The Settlers

I understand the appeal it must have had at the time, but I guess this is a perfect example of a game not aging well. Being able to play any other game of this type that is less barebones and has a less constricting screen resolution or view amplitude makes this game basically obsolete.

And don't get me wrong; the basic ideas of the game are very good (that's why The Settlers kept being successful as a series, I guess). It did merge some of the best elements of god games, city builders, and strategy games of the time, and it feels like it all mixed naturally. But past the tutorial (which needs you to read the manual to understand what's going on) the game doesn't have anything different to offer. Cool mechanics, ok. So what? What now? Am I supposed to just repeat the same methods again over and over?

Let me put it better in a list of cons vs pros. These are my key issues with this game:

-There's no reason (and no possibility) for variation in strategy, and no different mission goals past the tutorial. There are just optimal and less optimal ways to structure things, that's all. Once you have tried and confirmed all of them, what is the point of playing this again? I guess you can still win or lose depending on the AI difficulty and the uneven properties of the terrain, but the lack of possibilities in gameplay variation plus the other issues I'll list next, make it not worth the time for me.

-The rigidness of the road system plus the buildings' required space rules; they make the spatial organization of your city unnecessarily hard and time-consuming. One of the key reasons for this is that you can't rotate buildings. I guess this is understandable for a game this old, but it creates some absurd and ridiculous incompatibilities for road building and space organization that are not compensated (you can't link two close buildings because the doors are oriented the same way; you can't link two roads in the most convenient spot because there's already a junction literally two blocks away). Apart from that, creating 'non-basic' buildings prevents you from creating more 'non-basic' buildings close in the area, regardless of the free space available. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the terrain itself wouldn't impede constructing these 'non-basic' buildings half the time already, and that almost all buildings belong to this 'non-basic' category. So forget about anything but fish, rock, and raw wood logs unless you make a well thought spatial organization plan beforehand.

-You may run out of raw resources and can't salvage them from existing buildings nor construction sites. This is an underwhelming flaw that could have been easily avoided in the making of the game. Basically, if you run out of wood at any moment and have no trees  nor a forester hut near your woodcutter hut, you're done. It doesn't matter how you're doing or whatever other resources you have; you can't commerce or exchange in any way, and if you demolish a building, you simply burn it and get nothing from it. If you demolish a building in the making, the resources piled around also disappear forever, so you don't get anything back either. The only way out would be simply creating another forester or woodcutter hut, but you need wood for that, so you're stuck. So, a simple negligence like that can make anybody lose by accident at any moment. I guess this can be used as a 'strategy', but it feels more like exploiting a weakness of the game than anything else.

-The randomness of the workers' choices for targeting is just too much. I'm fine with not commanding units directly; it is a perfectly valid and interesting type of gameplay. But in this game the AI is programmed in such a way that, half the time, it becomes very annoying and time consuming to expect anything from your units. You can put a woodcutter next to a specific tree, and it can be the very last one he will cut after clearing the whole area; if they have more than one option for a task, the choice will be totally random, regardless of distance or any type of measurement of convenience (they could target things closest to roads or buildings first, if not closest to them). Sometimes they even refuse to work on a nearby object forever, and you'll never know why; you'll have to put someone else there and hope the new guy will just do it.

All of that makes every new mission a bore to go through, if you have no specific goals than trying the same to win once and again. Aside from all that, the strong points of this game are the following:

-The art does its job good enough and the music is better than average. Not the most important aspects of this game, but they do exist and they have to be mentioned. I've heard the Amiga version has far better audio quality. I'm used to MIDI in old strategy games so I actually have no complains for the DOS version; I really enjoyed the background music.

-It is quite complex for a game this old, and has a good attention to detail. It is mostly well thought and put together, and the core ideas are definitely above average and interesting. The units are not mere visual components with animations: they really have an individual AI, and the taking and moving of resources -as well as any other action in the game-, depend on each one of them doing their job. Except for the cases mentioned before, this is done very well, and the chain of tasks and demands for the automatzed evolution of your city/serfdom are not precisely simple. I guess this is the real strength of this game, that manifests in different ways. Think of the 'geologist' unit, per example. That was a very good idea; it makes mountain exploitation far more engaging. I'd say that the most fun in this game is in learning how to play it and discovering all the specific elements of its complexity, and how they are related.

But as I said, in the end, once you know how to play, all missions feel the same; the gameplay feels rutinary. Usually, to counteract this limitations, good old games focused on giving the player different types of missions and gameplay experiences all along. Because there was not so much to offer in terms of game mechanics themselves, back then. So it was through the smart use of limitation and delimitation that a game experience could be kept interesting for the player, such as happens in the first Warcraft game. In lack of that, multiplayer capability usually helps, but being a game from 1993, multiplayer means to have the screen divided and plug 2 mouses. I had to play it in DOSBox on a modern computer, so I don't know how to do this, but the idea of a cooperative game with another player against a hard-level AI sounds way more engaging than the core game itself.

So, all in all, although it's very well thought and quite engaging for a game that came out in 1993, I don't think I'll find myself playing it again (unless I find a way to give the multiplayer a try). I'll check the next games in this series; hopefully they are able to give a fuller experience of the same ideas.