I have a Quest for you

Supplies sent to friendly settlements can be guarded with military units - there is a risk that bandits might be lurking in the area.

To spice things up, The Settlers dishes out additional tasks and quests. Each mission has a pile of objectives to complete, and usually "bash enemy heads" is not even on the list. You may have to supply certain goods to a friendly settlement, perform tasks with your Knight, expand your own settlement until your knight can attain the required title, or bash some of those enemy heads. The quests provide goals, but at the same time they ensure that each map plays the same every time, as you can't deviate much from the designed building path as you complete the required quests. In a way they do enrich the single player campaign, but they do it by sacrificing any shred of replayability.

Some maps also require you to do trading. Some resources may be completely unavailable on the map, and the mission expects you to find a friendly settlement that is willing to trade them for you. Trading is also a way to turn excess materials into gold, or to obtain sheep and cattle, when no area of the map has any wild ones that you could capture (by claiming the territory). Campaign also includes a running storyline related to a mysterious disease. Some missions include an additional task of sourcing a medicine (or herbs that you can turn to medicine), either by trade or harvesting. All the small quest-related details do liven up the game, and manage to keep the interest up for a while, but in the end the sheer repetition of always rebuilding a new city creeps in. There are missions where you start with a half-built settlement, or with a more unique goal than just building up a big city, but they are rare.

Beautiful lands, with a few crashes

The Settlers excels in the visual department. Art is generally very high quality, and it holds up pretty well even when zoomed up close. While actually playing, you don't really have time to watch things too closely, but sometimes it's just fun to follow the settlers as they walk around doing their endless cycle of gathering, processing and hauling materials around the city. As the population grows, the city gets very lively, and everything is presented in great detail.

At it's best, Rise of an Empire looks outright beautiful.

Even when you zoom all the way to an individual settler, there is extra detail to be found.

Buildings and roads can be built fairly freely, and it's easy to end up with a jumble of different buildings surrounded by a wall that just happened to get built where it managed to fit in, and the end result looks like a medieval city straight out of a fairy tale.

While the game behaved pretty well, I played it only after applying the 100MB "launch day" patch to version 1.1. Even after the patch, things are not completely stable. Although random crashes out of the blue were very rare, more annoying was the problem with saves. It's possible to end up with a savegame that won't load - you'll just get a crash when the game should continue from your saved point. This is not a truly major issue, as you can always start from the beginning of any mission you have unlocked and the missions are not that long, but there is certainly room for further debugging. Other sources tell that the original 1.0 was a horrible mess, so an Internet connection capable of downloading the patch should be considered a requirement. Thankfully the game automatically downloads and applies the patch when you first start the game, so there is no hassle with the patching.