- The Settlers VI Gold Ed PC
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The Settlers VI: Rise of an Empire Gold Edition
The Settlers VI: Rise of an Empire Gold Edition
Filed in: PC Games
Product Description
The Settlers VI Gold Edition PC… More >>
The Settlers VI: Rise of an Empire Gold Edition
The Settlers VI: Rise of an Empire Gold Edition
What I’m not: I’m not a teenager who can neglect his homework, play for hours every day, and talk to his friends about how to kill the bad guy.
What I’m not: I’m not a war general who knows to put the archers on high ground and flank the cavalry with spearmen.
What I’m not: I’m not someone who works for the department of zoning and planning.
What I am: Just someone who likes to play a game and win more than lose.
What this game is not: This is not a fast action paced game where you tell your wife you’re too busy upgrading units, don’t answer the phone because you’re bein attacked by aliens, or hold in that bladder tight because any minute now and you lose.
What this game is: It’s a slow paced game. You can kick back, sip coffee, smoke a cig, and even walk away to attend to real life concerns and still come back with everything intact.
What this game is not: This is not a high dedication game. You don’t have to dedicate eight hours a day, seven days a week to upgrade your cooking skill.
What this game is: A couple of hours of fun. The time stamp has given me an average of two hours of game play per completed campaign map.
What this game is not: This is not a game designed for the strategic expert or the officer of city commissions. You don’t have to know anything about planning a city or war strategies to have fun and win the scenarios.
What this game is: A game for dummies. It literaly tells you, “Click on the flashing button. Now place the cursor over the blue signal on the screen. There! You just created a building, now watch.” And, “Click on the catapult, now click on the flashing icon to activate it. Now click on the glowing target.” I need someone to hold my hand and walk me through some of these games. I’ve played other games with hundreds of buildings and all they do is, “What would you like to build first?” I don’t know, i’m not a zoning commissioner.
In summary, this is a slow paced, low action, high in telling you what to do and when to do it game. You can walk away and come back if needed. You can spend a few hours and have fun. You can take your time to think about what to do next. You can win every scenario. This is the game for me. I hope they make more like these.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this game on a whim without knowing much about it. I am glad I did. I never played the earlier versions of The Settlers, so I’m coming into this one with fresh eyes.
This game is more about city building than it is about combat. There are only a few units to recruit. You can recruit swordsmen and bowmen, with a few siege weapons. That’s all that you can get for combat. That might sound really bad, but the strength of the game lies in managing your settlers and city. I don’t really find combat all that fun, it’s more of an afterthought than it is a major part of the game.
The only way you win in combat is by having a superior numbers of troops. However, there are a few things that come into play. The happier your citizens are, the more damage your troops do. If you’re on your own land, as opposed to an enemy’s land, you’ll do more damage as well. It’s not rocket science, but you do have to keep an eye on a few things. It’s another reason why this game is more about managing your settlers, even their happiness affects combat.
How do you manage your settlers? By building bakeries, hunting huts, barracks and so forth. You can’t directly control your settlers, they do their chores on their own. To keep them happy, you have to make sure they have enough beer in stock and medicine available, as well as other needs. The game does lack depth, other than keeping them happy, all you can really do is raise and lower taxes. I should mention, you can also trade with surrounding villages, but that’s where most of the interaction with them ends. Other than doing a quest for a village, all that you can really do with other villages is trade with them(or destroy them if they are an enemy).
Settlers: Rise of an Empire has some really high quality graphics. When I think of graphics, I don’t think of what looks flashy, I think of what looks like art. This game has really wonderful graphics, full of color and life. It’s the first game in a long time that I actually admired it. It has a charm and a retro feel about it.
I do enjoy the music and sound in the game. Your settlers themselves don’t say much, but your heroes that you can control and interact with do a lot of talking, and their voice acting is very good. Some of the music is catchy, like the great festival music.
This gold version also comes with the expansion pack. I finished the original campaign, but haven’t gotten through the expansion campaign yet. It’s more of the same with a few new things added, like a new hero to control and maps to play on. I had fun in the original campaign and I am having fun in the expansion so far as well.
This is a really fun settlers game that’s easy to get the hang of, there is nothing complicated about it. For people wanting a city building game with depth, this isn’t for you.
I have nothing bad to say about the game. It played pretty smoothly, didn’t crash at all, and was fun. The gold version does not include a physical manual however, so that is one small minus for it. The game does come all patched up so you don’t have to worry about downloading anything extra for the game.
One small note about the campaign that you’ll play: It starts off really easy, like a tutorial, but it does get harder when you get more into it.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a solid choice if you enjoy city-builder games.
You are mostly gathering resources, growing your settlement, expanding your territory, and fulfilling various scenario tasks, all within a usually very creative map that includes valleys, river crossing, mountain passes, and other fun strategic stuff. Maybe half of the scenarios end with you destroying another faction, but this is definitely not a military-focused game.
