Genre: StrategyDeveloper: Blue Byte SoftwareYear: 1996
Rating: 0.00 / 10.00
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Here's one of the latest classics made found here at Abandoneer. Settlers II combines management, military strategy, a reasonably easy-to-use interface, good graphics and sounds and a humorous atmosphere to bring you one of the best medieval empire strategy games ever.
Some might think of Age of Empires when looking at the game mechanics of Settlers II, although the latter is a lot more management-driven. You dig for raw materials like coal, iron, and gold, grow food, cut trees, build structures, produce weapons and tools, to be able to do all that again, and build an army to conquer your enemies. Sounds easy eh? Think again.
First off, there's more than one way to fill in certain situations in Settlers II. To feed the workers in the mines, you may build fisheries, which are fast but become useless over time, or you can build farms, that procuce grain to feed the mill to feed the baker, or produce grain to feed the pig farms to feed the slaughterhouse. And if all these buildings are made too far from each other, it's likely that you'll never see the result coming. The structure of your empire it not as easy as it looks.
Military units are a lot simpler, if you ignore all you had to do just to build their weapons or make the coins you need to train them. Yes, it's a military strategy game, but the management matters the most. If you manage your empire better and make your structures work faster than your enemies, it's likely that you'll have a growing army *before* they even find the time to build up defenses. Now even if you spend all your resources in military structures, it's a long way before you can have soldiers decently armed and trained to fight for new lands... or for your own.
It's hard to cover all the aspects of this game. The graphics mix a sharp VGA landscape with cool cartoon little characters that add to the fun factor of the game. Sound effects are plenty and simple, mostly to express the noise of birds, wind, skirmishes and so on. Because of its great addictiveness and fun factor, this game is not only a classic, but indeed rivals even the latest games in the genre.
