Wood and stone are the primary building materials, although you'll quickly need to mine coal, iron, gold and sulphur to build the best stuff. There's an incredible amount to do in S4, with a total of 32 raw materials, goods, tools and weapons to micro-manage, some 48 buildings types to think about, 36 settler types, eight warrior types, nine ships and vehicles and 11 different tools and weapons. Unlike in Age Of Empires and its clones, you don't give your individual settlers instructions to 'chop wood' or 'mine stone' -you simply put up the relevant building and watch them do whatever is necessary to get them producing. To do this, you have to gather raw materials from the surrounding area, occupy land to provide space for your buildings and organise a complicated series of production chains to turn things like wood, stone and iron ore into tools, weapons and eventually war machines and ships. In fact, it's perfectly possible to play without lifting a sword in anger, even against other humans, thanks to the free-settling mode in which the winner is the one with the biggest and best settlement at the end of the game.
But as always there's only one thing that really counts and that's gameplay.Īs you'd expect, S4 is an empire-building game with its accent being on creating a sound economy from which to wage war on your opponents. The cute cartoon-style Settlers series might not be everyone's cuppa, particularly when you go up against epiclooking titles like Cossack. Let's face it, if a game gets as far as a fourth incarnation, it must have something going for it.
0 kommentar(er)
