Cross-posted from my other blog.:)
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It’s always a pleasure to return to city-building type of real-time strategy games. These games aren’t quite as prolific as the Command and Conquer/Warcraft clones, but over the last decade we’ve seen impressive titles coming out from Impressions Games – which produced several titles in the Caesar and other ancient city simulation series – and Germany-based Blue Byte, developers of the Settlers series.
Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom is the most recent iteration of a long-running series whose first title rolled out in 1993. And over the years the core game-play hasn’t changed much. You start off with a smattering of resources, a small settlement, and you build your kingdom up. I was a late-comer to the series, with my introduction to Settlers occurring in the fifth title in 2005.
I hesitated picking up Settlers 7 though, on account that it was making use of Ubisoft’s controversial new DRM system. The game title now requires you to have and maintain a permanent Internet connection. While the new DRM allows you to install the game on as many computers as you wish and lets you play without requiring the physical media after installation, it also enforces synchronization of your local save games to Ubisoft’s servers and a persistent network connection to it. If your Internet connection drops for any reason or Ubisoft’s servers are unreachable, you can’t play… not even the Single-player campaign – simple as that.
Before one thinks that server instability won’t occur, there are horror stories abound now of an entire country market seeing a lot of players who can’t access their shiny new purchase: Australia, specifically. Those of us in Singapore are a little luckier. Upon installation and creation of an Ubisoft play account, I couldn’t access the Ubisoft server myself (no kidding) for about 10 minutes – after which the problem solved itself alongside the download of a compulsory 440MB-massive patch. You read that right: right after installation, you still can’t play until you install that monster patch.:)
And even after the game can reasonably start up reliably for me now, I’m still experiencing the occasional boots to desktop that’s come by way of the game crashing suddenly, or server connection disruptions that will do the same.
Before you conclude this post is all complaining about Ubisoft, there is a solid game behind that temperamental DRM system. You just need to be prepared for some degree of frustration alongside sudden Returns to Windows.
DRM aside, Settlers 7 the game has gone through several changes. Firstly, the visuals are bumped up with lots of tweaking options to suit the range of performance machines. It’s extremely colorful, terrain and elevation is used to eye-popping effect, and some of the maps can comprise a few dozen sectors – i.e. huge. Objects are rendered in full 3D, and camera control allows you to zoom out to a bird’s eye view of your city and the surrounding country, or right down to street level for you to do 360°C pans. The animations of your underlings and civilians remain a pleasure to watch as they go about their daily business.
Specific gameplay elements have also gone through several changes. Combat is simplified from previous titles: you no longer control your armies at a tactical level. Your involvement is largely limited to deciding on army composition – e.g. 6 units of Pikemen, 4 units of Musketeers, 4 units of mounted Cavaliers etc. – then sending them off to a sector you wish to overrun. Your opponent’s equivalent army will likewise sally forth to meet yours headlong. The game system takes over from there. Upon battle resolution, either your army will have won and automatically sequestered itself in the keep or tower of your newly conquered sector, or it’s been sent packing in retreat. There’s basically very little actual involvement beyond pointing where you want your armies to go.
Likewise, victory conditions have changed. Ther’ are now several ways to complete a mission, and these ways aren’t all mutually exclusive. The missions in the second part of the campaign require you to accrue sufficient “Victory Points”. The victory points can be obtained through a large number of ways: by building necessary structures (“Metropolis” point), by acquiring necessary technologies, military conquest, and solving quests and so on. What that basically means is that in order to win a mission, you no longer have to crush all your opponents on the map. You could win just by meeting a subset of all the possible victory conditions and chalking up enough points.
There’s also a good degree of longevity in the game. The single-play campaign comprises over a dozen missions stringed together loosely through a story: the first half are pretty structured through its use of intermediate goals and milestones, and you’re hand held in each by your adviser. These missions serve as a very nicely progressive tutorial that introduces new game play elements incrementally. The later missions are all sand box though where you’re expected to make use of all the mechanics you’ve been shown.
Once you’ve beaten the campaign – and that ought to take you about 25-30 hours – there’s online and scenario-based play. There are incentives to keep playing too: each mission rewards you with some coins, which you can in turn use to purchase additional in-game content. There is also Facebook profiling in a badge-sort of system where you can show to others your successes in Settlers 7.
Many of the changes while possibly initially startling to Settlers-veterans should prove welcome. The multiple-paths to victory work especially well, and I don’t mind the dumb down combat – it lets one focuses on city building and production management, and the daisy-chain production mechanisms have been refined over the several iterations that it works pretty well here.
In sum, having spent about 20 hours so far in the game, I think there’s a gem of a game in Settlers 7. One just needs to get over the DRM and that the game’s easily spooked by server disconnections. Just use the down time when the game restarts and your save games have to be resynced for the toilet breaks you’ll need for this “Just five more minutes” game.:)
(Pictures from Gamespot)
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