The Settlers® 2: Gold Edition

Settlers 2 is one of the games that I've been hoping was going to come to GOG.com since the site launched. I found the demo years back and played it a lot, but was never able to find the full game in stores. It is a real-time strategy game, only in the strictest sense of the words. Its focus is much different than most RTSes out there: you don't have any direct control over your units. You give build orders and create paths for the helpers to walk along. For the military units, your only command is a generic "attack enemy military structure" order---you can specify the strength of your attack, but the game resolves the combat with any nearby units. The true focus of the game is building your economy to create and sustain a large enough army to survive and attack your opposing players. There are dozens of different resources, some of which are used to build buildings, some used as food or in the process of making food to feed your miners, some used to make tools and weapons, etc.. Keeping your entire resource hierarchy producing efficiently can be difficult, especially when you don't have enough space for what you would like to build. The game is generally pretty slow-paced. The V key will double the speed, and I tend to use that for most of the game, except at the beginning and when attacking. Even so, the game can often feel slow to develop. The storyline isn't too well-developed, but that really isn't my first concern. The art looks nice, though the sprites are a bit small in modern-day comparison. It's overall a pretty cartoony feel. I can't really blame them for that with the game being this old. The main (Roman) campaign starts off pretty easy, but gets pretty hard after the first few missions. In general, the missions are pretty fun, though it is a challenging game. I haven't had the chance yet to try the world campaign. All-in-all, this is a pretty unique, yet very fun strategy game. I'm sure that it will waste plenty more of my time in the future.

The Settlers II is not a bad game. Hell, I've spent *many* a night playing the original DOS version and now on Windows via this DOSbox release. But it's deeply flawed in the sense that you have at times very little control over what goes on. You have some tools at your disposal to order which goods take priority over others, but they're ineffective and will just frustrate you. Control over the military is also thin, and overall the page is just so, so slow. On the Roman campaign, at around level IV, you reach a stalemate because all coal has been mined, there's no more stone to power your catapults, and the enemy isn't moving either because they're out of stone to rebuild the guardhouses your catapults just destroyed. Also, your catapults take over 5 hits to destroy a guardhouse, but the enemy destroys yours with one hit. Once this happens, you're a couple of hours in and you feel totally frustrated. I really WANT to love this game - the concept is good, and the pixel art is charming, but I've never figured out how to not make it a slog.

Good for peoples with depression, just create You own game and relax.

I rate the game 5 /5. I'm not going into details, about the game - this is a timeless classic that I am going to return to in 2025 and beyond. I rate the GOG implementation 4/5, as I had to upgrade the DosBox app manually. I had to download the latest dosbox installer, extract the gog version and run it manually, but everytghing works flawlessly. BTW I play the game on macOS, using the official DosBox for intel mac : )

As others said, this game is a solid 5/5 the first few levels, and has aged really well in that way. The graphics and animations are simply the best! I love watching the wheat grow, feeding the pigs, and when I need to, butcher them and slay my enemies. With the soothing background music and a nice learning curve of challenges, It's a pleasure for every part of my mind. However. The late stages of the campaign, and "advanced" tactics simply isn't up to scratch. You will soon be deadlocked, where you almost can't reach your opponents (it's worse then you would expect), or the AI can't reach you, and you resort to building catapults (again: it's fun the first times, but a mind-numbingly boring strategy to win challenges that are otherwise impossible). So. that's 5/5 for the first 7 or so levels., 3/5 for the rest. Is 4/5 fair? Idk. I grew up with this game, and want to rate it 5/5, but I think that wouldn't actually be fair to real 5/5 games.