Settlers is based on several aspects.
First is your Economy. This consists of your city, and the food production.
So you start off building some grain farmers, windmills and bakerys. That's bread income.
Then you can make fishing huts for more income. Bread and fish is Normal Food.
Second food chain is Fancy Food, these are Sausages. You can produce these in 2 ways.
A hunter, which catches deer, and a butcher, which produces Meat (Fancy Food). Second option is having a Pig Breeder. This guy provides pigs for the butcher.
Once you have that set up, and a solid income, you can move on. Don't know if you've played Settlers before, but Settlers 7 is completely different, see below.
There are 3 branches in the game : Trade, Militairy, and Technology.
Each branch offers many rewards and useful things, and all of these branches have so called Victory Points, which is the way to win any game in Settlers 7. This takes time, as they are deep in the Boards, read below.
Trade speaks for itself, you need to be able to reach a Trading Port, or a Marketplace to be able to Trade. You build an Export Office, and then you can start trading certain items, for other items. There is a HUGE variety available, and technically you could have ANYTHING traded for ANYTHING if you set up proper trade routes which takes time. You make Traders and these will not only Discover new trade routes on the Trading Board (see this is as a board game, you have to expand to get to the better ones), but they also make the trades you tell them to.
Technology consists of a Church, and the Technology board (again, like a board-game, the best ones are deep into it). You build your Church, and then you can make Novices (priests) that can discover Technologies, which again takes time. Just like the Export Office for traders, the Church can be upgraded to produce better traders/priests that will get better technologys etc.
The technologys are the most useful things in the game pretty much, as you can get perks like "+50% movement speed on all your Troops". Or, "+30% ranged damage on all troops". But also perks that are useful in your Economy, like for example "grain millers and grain farmers work twice as fast". There are roughly 20.
Militairy speaks for itself as well, you make a Stronghold in which you can train several types of soldiers. This can also be upgraded like the Export Office and the Church, to train better soliders. Again, the Militairy branch offers a handful of Victory Points like the other 3 branches, they are given to you when you meet certain criteria. Note that most VP's are Dynamic, meaning that when your enemy gets more of that certain criteria, he gets the VP.
These are the 3 branches. Note that all 3 require a lot of resources to be set up as well, which is the next part of the game. For example, a Priest will need Cloth and Food to be made.
A trader will need the same, and Militairy will need weapons etc. All of these have to be produced by you as well.
Then there are a few other important things. You can speed up your whole production chains by placing the Storehouses properly. Here is where you store the outcome of all the production buildings, and the Carriers from each Storehouse carry it around in your empire to get it to certain other chains. For example, the most important thing in the game, is that you can set certain production buildings to use Fancy Food, and boost their output. This is good when you have a solid food income, you can boost for example the Blacksmith's outcome, to make him output 2 swords instead of 1 when you provide him with Fancy Food.
Other than this, there's a Prestige tree, which is basically like a skill tree in SRO for example. Or a spec tree in WoW. You get certain useful things from them. Prestige is gained through Prestige Points, which you get from conquering new sectors, and placing Prestige Objects. The points can buy you useful things like the "Storehouse upgrades" which puts 1 additional carrier at the storehouse you upgraded. Speeds up production and distribution. Another one is "Geology" which can put your miners to Geologists when your mine is Depleted, so they can still find ore. Note that the Prestige tree contains all the Branch building upgrades. The church upgrades, the Stronghold upgrades, and the the Export office upgrades. So yes, Prestige is very impotant.
You win by either completely wiping out your opponent(s) from the map, or by Victory Points. Victory points is how most games end, and they are acquired in all 3 branches, and by expanding etcetera. For example there's a VP for having most coins. There's a VP for owning most Sectors (Sectors is how you expand in settlers, step by step). There's another for Most militairy units. But also all branch VP's, like having the most Trading Routes discovered, or having a certain Technology researched etc.
I think that's a pretty good summary of the game, in what became quite a wall of text
I'm personally really enjoying it, because it offers many different ways to win. In the end, it's mostly about being fast with your branch. For example you could be doing 2 branches at the same time (Technology and Militairy), but keep in mind that you obviously need alot more resources for both of these to be able to keep up with your enemy(s). But you could also focus purely on 1 branch (Militairy for example), to rush your enemy before he's even got an army up on its feet.
Scarth wrote:I got it, and played through a level or 3 on the tutorial. It's just so darn slow
Yeah. It's pretty slow. But note that you can easily win a game within an hour, just depends on how good you are with certain things
You gotta build a solid Economy first..
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Crumpets for Pres
