The Settlers® 2: Gold Edition

As a long time fan and owner of all settlers games (except the newest one) I have to suggest mod Return to the roots. It adds tons of features like: - new civilization Babylonians ! - support for modern resolutions - built in server for multiplayer - mouse wheel zoom in/out - smoother animations - speed adjustment of game from -2 to +4 with +/- keys - optional new textures. - quality of life features All that while respecting original game. I only discovered it this week and I am very happy with it.

If you have the original Game Files (the ones from GOG must do it) there is on www.siedler25.de (don't worry the important things on that site are in english too) a very good remake. You can play it with higher resolution , with only Lobby , with more Options ... and it is still the same game!

It's a very good game. I've spent many-many hours to find the gateways and dominate the islands. It's really exiting when you discover the area, find new resources and expand your territory. But the game begins to fail when you have to build ships and harbors. Sometimes the ships stuck in the harbor because the program can't calculate their way properly. It seems that they want to start their way through the land instead of the sea. This becomes more annoying when you have many harbors and many ships. They want to carry the resources to the new harbors but eventually more and more ships become unavailable with useful resources in their cargo bay and the new harbor never gets these resources. On some maps it is so unplayable that I stopped playing with this game.

Guys. No tutorial? Maybe start the freaking campaign - and the first mission is an entire tutorial mission. TA-DAAA. Anyway, how difficult could it be figuring that trees need to be cut out, and replaced, wood need to be sawed, pigs need to be slaughtered, etc... I was like 12 years old, when i first played it, and strange, but it wasn't that hard for me. Too slow? Maybe try the F12 button! (Or F8, if not the F12, i don't remember it properly.) And a free tip to the end: P is for Pause. 3 stars from me is because tho it's very addictive, charming, and complex game, but it becoming very slow, when there is a halfcontinent size empire i rule, and the materials are transferred 1by1. Even if there are max number of material by the flags. And the whole empire just stands there, and doing nothing. Sometimes they just don't wanna bring things, because they wait for other things, etc.

Well, here's another example of game that sets standards and lays the foundation to a whole vein of gaming. Settlers 2 is probably the most famous in a family of six games. It drew much attention to the series, and for good reasons. It's pure fun, packed as a DOS game (or rather, Windows XP/Vista now). Building upon the mechanics of an already cunning Settlers 1, at first the game looks like a cute cartoonish city building game on a lush green field, but the amount of management necessary to beat any Settlers game is impressive. Starting off with the most basic materials, you build a woodcutter's hut and farm, then with that wood and food you can start mining precious metals and coal, with these you'll have access to better tools for more advanced resources and structures and so on until you can train a military force and conquer the enemy settlement the other side of the hill. Phew! And of course they're planning the same to you, so the game does get serious eventually. Among its many qualities, Settlers is one of those games with an overall very high fun factor, including addictive gameplay, nice graphics and sound effects and... something more. While in most games of yore you'd have your structures silently and invisibly do their jobs mathematically (even the mighty and 5-star-worthy Lords of the Realms 2 was like this), in Settlers you can actually SEE your people doing the job. You see the woodcutter going out, you hear him cutting a tree down, you see and hear the tree going down and gradually your town becoming less green because you put too many woodcutters too close, you then see your hungry woodcutter taking long and precious minutes to bring food home because you put him too far to the warehouse and so on. Settlers shines in that they took the time to make your town look like it's really alive. And that's beautiful. And now, call me nostalgic, but I've very recently beaten Settlers 6 for the first time, and seriously, while being a great game, Settlers 2 is just as good because it doesn't feel dated in comparison to many games of its time, it has the same mechanics, even some more complexity in some fields (more maps, more resources you can craft), it plays good and it just kept its appeal for me all this time. So it's a great buy.