The Settlers Amiga 1993 Blue Byte

cf.: History of 1990s Computer Games.

The Settlers Original Version

Developed by Blue Byte in 1993, The Settlers is a real-time strategy game and city-builder coded for the Amiga microcomputer and MS-DOS.

The Settlers was influenced by SimCity of 1989 and Populous of 1989.

While impressive from both a technical and graphical standpoint [1], the main problems with The Settlers are as follows:

• It came too late in the Amiga's lifespan (1993 was too late)
• It doesn't feature direct unit control (similar to god games)
• It is utterly destroyed by Dune 2 Westwood (1992)

The Settlers is most fun to play when going up against a friend in two-player split-screen mode on the Amiga (with 2x mouse plugged in). That is how I played it back in the day, I never played against the computer. There is also a 2-player coop mode.

30 years later, versus the AI, I went up against Lady Amalie's Kingdom in the first mission. Since she started off better positioned to exploit the gold reserves located in the mountains between her kingdom and mine, I had to expand east and take that territory first.

I did this by building "Knight Huts" on my eastern border that incrementally expanded my territory eastward into hers. I built several Knight Huts but then also had to pay the Knights to lift their morale. So I built Gold mines for ore and then a Goldsmith to convert the ore into goldbars, which were delivered to the Knights.

Then my Knights started attacking Lady Amalie's Knight Huts, taking more and more of her territory until her castle was in-reach. When I felt like I had enough Knights ready for war, I sent them to besiege and burn down her castle. Then I mopped up the remaining Knight Huts to win the scenario. 

And that is pretty much how every level goes, except that in later levels you will be up against more opponents (each of which has certain behaviors) and varying terrains, castle resources and exploitable resources.

Here is a Garrison packed with Captains and gold bars:

Criticism of The Settlers

• Click-drag avatar-anchorless screen-scrolling instead of smooth hardware-accelerated avatar-anchorless edgescreen autoscrolling (per pixel at 50 FPS)
• Cumbersome two-mouse button selections ("Special Click"). I hate two-button clicking
• Road-building is a bore
• No direct unit control results in unengaging battles; even PowerMonger's bloc control is more engaging
• Unskippable intro
• Too many jobs, buildings and tools: A mine is a mine. There is no need for gold, coal, stone and iron ore mines. It is enough that you find a mineral deposit and build a mine there
• Five different "Knights" that all act exactly the same but just have different stats (which are not player-interpretable). No Knights on horseback, no siege weapons, no bowmen, just five different Knights that line up outside enemy fortifications to fight the defenders, one by one
• Not enough on-screen info (need to refer to the game manual for things that should not require external-to-game referencing)
• Game mechanics and game concept were outdated at least one year before The Settlers came out

"After playing for a few hours, you will agree with us when we say that this game has no equal in terms of style or graphics." - The Settlers manual, Blue Byte, 1993.

I saw better on the Amiga in 1989. And how about Falcon 3.0 on MS-DOS in 1991?

"The Settlers is an 'intelligent' program that thinks for you and a game where you are not required to take care of everything yourself." - The Settlers manual, Blue Byte, 1993.

Not sure what that means. It could be a justification for the lack of control given to the player as well as the lack of player-interpretable stats. And if so I suppose it could be a Bullfrog-like game design philosophy that foreshadows casual gaming, which has since culminated in "games" that all but play themselves.

What The Settlers was going for:

The player lays down building foundations and links the buildings by roads, creating a resource network or chain of interdependent resources. But the actual building, the manning of buildings and the production of and bringing in of goods is automated by settlers based on available resources (the engine does the heavy lifting). The player does not have direct control of any settlers or combatants; control is abstracted and indirect -- based on vague priorities and proximities -- yet everything is unceasingly real-time and played out before the eyes in every detail.

It comes down to preference: I prefer direct over indirect gameplay engagement. For me, moving units to precise positions and having them carry out specific tasks or attack or defend specific units and buildings results in more fun and engaging gameplay (Dune 2 and WarCraft 1) than RTSes that employ (what I consider to be) outmoded god-game mechanics (The Settlers).

Note also that the best turn-based strategy games feature direct gameplay engagement and player-interpretable stats.

The Settlers was distributed on 3x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via Blue Byte Install. The install size is 2 megs and consists of 58 files.

[1]

The Settlers Graphics

The graphics in The Settlers are beautifully-drawn (no exceptions), the on-screen sprite count is insane, the sprite anims are detailed and the music and sound effects are memorable, unforgettable -- it's an Amiga game that came out towards the end of the Amiga's life-cycle (1993), back when coders had become grandmasters at tapping into the original Alienware -- would one expect anything less?

And as it pertains to the technical side, the game's code handles big numbers (you'll read about 250 billion this and 64,000 that in the game manual), but that didn't translate into particularly nuanced strategies or deep gameplay in general.

No one says The Settlers isn't a sophisticated example of software engineering whose internal logic is beyond mere mortals --- but is it a great game?

I'll leave that question open.

The Settlers IBM PC MS-DOS 1994

Blue Byte released The Settlers for IBM PC MS-DOS in 1994. The Settlers is a Rational Systems' DOS/4GW Protected Mode run-time.

The IBM PC MS-DOS version of The Settlers displays in 256-color VGA 400x300 (352x240 viewport and 320x192 drawspace) or 256-color SVGA 640x480 via VESA Local Bus or PCI Local Bus (640x480 viewport and 608x432 drawspace).

In SVGA display mode The Settlers requires an i80486-50 MHz CPU, 8 megs of RAM and 512K of vRAM. 4 megs of RAM "only" allows for size 5 worlds of 60,000 settlers.

IBM PC MS-DOS version of The Settlers was distributed on 2x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskettes and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via BlueByte Installer. The install size is 5 megs and consists of 66 files.

The Settlers sound effects support Forte UltraSound, Sound Blaster/Pro, Pro Audio Spectrum/Plus/16 and AdLib Gold.

The Settlers music supports PC Speaker, Tandy 3-voice Internal Sound, Pro Audio Spectrum/Plus/16, Roland MT-32, AdLib/Gold Music Synthesizer Card, Advanced Gravis UltraSound Card and Sound Blaster/Pro.

The Settlers 2 IBM PC MS-DOS 1996

The Settlers 2 was released in 1996 for IBM PC MS-DOS only, not the Amiga. The Settlers 2 displays in square-pixel SVGA 640x480. Unlike the original version of The Settlers the user interface in The Settlers 2 was designed specifically for 640x480 and was dramatically improved. In addition, click-drag scrolling is smoother even though the pixel count is almost five times greater.

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