30 Years of "The Settlers 2": Veni, Vidi, Wusli

Contents

A full 30 years have passed since “The Settlers 2” first flickered across our screens, captivating an entire generation of gamers with its relaxed hustle and bustle. What began in 1996 as a consistent evolution of a surprise hit quickly became a milestone in the city-building strategy genre.

The city-building game “The Settlers”, first released on the Amiga in June 1993, was a huge hit for good reason: its cute, bustling graphics were sigh-inducingly beautiful, Markus Kludzuweit's music transported you with its varied themes directly into a cliché medieval world, the controls were super-simple, and the gameplay was both accessible and remarkably profound.

At first glance, the game resembled a medieval ant farm. But beneath the lovable exterior lay economic cycles that were as interesting as they were cleverly intertwined, demanding a lot of attention and micromanagement from players. Added to this were cumbersome pathfinding and a combat system based solely on predetermined statistics, which lent a few annoying scratches to the relaxed hustle and bustle. And there was no campaign or anything comparable, just disconnected single missions against variable-strength computer opponents. So, no question, “The Settlers” was already a really great game – but there was still clearly room for improvement.

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"Die Siedler 2" wird 30 (10 Bilder)

The Playable Improvement List

Lead designer Volker Wertich, however, had no interest in testing this room for improvement: after the years of exhausting development of the first game, he would rather not jump straight into a sequel. The development of the second part therefore took place internally at Blue Byte, the distributor of “The Settlers”, under the direction of Thomas Häuser. He had been primarily responsible for quality assurance on the first game and still had a long list of suggestions for improvement from that time – which he was now able to implement directly in a second part.

The result of these efforts was released in April 1996 with the subtitle “Veni, Vidi, Vici”, which already highlights the most important change from its predecessor. Because in “The Settlers 2,” there is finally a proper campaign: the nice intro shows the fate of the Roman captain Octavius, whose ship crashes on an unknown island after a storm. For ten extensive missions, he and his crew must now find a way back to Rome.

And they do this by... well... settling: From the main building, a lumberjack's hut is built in a nearby forest, along with a sawmill (for processing trees into boards) and a forester (new trees have to come from somewhere). By the nearby lake, a fisherman makes himself comfortable, and the stonemason turns scattered rocks into building materials. A farm is erected, the harvested grain is processed into flour in a bakery, and a baker kneads delicious bread from it. Pigs grunt happily on the pig farm, coal, or ore mines extract important raw materials, and your borders are pushed further and further out via watchtowers. And eventually, you inevitably encounter a neighbor who regards you suspiciously and already has the swords sharpened in your forge.

Little Computer People

In terms of content, the game remains very true to the footsteps of its predecessor. In “The Settlers 2” as well, the goal is still to optimally occupy the available land and optimize the in-game economic cycles for your own purposes. The player again only gives work instructions and creates construction sites. The actual execution is then always carried out by the computer, or rather by the hundreds of pixel figures bustling on the screen simultaneously, which give the game its wonderfully bustling factor.

“The Settlers 2” doesn't reinvent the city-building wheel, but it adds a lot to practically all aspects: instead of just one type of settler, there are now four peoples (Romans, Asians, Vikings, and Nubians), who, however, only differ visually very clearly. There's much more going on on the large maps now, especially in terms of fauna, which gives the new hunters something to do and the settlers in general an additional source of meat. In addition, there are many new buildings (such as wells, breweries, mints, donkey farms, locksmiths, or catapults), different landscapes with varied graphic sets, fog of war, scout towers, or ships, which don't change the original gameplay principle but expand it very sensibly.