#The settlers game free full
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#The settlers game free free

Settlements in S4 have a fixed boundary, and to expand you'll need to either create pioneers who will slowly push the borders back, or build towers and castles.

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Plus soldiers to recruit - swordsmen, archers and medics as well as unique units for each race. You also control five specialists -geologists to look for mineral resources, pioneers to expand your boundaries, priests to cast spells and ask the gods for help, gardeners to counter the Dark Tribe's doings and thieves to pinch other players' resources and to scout around.

And they won't get bread until you farm the grain - with that bloody scythe that you haven't got. To get a metal ingot with which to create the tool, you need to get your miners to work, but they won't if they don't get some bread. It can be frustrating in the extreme to watch six bags of coal sit on the ground right next to the building that you desperately need to turn out a scythe for example. In fact, it's perfectly possible to stall a settlement completely simply for the lack of one tool or a bag of ore - at least it is if you've set the priorities badly. In contrast to Civilization clones there's no such thing as automatic production in this game and it does make you think.

#The settlers game free free

Knocking down your own buildings to free up resources is also more tactically important than in other games of its type. When materials are scarce, you can alter the relative importance and priority of individual goods and even prioritise production. Carriers take animals to the slaughterhouse and the butcher stacks the meat outside for more carriers to pick up and take them to wherever they're needed most.

Build a slaughterhouse, for example, and a spare settler who's not a builder, carrier or digger will pick up an axe (if you've got one, of course) and get to work. There are 28 other occupations in the game, most of which are automatically created when the relevant building is put up. More builders and diggers makes construction faster, while the efficient flow of raw materials and goods around the settlement depends on carriers. You specify the exact number of the three basic occupations: builder, digger and carrier. With 36 different occupations for each settler, it's up to you to ensure the right balance.

#The settlers game free full

Only miners actually consume food but you need the right foodstuffs to get them working at full tilt. You can also build grain farms, waterworkers' huts and mills to create bread, manage pigs or sheep from the farm to the slaughterhouse to feed your miners, and grow vines to create alcohol to curry favour with your gods.Įventually you'll have to build storage sites because production stops quickly if the goods aren't carried away from the place of production. 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.

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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.