Preview by: Troy Goodfellow

The Settlers franchise used to be big in America, if not quite the hit it has always been in Germany. The first few Settlers games were modest hits that were quite different from the usual city building/RTS fare. The game was more about efficient resource collection than collection alone. You gathered basic goods which are then processed into more advanced goods which unlock other things, etc. with the key consideration being that you don’t want goods sitting around not being used but you also don’t want to have to wait for them to be made. Wasteful overproduction is to be avoided. Oh, and then you build an army and kill some guys.

Somewhere along the line the franchise lost its way. As other faster games made inroads into the RTS market, the leisurely pace of Settlers seemed downright antiquated. The series bounced from developer to developer and has recently landed on the desk of Blue Byte, the house behind last year’s very good Dawn of Discovery. That game took the German Efficiency Game design in a new, friendlier direction and was a huge success. Now they are trying the same thing with Settlers 7.

“This is a game that lingers in the economic phase,” says veteran game designer Bruce Shelley, now a gaming consultant working with Blue Byte. In his opinion, the Settlers series is tailor made for those people that prefer to build stuff in their RTS games instead of rushing to combat. As he directed me to keep building a chain of storehouses throughout my kingdom, he emphasized how important it was to keep the Settlers franchise on the old track.

“There has to be room for different kinds of games out there,” he says. “We aren’t competing for the Dawn of War audience.” With an average multiplayer skirmish time of around forty minutes, this is not the rapid rinse and repeat experience of the modern RTS. Part of that is the allegiance to its pseudo-city-building roots. But Blue Byte is clearly designing this as more of an RTS than the classic Settlers model. Though the series has always included combat, the general skirmish game now gets you competing for victory from the very beginning.