Retro-spective! Settlers 2
So after getting annoyed with my production que in Towns I decided to kick up Dos box and play one of my favorite classics Settlers 2. Now I'll admit I haven't played the origernel settlers, but I have tried to play some of the latter settlers games. And let me say they were awful. Should a settlers developer ever find this tumbler post may I say dear sirs your consumers wanted something like Anno, not something that was unplayable. And probably shouldn't have a 'classic game' box.
I do have this fondness for build a city type game. I love Age of Empires (2), I love Empire earth (1), I love stronghold (1). I have a fondness for the old school ones, where it's pixels instead of proper graphics. Though I am growing to love anno as well. Settlers 2 was a little more unique, you weren't utterly in control. In AoE or EE you knew how much resources you had, you had a timer on having buildings built, and having troops trained. In settlers 2 it came down to priority, and how good your paths were built. Though I've found similar retro games since like Stronghold and Knights and Merchants which do a similar thing to settlers 2 in their use of resources, but with a much better emphasis on combat and strategy which makes them both better games.
But unlike Knights and Merchants or Stronghold, Settlers 2 is a lot less stressful. You set your folks to do buildings, they build it and you can mess around with something else in the background. Sure there is some stress when you can't produce enough food to feed your miners, but really it's a very basic game you could leave running in the background, and really it's a very boring game. It's interesting when you start a new map because you have to build your city and build up your resorses to fuel every new thing. And it's interesting when you reach the end game of that map because you're directing troops and struggling to maintain enough resorces because you're running out of ore by this point. but there is just this point in the middle where you are just maintaining status quo. Your not building anything, you're just building the occasional mine and that's it. And keep in mind a single level on settlers 2 can take somewhat 10 hours to complete. that's a lot of hours of doing nothing.
Settlers 2 is fun, and it's a great game to have running in the background if you're browsing around. because most the time you are required to do nothing. But really it gets pretty boring for too long. But the real tragic thing about settlers 2 is because it takes so long to complete a level and the game is so very slow with getting things done, that if you make a mistake say... two hours ago, in like not making sure to build a second quarry, and then that action bites you in the butt two hours later when you run out of stone, it's a bit hard to go back and undo your mistake. (not that it takes two hours to build a quarry, but if you have a giant sprawling map and over ten buildings scheduled to be built you really can end up shits creek without a paddel.) for a better example I've been playing the level 'the wasteland' on settlers 2. you have very minimum gold resources and coal and iron resources. It might seem enough but trust me it's not. In retrospective of the level I probably should have hoarded all my gold, and make sure none of my guards were upgraded to Sargent, so I could then use the gold in the final battle to keep my troops at a high level. But this insight is no good to me after six hours of playing, and having zero gold left and zero coal and iron left and a bunch of ticked off enemies on all side. It's pretty much game over for me, just have to wait until they kill off all my generals and take my land bit by bit.
And I don't know about you but that's frustrating, I suppose I should have had better strategy in the first place, but settlers 2 isn't really a good strategy game. All you do is say "five of you go here and kill stuff" and watch two soldiers whap each other on the head until one dies. if you're lucky you win. and that's really it. You can only count on winning via swarming the enemy with numbers, because you can guarantee that they found more gold than you did.
but yeah... if you have fond memories of Settlers 2, then good for you, because it is a good game. It just hasn't really aged that well. There's probably a few mechanics that could have made it better. But if you like having a game you can play in the background, that doesn't require your full attention 100% of the time, and is pretty fun to achieve a good balance, as well of hours of playtime. Then you really can't do that much worse. Plus the people animations in the game are awesome. It still boggles my mind why they would have included a camera follow feature. xD probably so you could catch the settlers picking their noses.
