Building an Army

In most missions, building the city is just part of the job. Once you have the basics in place, you can set up swordsmiths and bow makers, and use the weapons to recruit troops using the barracks. This requires iron, and you need to secure a supply by setting up iron miner's hut. In addition to armies, you can build a siege engine workshop to supply siege weapons, in later missions. Combat is very simple and the results are determined almost solely by the size of the armies. Bowmen get bonuses when firing from walls or high ground, but in practice it doesn't really change anything. Walls play a bigger part, and while wooden stockades can be burned, proper stone walls require siege engines to crack. This is also true when defending your settlement. n many missions the core of your settlement must be properly walled or the enemy will make short work of your critical buildings.

Knock knock - a courtesy call at the enemy city.

A major downer - captured the outpost, and the whole enemy city was instantly razed to the ground.

Once the city is breached, soldiers can burn buildings using torches, but there is no need - once the enemy outpost is captured, the whole enemy settlement gets instantly razed to ground. While it would seem easier to just burn down some outlying buildings to harass the enemy, in reality as soon as you can get through the enemy walls, it's just as easy to go for the main building and wipe everything out. Overall the whole combat side of the game is oversimplified and delegated as a minor sideshow - city building and managing available resources is the main meat of the game, and if you seek a combat-oriented RTS, The Settlers is not your game.

Expanding the Empire

Upgrading a building - ten units of wood, thank you.

While you don't actually get to build a whole empire - it's all just cutscenes as the story goes on - you will expand your city across the mission map. Each map is divided into a handful of areas, and initially you can build only into your starting area. To expand further you claim territories by building outposts and, if necessary, removing any hostiles occupying it. In almost every map you have to snatch some extra land just to obtain all the needed raw materials to reach mission goals, and to secure additional supply when initial sources have been exhausted. All the materials are always carried to your storehouse.

Settlers always take the fastest available route, and you can direct them by building a route of trails and roads. Existing buildings can be upgraded twice. Each level of upgrade requires some resources in exchange for additional productivity - an extra settler arrives to work on the building, and the settlers start using carts to ferry around larger loads of materials. Each building requires the same amount of food, clothing, cleanliness and entertainment, regardless of the number of settlers working in it, so even when you have plenty of space for extra buildings, upgrading is more cost-effective.