivers the actual lines, which are
displayed on the screen anyway. (And occasionally don't match the spoken
words.)
I mean, sure, I get it, it's a tutorial. But please, spare me trying to
pretend it's part of some epic saga. Just TELL ME how to operate the
controls. Don't feed me some prattle about "Excellent, my lady. Good
navigation is fundamental to good kingdom rule." You just showed me how
to use the mouse to move the camera FFS! Get ON with it!
So, the first big change to gameplay is that it's fully 3D now. Yep, you
can look at your stuff from any angle. You can also zoom in and zoom out
now.
This also means that /finally/ we have a slightly more convincing build
animation. Every singe TS1, builders build buildings by walking up to
the building and hammering on thin air. As they do this, a picture of a
timber frame slowly reveals from bottom to top, followed by a picture of
a finished building revealing in the same way. In TS7, we get actual
timbers appearing one by one, in a cloud of brown dust. It's not /much/
more convincing (especially the way the timber frame instantly turns
into a finished building at the end), but it's a start. Oh, and the
builders still hammer on thin air. ;-)
Perhaps because these are tutorial missions, you always start off with
half a dozen buildings already built. Which means you have to spent five
minutes figuring out what you've already got before you can decide what
you need to make. It's a bit irritating, but it seems to diminish in the
later missions.
The really big change, of course, is the land. It used to be that you
started in the center of a vast blackness, and you set out to explore
it. You decide where to locate stuff, how to connect it, and so forth.
All of this is gone now. Instead, you have a network of "sectors".
There's a minimap constantly showing you all the sectors, who owns each
one, and how they're connected. A network of pre-existing roads runs
through these. (Indeed, some sectors are divided on the ground by
rivers, and have bridges across them. Hint: You can't build bridges.)
Each sector has one guard hut in it, and a predefined set of
"fortifications" which start as ruins and which you can optionally
rebuild, repair and upgrade.
In short, the land is already explored, already parcelled up into
sectors, all the roads connecting them are already build, all the guard
huts are already built, and some of the defences are already built. All
of these things have already been decided by the level designer, and you
are powerless to change them. You can also see all the land, right from
the start, so you can go see what your enemies are doing. So much for
the thrill of exploration, or the satisfaction of building a settlement
from nothing.
Obviously, you can only build stuff on sectors that you own.
Irritatingly, there are parts of the land which are not part of any
sector, and so can /never/ be built on by anybody. Isn't that wonderful?
You can also only conquer sectors in the order indicated by the minimap.
It doesn't /matter/ if, on the ground, it's easy to walk from sector A
to sector C. If the minimap says you have to go through sector B, then
you have to conquer B first. And let me tell you, often the minimap
doesn't seem to relate very closely at all to what's actually on the
ground. (Some of the placements of cliffs, rivers, etc. also look highly
unnatural and are /obviously/ just to divide the rolling landscape up
into neat little sectors.)
Aside from the first few missions, it seems that gameplay now /revolves/
around beating your opponents. In earlier games, warfare was usually
something that didn't happen until a game was well under way. Here it
seems to be the main goal for play. If you don't start producing
soldiers immediately, your AI opponents certainly will.
Perhaps most irritating of all, the way you win has changed. It used to
be that you played until you got bored, or you played against the AI and
you win when you've captured all their land. But in this new game, you
win by accumulating arbitrarily-defined "victory points". Like, if I
have 25 units of gold sitting around doing nothing, I get a victory
point for that. If I actually /use/ that gold to do something useful, I
lose the victory point. The first person to accumulate X victory points
wins. (Assuming they can hold onto them for 120 seconds.)
It's daft watching a scenematic of a hooded monk promising death on the
battlefield, and then playing a game where all I actually do is mine /a
lot/ of gold, and then seeing my triumphant character taunt that we are
victorious in battle. There hasn't /been/ a battle! I didn't even /have/
any soldiers! In a *real* game of The Settlers, I'd have lost miserably.
But here, in this new-fangled thing, apparently that's good enough to
win. Go figure...
In a similar way, there are certain buildings that you can't build until
you "unlock" them by having a certain amount of "prestige". (You get
this by building certain /other/ buildings which do nothing except take
up space, and which require a lot of resources.)
You can also use priests to research "technologies" such as making your
mines go faster or making your soldiers harder to beat. To do this, you
have to produce enough priests of the correct types and wait 60 seconds
for them to do their work. There's a whole minigame of noughts and
crosses where only one team can own a given technology, you get it by
sending priests, you can only research technologies connected to ones
you've already obtained, other players can send more priests than you to
out-bid you for a given technology, etc. Oh, and the most expensive
technology in the center just gives you a victory point. Since once a
technology is gone, it's gone, if you get this victory point nobody can
ever take it away from you. (Or rather, WHEN YOUR OPPONENT gets this...)
There's a nearly identical minigame for "trade". You have to recruit
traders and send the right number and type of traders to "establish
trading posts" along predefined routes. Again, only one player can own a
given trading posts, and once it's gone it's gone. Here the reward for
owning a trading post is that you can then exchange X units of one good
for Y units of some other good. If you have enough traders, that is. Oh,
and some trading posts don't let you trade anything, they just give you
a victory point.
In the old days, the AI would always start out with way more soldiers
than you. But if you could produce soldiers really fast, you could still
crush them. Today, the AI can research all 25 technologies and discover
all 32 trading posts within minutes of starting the game, before you've
had a change to even build a church never mind recruit any priests, and
they've now buggered up the technology board and the trade board for you
permanently. They've also got four victory points which can never be
taken away. If you need four to win, it's now game over.
I can't help feeling that they've added all these things to make The
Settlers "more like X". I just can't figure out exactly what X is. Then
again, I don't play that many computer games...
And then there's the crashing. The game has flat-out crashed to the
desktop at least three times now. And when you consider that a single
game can take several hours to play, this is infuriating beyond
description. The total lack of a pause button is also annoying and
utterly unnecessary - especially when you consider that the Facebook
messages the keep popping up manage to pause the game just fine. :-P
But the worst stability problem is "slow mode". From time to time, the
game will just randomly enter slow mode. When this happens, the frame
rate crashes, bits of buildings or landscape flicker between visible and
invisible, and stray polygons sometimes flicker around the place. I've
discovered that if you tilt the camera the right way, you can sometimes
make it go away. Or sometimes it just fixes itself after a while. And
then the game will play normally again. Even so, it's utterly
infuriating to have paid money for a game and not be able to actually
/play/ it. All the controls become so unresponsive while it's in slow
mode...
(The game launcher checks for updates every single time you start the
game. The first time I ran it, it found 1 update, downloaded it,
"failed" to install it, and it's never found any updates since. So
presumably it's a known problem that Ubisoft just can't be bothered to
actually fix. All my /other/ games run just fine. :-P Only TS7 has
problems.)
It is perhaps a testament to the addictive power of the original game
that not only did it survive to its 7th incarnation, but that /in spite/
of all the pointless crap they've lumped on top of it, despite how badly
they've ruined the concept and messed up the gameplay, and even
considering how buggy it's now become, I /still/ can't stop playing it.
It's like when Westlift did a version of Uptown Girl. It's a special
kind of song that can be covered by one of the worst bands in the world
and /still/ sound decent...
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