The Settlers is an RTS game trying to find its place in a new world
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It’s not an understatement to say that Ubisoft’s The Settlers reboot takes some of the blame on its shoulders. The 30-year-old RTS game series hasn’t had a new entry in more than a decade, and this latest entry was supposed to be released before 2019.
It was delayed until 2020, and then only until “further notice,” but now it’s back in the public eye with a release in just a few months. So, is the extra time enough? But perhaps more importantly, does Settler still have a place in the current pantheon of strategy gaming superstars?
The series has always navigated between the scale of a Warcraft RTS and Anno’s meticulous economic management. The main challenge it faces is that both subtypes have grown over the past decade. Anno 1800 elevates the traditional strategy series into a powerful economic simulator, offering rich settings, depth, a diverse feature set and multiple successful expansions. It’s about to kick off the fourth season of the DLC, even though the developer originally had only two plans. Likewise, indie RTS games like Northgard are skipping more laborious components like the production chain and focusing on their setup and instant decisions.
Ubisoft Dusseldorf cited the third and fourth settler games as specific inspiration for the reboot, but the studio has once again opted for the fantasy faction that has been a MO in the series since the fifth settler game, Legacy of the King .
Settlers continue the tradition of limiting your indirect control over civilian units, in addition to new engineer units specializing in construction, allowing you to expand the boundaries of your settlements and seek out rich ore veins that are vital to kickstarting an advanced economy in the mid-game.
Ubisoft’s The Settlers reboot comes with some baggage
Other than that, the only units you can directly control are military units, which are divided into ranged, melee, support, and siege categories. There are two types of melee units (one offensive, one defensive), a single option in the ranged and support categories, and then two different types of siege units. These basic units all have distinct advantages and disadvantages, so combat is all about deploying the right unit in the right situation.
Factions get unique variants of existing units, such as the Elari Rangers who wield deadly crossbows and Maru Guardians who carry spears instead of swords for increased range. Each unit requires its own specific resources to build, which brings us to the economic side of settlers.
Compared to Anno, it’s very simple, and it’s fine in principle; there’s no need to replicate the complexity of a full-fledged economic sim.but what Yes Not giving way to any meaningful interaction.
Settler has yet to prove it’s capable of reinventing itself for the modern strategy gamer
For example, there are several different types of food resources, but food only seems to be useful as a trade good, or to power a special buff that doubles a building’s production rate. It doesn’t seem to have any other use: it’s not used as a civic skincare product, and it doesn’t seem to be a significant cost to anything else.
The Settlers actually have only three phases: get building materials, build things, and then collect rare resources to build a good army. In theory, there are a few different ways to get to the final stage. You can throw your starting materials into building a strong early game army, but before long your military progress stops and you have to start expanding like everyone else. Alternatively, you could build a port and hope to trade early game resources like wood and stone to fund your early game belligerence. However, these measures always feel more like stopgap measures than effective strategies.
It’s a pretty boring economic system, although logistics is touted as one of the shiny new features. You can speed up the flow of goods around your settlement by building slightly better roads and donkey transport, but in our testing so far this doesn’t seem to have a noticeable impact. Often, the number of citizens you have seems to be the main cause of the bottleneck.
You can get more citizens by building residential buildings and waiting for them to be mass-produced, but since citizens don’t seem to need food as a resource, there are no safeguards in place to prevent just spamming more buildings and spawning exhaust from there Possibly as many citizens to start with. It’s not a difficult model to master, but it’s neither intuitive nor particularly robust.
All of this to say that our time with The Settlers wasn’t particularly satisfying. The preview is limited to the tutorial section and some skirmish modes; I’ve only played 1v1 skirmish games with the AI. To be fair, 1v1 is only really of interest to competitive players: the final build will have 2v2 and 4v4 modes against AI and other players, which should be more fun. There’s also a special Onslaught mode and single-player campaigns — campaigns in strategy games often include custom rulesets and scenarios, which may prove to be a saving grace.
But there is also a real danger here that the settlers arrive too late. There are plenty of great games out there that offer a more focused single-element experience, whether it’s other civilization-building RTS games like Northgard or Age of Empires, or economic sims like Offworld Trading Company and Industries of Titan. Some classics aim to stay in the nostalgic territory of Back to the Past, and Settlers have yet to prove if it can reinvent itself for the modern strategy gamer.
Settlers will release on PC on March 17, 2022, though if you want to try it out for yourself, it will be in closed beta starting January 20 and sign up on the official website.
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