Building a City

Every city starts with the basic buildings - a castle, a storehouse and a cathedral.

In essence, The Settlers: Rise of an Empire is all about building a city. While you can recruit soldiers and fight, combat is not at the forefront. This is unlike most other RTS games, and, so I've been told, some of the earlier Settlers titles too. In Rise of an Empire you start out with a castle, a storehouse and a cathedral; all pre-built close to a well, situated at the center of your new settlement. In addition to the buildings you have a Knight character ready at the scene, selectable from a handful of different characters for each mission. Each Knight has his own special abilities, but they don't affect things too much - every mission is fully playable with any character as your Knight.

Initially the building selection is very limited. You first have to promote your Knight to unlock additional building types, and in early missions the promotions are limited, so the different types are introduced gradually. In any case, every city starts out with a couple of woodworker's huts that supply wood. Then you have to set up a source of food - usually you begin with a hunter's hut, or a grain farm, coupled with the city building to process the food - a butcher's shop or a bakery. Your settlers also need clothes, and a tanner can fashion them from the animals supplied by hunter's hut. Alternatively a weaver can produce clothes from wool produced by a sheep farm - but that assumes you have access to sheep first.

Promoting your Knight unlocks additional buildings.

As your city grows, the streets get very busy.

Once these basics are set up, and you have upgraded your castle (requires stone, mined by stonecutter's hut), you can promote your Knight to Sheriff. This allows the building of broom maker and soap maker, which provide "cleanliness" by making brooms and soap from wood and animal carcasses. When your settlers have food and clothes, and the tools to keep the city clean, and your main buildings have been upgraded, you can again promote your Knight, and unlock the entertainment buildings.

For entertainment, the settlers want some taverns and theaters. Beekeepers supply honey for taverns, while weavers make costumes for the theaters and it all gets converted to entertainment - again, fulfilling the needs of your settlers allows you to promote your knight and unlock more buildings. This continues up as far as the mission allows, with additional building types opening up as your knight gets a new title. Further buildings allow the manufacturing of luxury items for the settlers, but these come up only in the later missions.

Seasons change, and the climate sometimes limits your options.

The supply chains used vary as climate and available land changes. Alternate sources of food include cattle farms (requiring cows, obviously), with the milk processed to cheese by a dairy and fishing huts, with corresponding smokehouses processing the fresh fish for stockpiling. In the north the winters are long, and in worst cases frozen fishing spots, snow-covered grain farms and hibernating beehives produce nothing during the long winters. In the far south the summer goes on all year long, but there is little fertile land available for grain farming, cattle or sheep. Everything goes through the upgradeable storehouse, with tiny settlers walking back and forth carrying things around. Almost every mission plays out the same - the ways and means may change, but in every case you need to provide food, clothing, cleanliness and entertainment for the hard-working settlers to keep them happy.