The good:
-Very solid game engine: never a bug or crash after 5 months of playing on Windows Vista 64-bit with a GeForce 9800GTX and graphics settings maxed-out
-Immersive period graphics and another solid ambient period music score by Dynamedion (Best German Soundtrack 2007)
-Creative maps/scenarios that are generally not too difficult and typically take around 3 hours each
-Vegetarian rating allows you to replay old maps using a different strategy
-Active user community creating custom maps for you
Cons:
-Somewhat restrictive camera angle
-Less complex than other similar games (Anno 1701), although what it lacks in complexity in the game engine, I’d say it makes up for in the variation and creativity of the maps/scenarios.
Rating: 4 / 5
I was very excited about this next installment in the Settlers series. The last one being very replayable and quite imaginitive. I’m somewhat disappointed in this one. It seems they took a step back instead of forward. The missions are quite repetative, the characters one dimensional, the city building limited and boring and the story lines themselves are merely to get you from point point A to Point B. The graphics are, as always, quite good and the life movement entertaining but there’s very little variation in any of the objectives so these, in the long run, lose their novelty. I guess it was too much to expect that they would keep going forward. This game should have been released before the last series. That would have made far more sense to me.
My over all impression…not a bad game but not as good as I would have liked or assumed. You’ll probably not pick this one up again once you finish playing through it. Also please make sure you check your graphic capability before purchasing.
Rating: 3 / 5
The 6th Settlers game is a city-building sim similar to “Dawn of Discovery” or any of the Anno games. Its cutesy style, along with a fairly simple layout, makes it probably the most user-friendly game in the Settlers series, something that may not appeal to long-term fans.
The Settlers VI operates on simple principles. There are two types of buildings: gatherers and producers. Gatherers are placed near resources like wood, stone, or wild animals, and gather those resources. Producers are “city buildings” and turn raw materials into usable product. There are only a few categories of product compared to earlier Settlers games. There’s food (meat, bread, cheese, or fish), clothes (made from leather or wool), cleaning supplies (soap from animals or brooms from wood), and entertainment (mead, baths, or decorations). In each category, you only need one particular type of thing – compare this to Dawn of Discovery, where your citizens had very diverse tastes and needed all of them to be fulfilled equally.
Not all the things you will need will be in your starting area, though. The game divides maps into different provinces; by making outposts in other provinces, you can secure their resources for your city. Choosing which provinces to expand into is a vital part of the game, especially in multiplayer when they are contested by several players.
A new element in VI is the presence of Knights. Knights serve as avatars for the player, providing bonuses depending on which one is picked. The military knight, for example, produces soldiers more cheaply and can refill their supplies. The holy knight can heal sick settlers, the trade knight gets better deals off of trading with villages or other players, and so on. The knight you pick also serves as the voice of your advisor, notifying you of events around your city. Fulfilling short-term objectives, like giving your citizens clothes or cleaning supplies, allows your knight to be promoted in rank and unlock the next tier of buildings. As your knight gets promoted, the demands of your city grow, but so does your power as a ruler.
Besides making sure everything is running smoothly, there are a few other things you can do with your citizens. You can call a sermon at your local cathedral; attendees will be happier, and will donate some money after it is over. You can declare a festival at your marketplace, which results in people getting married; housewives (or in one case, house-husbands) will take care of chores like retrieving food and clothes, leaving the actual business to their spouse. Finally, you can adjust taxes once you’re high enough rank, meaning that if you’re doing well with money you can drop off your taxes to make your citizens much happier (or raise taxes if you need cash quickly).
There is also a military system present in the game. There are two types of soldiers: swordsmen and archers. The former are a melee class; the latter are a ranged class. Both sides use torches to attack structures, and they possess them in limited amounts (though they can refill them for free at military structures or outposts). There are also siege engines, used to attack stone walls (which don’t burn). The combat in the game is very simple, and hinges primarily on numbers. However, the prosperity and happiness of your city also influences the quality of your soldiers, so keeping your people happy is a good way to ensure a strong military.
In addition to the fairly enjoyable campaign mode, there are also some side scenarios and multiplayer options. The side scenarios aren’t that great, and there are disappointingly few multiplayer maps. The presence of random maps would have done a lot to add replay value to the game outside of the campaign. There are four distinct climates in the game – mild (standard European), cold (Viking), warm (Spanish), and hot (Arabic). However, the climates only affect crops (the availability of crops at certain times of year and the presence of fertile ground) and the appearance of your castle. Villages on these maps will have unique climate-specific buildings, but your own city always has the same building styles. This is unfortunate, but understandable. Most of the buildings are nice to look at as it is, with a wide variety of roof-tile colors so you’re not just looking at the same building repeated 20 times. In fact, making a satisfying city is one of the best parts of the game, further reinforced by the fact that your settlers and their spouses are all visible somewhere in the city going about their tasks (or loitering and chatting, if they’ve got nothing to do).
The graphics are nice; the cartoonish look means that their ostensibly low quality goes unnoticed in favor of a more stylized approach. As mentioned, making beautiful cities is the high point of the game. Voice acting is somewhat laughable, but not actively terrible. The music is a little bit annoying, but not offensively so. Some sources complained of technical difficulties and crashes, but playing the game through the Gold Edition (purchased with the Steam online service), I had no problems of that nature. On the whole, The Settlers: Rise of an Empire is a good game, but better for more casual city-builders instead of hardcore settlers fans. The lack of free-play and city diversity is annoying, but not unmanageable.
Rating: 8/10.
Rating: 4 / 5