The last time I ran an economic strategy game was about 15 years ago, it was Anno 1701, another urban strategy game from Ubisoft. I spent a lot of hours in the game, but after it I didn’t return to this genre anymore, somehow action games and RPGs drew attention to themselves. But here Ubisoft announced that from January 20 to January 24 they will conduct a closed beta testing of The Settlers and gave the opportunity to sign up for this test. I’ve been lucky enough to test other games from the publisher, and I’ve been lucky this time too.

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Note for those who are too lazy to read the whole text: The Settlers is an economic strategy in which we extract resources, build buildings, train warriors and do it all in order to defeat the enemy.

Education

Before annihilating opponents, I would recommend first breaking into the Tutorial. In games of these genres, you should not neglect the Training mode, it can greatly simplify life and speed up the enjoyment of the gameplay. That’s what we came here for, right?

Unfortunately, the tutorial in The Settlers is extremely basic. You will be taught the basics of management, how to fight (to win – beat your opponents), and how to build a building to extract resources. All this is divided into separate training blocks and takes about 15 minutes of time, most of which you will just wait while the building is being built. I’m not joking, in one of the training modes, you just need to build a building and … that’s it, the training is over.

There are two more training blocks in the game, “Research” and “Advanced”, but they are not available in the beta. Also, the tooltips use the same visual stubs, which do not make your life easier, although in theory they should. Most likely these are flaws in the beta version, but I had to say about it.

Quick game

I will say right away that you cannot save in a quick game against AI. Even if you have every chance of winning, you will have to leave the game on pause or just turn it off, sacrificing all progress. I hope that in the full version of the game, the save button will be added to the quick game.

In the beta, “Quick Play” is available in PvE modes on “normal” difficulty and PvP mode. You can break into battle on the maps “1v1”, “2v2” and “4v4”; the latter is not available in beta. In Duos vs. AI, it was not possible to choose a partner between a live person and an AI, although the description says that such an opportunity should be.

At the beginning, you are given a choice among several unique managers, they are also factions. Only two are available in beta. In addition to visual differences, each faction has its own bonuses in the resource, military and research segments. We choose the one that best suits our style of play and into battle.

I already talked about the sparse learning mode, but the most important thing you need to remember is that the game does not explain how to play it. And in fact, I even liked it. Each defeat and launch first opened up new mechanics and possibilities for the game for me. Which ones, I won’t spoil, such moments are an integral part of the gaming experience. Here you can write “it’s like Dark Souls, only an economic strategy”, but that would be too much ?.

How it’s played

At the beginning of the game, we have enough resources to build essential buildings: for the extraction and processing of wood, stone, and a chain of buildings for the townspeople to eat. The latter is not very large, for example, for the production of bread, it is enough to build a “field” for growing cereals and a mill to grind flour and a bakery. To catch fish, it is enough to find a fishing spot and build a fishing station.

Importantly, the townspeople themselves do not require food, it is used to increase the production rate of other resources, wood or stone. For comparison, in the same Anno, you need to monitor the level of well-being of the townspeople and please them not only with essential goods, but also with entertainment and luxury goods.

To hire warriors, we build training buildings. For ordinary soldiers – one type, for healers – another, there is also a tavern in which, according to a long tradition, mercenaries are waiting for you.

To start training, you need to make a weapon and the type of soldier that you will have depends on this: a sword for a warrior, a bow for an archer, a club for a conditional tank. Weapons are made according to the same chain as food for the townspeople: raw materials – metal ingots – weapons.

But the main task of the game is still to learn how to properly manage resources. Fossils in the game are an exhaustive resource, just like in the real world. But there are certain places on the map where you can find a stone or gold vein with an unlimited supply.

With trees, the situation is the same, only those that grew near your base end, but in remote places of the map there are edges with renewable conifers. But here the rule “whoever took the first, that and resources” already comes into force. Yes, those arrays of resources that are closer to your base will be safe for some time, but sooner or later the enemy will come for them, so you will have to defend yourself.

Residents are another valuable resource. They drag your resources from the place of extraction to the Storage, and then to the construction site. Also, it is from among the inhabitants that future soldiers are trained. The population of your settlement increases in the standard way for strategies – the construction of new dwellings.

By the way, the fact that the resources are worn by the citizens of your settlement is also a gameplay feature of the game. Engineers begin to build a building after the inhabitants have brought all the necessary resources to the site of the new building. It happens that they even bring too much, it’s hilarious to watch.

At the beginning of the game, when construction is taking place near the base, this is not a problem, you may not even notice that the inhabitants are wearing materials. But in the later stages of the game, when you expand your holdings, transporting materials can take up to several tens of seconds. In the context of the game, this is noticeably long.

Apart from the initial resource capital, the game starts with a small army of melee warriors and archers. Enemies behave unexpectedly. In the first game, they did not attack for a very long time, on the second run, I decided to build defensive towers not immediately, but to spend resources on more useful things. And yes, you guessed it, this time the enemy did not wait long and carried out the first attack within a few minutes after the start of the game. Now I make the protection first.

I really hope that in the final version of the game they will add a game mode without opponents at all, so that it would be a pleasure to simply develop the settlement and not be distracted by military affairs. As a result of the match, experience is counted, but what rewards for leveling up will be, it is not yet clear.

An example of a sawmill of different factions

Technical part

The game is being made on the Snowdrop engine, which is also used to create The Division series and the future game in the Avatar universe of James Cameron. Graphics settings were not available in the beta, but even on fixed medium-high settings, the game looks amazing and runs flawlessly.

All buildings are very detailed, you can watch for several minutes how wood is processed at the sawmill, how workers bring in raw materials, and take out ready-made boards. Like fishermen butchering fish, or like happy residents resting in the fields, picking flowers and dancing in clover. I would only like to increase the maximum zoom of the camera in order to better see the life of your village.

The Settlers is already the eighth numbered installment in the series and, in fact, a reboot of the franchise. The game can be a great entry point into the genre for beginners. It is easy to manage, micromanagement is done without fanaticism, so everyone will master it in a few hours. I only hope that in the release version the training will be more detailed with an explanation of all the mechanics, otherwise many players will simply drop out of misunderstanding what to do next and unwillingness to learn the game on their own.

By the way, the first time I ran the beta for an hour before bed, just to see what it was like, and woke up at four in the morning with red eyes and swollen legs. At that moment, I understood why I had not played economic strategies for the last 15 years.

The Settlers is set to release on March 17, 2022 exclusively for PC.