The Settlers II: Veni, Vidi, Vici

The Good
There's certainly no lack of resource-constrained real-time strategy (RTS) games out there, but I think Settlers managed to take a really unique path and come up with a game that sits on the brink of being truly excellent.

All RTS games have to decide where they are going to focus. Some, like the classic Command & Conquer, focus on the production of fighting units, reducing all other aspects of the game to a bare minimum. For instance, there's only one type of resource, and collection time is limited primarily by the expense of the collectors. There's no real "economy" to speak of.

Settlers, on the other hand, focuses on the economics more than anything else. The game has a reasonable system for not only defining and collecting resources, but also moving them around the settlement, which I think is interesting. As the user adds new buildings to their settlement, the supplies needed to build it have to first be transported to the building site, and when its finished, the goods it produces have to be returned over the same route. Contention for the routes can lead to real delays in moving supplies around the colony.

Settlers has no user-controlled combat. This is both the most unique and oddest aspect of the game. Instead, Settlers uses a sort of "area of influence" or "projection of power" concept, where your buildings, notably military, project your power in an area around them. If you build a barracks, for instance, you will "capture" a certain amount of area around it. The net result is "your territory", the borders of which are displayed on the map as a series of flags.

Combat is abstracted away almost completely. All the player has control over is sending troops from one of their military buildings to attack troops in another. If they win, the opponent loses control of that area, and their settlement shrinks. There's no real concept of things like attacking their buildings to "hurt" their settlement, it's all about area.

The game progresses by building the economy, which makes newer types of buildings possible. These are then used to project power further afield, thereby capturing more territory and natural resources. So while Settlers has no direct combat, to speak of, the game nevertheless progresses in a fashion similar to most other RTS's.

The Bad
There are two problems with the game, which in my mind are serious enough to make it an overall failure.

The main problem is that you have no control over the people. Everything in the game is done through a simplified "planting of the flag" (of various sorts), at which point the settlers will start doing whatever you request. For instance, you can plant a literal flag and then ask you scout to go to that location. You can't, however, control your scout directly. I found the random movements that resulted to be extremely frustrating.

But its a side-effect of this system that is truly aggravating. Since territory is gained or lost via "projection of power", and that power is in turn defined by the presence of troops, its possible to loose swaths of land because your trooper arrives a second later than "his" (the computer). In this case the border moves, and all of your buildings in the area are destroyed!

Settlers REALLY needs some sort of direct manipulation system -- I should be able to tell my troops what to do directly. After all, its combat that attracts most people to the RTS genre in the first place. With the combat being so abstract, you also end up with things like catapults that don't actually fire at the enemy, per se. It's all just weird.

The other problem is a little more piquane: the designers simply didn't know where to stop when it comes to detailing the resource movement. To start with, every building must have a road to it. I found this to be somewhat unrealistic at a minimum.

But more annoying is the fact that the road to the building ALWAYS faces a single direction, the "southwest", which means you have to route the roads around the buildings in order to connect them up. And those roads take up room on the map, which means you end up with these spaghetti pathways that makes building annoyingly difficult some times. This is really poorly thought out.

As if that weren't enough, the actual terrain "under" the roads effects travel time over them. If the road goes uphill, goods will take longer to move. This is really nothing more that superfluous -- it adds nothing to the gameplay at all, and requires the user to micromanage ROAD BUILDING. Borrring!

The Bottom Line
A very interesting and unique RTS that I would recommend to anyone. I found it frustrating to play, personally, but many others praise even the parts I don't like.

I really think that a few basic changes would dramatically improve the gameplay. For one, it needs a real combat model, even a simplified one from something like C&C. For another, there should be more ways to damage the enemy than simply chipping away at their border. Attacking their buildings directly would greatly add to the game, IMHO.