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The Settlers: Rise of an Empire

Fallen Empires

While I'm unqualified to comment in detail how things have changed from the previous Settlers games, it's clear that the main goal has been to make the game visually pleasing and easy to play. In that regard Blue Byte has succeeded very well - Rise of an Empire is very accessible, simple to learn and looks very pretty on the proper hardware. Problems appear only later on - missions don't really get more complicated after you have unlocked all the building types, and difficulty level is definitely aimed at a casual gamer. It's exceedingly hard to fail, and the only way I ever managed to get a mission failure was by ignoring the need to build walls once you start facing enemy units bent on pillaging your city.

In a way the simplicity and accessibility of the game is a curse. It's very difficult to please both casual gamers and the hardcore RTS/Builder audience - if you go for the hardcore, you get something like Supreme Commander, with piles of glowing reviews and a financial failure as the game ends up inaccessible to the masses. On the other end of the spectrum we have Settlers: Rise of an Empire. It's destined to get spanked by the reviewers, yet I fully expect the game to sell well to the casual audience, and they'll probably like what they see, assuming the remaining technical issues are sorted out. I've tried to take this into account when scoring the game - yes, it's simple, repetitive and doesn't exactly break any new ground, but for someone who hasn't played every possible RTS there is, it's a perfectly fine game.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

(*) Note: While an ATI Radeon 9500 includes Shader Model 2.0 support, The Settlers: Rise of an Empire is only playable in DX8 mode (Shader Model 1.3, "Minimum" shader slider setting). The same is true for any low/midrange SM2.0 card. The Radeon 9500 is listed as the ATI minimum simply because it is the weakest ATI card that is officially supported and runs the game fine using the SM1.3 shaders. For SM2.0 effects ("High" shader slider setting), rendered at a playable frame rate, you need a much faster card (see YouGamers recommended setup)

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Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Managing Cities & SettlersPage 3: Creating an army to expandPage 4: Quests, Art & IssuesPage 5: Hardware Reqs & PerformancePage 6: Final Thoughts & Scores

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