Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1156 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: UBI Soft
• Released on: 2007-09-28
• Platform: Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description
In The Settlers - Rise Of An Empire, players build lively, bustling towns in a medieval world. Everything is visible, lovingly animated and realistic. Each settler has his or her own daily routine, with a range of different actions and behaviours that can be observed by the player at all times. This enables him to get the best out of his Settlers, build up a flourishing economy, tend to his settlers' needs, and protect his empire against danger from the outside. By expanding his empire, the player can aspire to becoming a legendary king or queen.

The most popular features of the predecessors in the series have been retained, and many of the fans’ desires and wishes were incorporated into the new game to create a very special Settlers atmosphere. The result is a realistic medieval world, captured in intricate detail. The game features an immersive, yet transparent, economic system based on the resources, wares and goods produced by the settlers in their various trades and occupations.

Customer Reviews

Looks great and strangely compelling to play, but...
Plus points:

1. one of the best Intro's to a game I've seen - the detail and rendering are amazing. Also several cut scenes through-out the game are very well done.
2. Extremely detailed world. Developers have obviously taken a lot of care to produce a stunning and detailed world - fish in the lakes, crabs walking about, etc. Really makes it fun to play.
3. Something very satisfying about building up your settlement and watch your settlers go about their business. I guess like building a train set or flying a flight simulator - just building a nice settlement with content settlers is strangely addictive.
4. User Interface well laid out and very intuitive. Most people should be able to get going with the tutorial intro mission and common sense.

Minus points:

1. Way too easy. No difficulty adjustment that I can find. Simply build up your settlement and you have content citizens and loads of cash. Even maps with less resources (e.g. desert maps) just means that it takes longer to build up your settlement. There's no awkwards decisions here with limited cash and not enough food to go around. I never had a problem feeding or providing everything the settlers need on any map. Apparently they go on strike if they're not happy, but I never saw this once. Sim City this ain't.
2. Combat is a bit of an afterthought. Attacks from enemies are few and far between and really means there's little point in building walls around your city. With a decent number of soldiers you'll have no problem with fending off any enemy attack. Also, taking over a territory is simply a case of attacking the outpost there. This is a tiny building with enough space for 6 soldiers and the outpost seems to offer the soldiers inside no protection. Hence they're easily overwhelmed by a small force. If you could upgrade the outpost up to a castle (just like Settlers I) and populate with a decent defence then things would be interesting. But as it is, there's no reason to bother defending your land - just take it back from the enemy should they (on the very rare occasion) attack you.
Overall - combat needs a serious look for the next game - I appreciate that they're never going to compete with Age of Empires and those type of strategy franchises, but they need something more advanced and more difficult to master than this offering. Just way too easy for even mild fans of strategy games.
3. Some technical problems - needs a serious graphics card to play. My 512MB nVidia 7950GT was struggling in bits. Sreen scrolling is jerky, but that may have been also due to my 1GB RAM limitation (one of my memory sticks failed just as I was installing it). Also suffers from serious memory leakage. For the non-techno geeks out there, this means the game just continually grabs more and more of your computer memory the longer it plays. Eventually the game will crash, but you can predict the impending doom by the fact the your hard disk will start going mad about 5 mins before crash due to all memory swapping going on. I needed to restart the game about once every hour to avoid problems. The game actually says that it will run on 512MB of RAM but I seriously doubt that.

Overall - I like it just for the satisfaction of building a settlement and watching everyone going about their business. Beautiful to watch and a very detailed world that the developers have taken a lot of time to create. With more difficult and finely balanced resource maps that made you seriously consider every move you make and *much* more attention to combat, this could have been a real classic. Nearly...

Ok
This is a basic resource management game with a bit of exploration thrown in. combat is very limited and building walls to protect your city is awkward to get right and also pretty pointless.

It looks good and is strangely compelling to play, but it takes a long time to finish each map while at the same time being very easy (I am on about mission 12 of the single player campaign and have not had the slightest difficulty so far).

The only difficulty in this game comes from some maps having very limited resources /fertile ground available the odd mission with a (very generous) time limit and you having to get your hero to run round all the time to buy things from allied villages.

The vast majority of time spent on each game is slowly building up your settlement from nothing, promoting your knight and releasing the next set of new buildings. After about the 10th time it gets dull. A deep irritation is no matter how well you do in the preceding mission it has absolutly no effect on the next one, with you having to start from scratch each time.

Combat it simply a matter of building as many swordsmen and archers as you can (not many it turns out - I have always been limited to less than 10 units so far) and then overwhelming any opposition. There does not appear much point in defending anything as it will cause your already tiny army to be split up. There is siege equipment but it's equally limited.

The Much heralded Female settlers is simply the ability to call a fair at your town centre watch the couples dance about and then your buildings become slightly more efficient. Nothing to it really!

It may be better as a multiplayer game but I've yet to try it.

Personally I wish they would just bring out a version of the original settlers with better graphics

Update: I reached mission 13 and suddenly things got very tough! Suddenly there is a point in building walls! Its just a shame it took this long to give any kind of challenge and then a very hard one.

Fun, Simple and Addictive
A lot of people have said that this game is too easy, which at times it can be. It isn't a game for your hard core military strategists, but it is easy to pick up and fun to play.

Settlers Rise of an Empire requires you to build a thriving settlement, with everything your settlers could possibly need. These things range from butchers to sheep farms. You have to find resources to convert into goods that can be used by your citizens to enable your town to grow further and open up more opportunities to build new buildings. The campaign is based around you building an empire and completing quests in different settings. These different settings cover four different climates such as the snowy north or hot south. These different climates offer different challenges and actually affect the way you have to manage your settlement.

The thing that I really enjoy about this game is watching your town grow and watching the settlers go about their everyday lives. The military side is limited, with only two soldier units and three siege units available. But this isn't the point of the game, founding a busy, bustling town is.

The graphics are very good indeed and building your perfect town will keep you occupied for hours. Be warned however, this game is highly addictive and will stop you having a life for quite a while!