The Settlers III

The Settlers III is a real-time strategy computer game developed by Blue Byte Software, being the second sequel to The Settlers, making it the third game in The Settlers series. This isometric city-building game was released on November 30, 1998.

The most notable difference between this game and its two predecessors is that there are no more roads—all units, including carriers with goods, can walk around freely. This simplifies the building of a settlement, since only the distances between buildings are relevant, and not how roads can be constructed between them. Military units are now directly controlled, making fighting more similar to games like Command & Conquer or Age of Empires, than to the previous Settlers games.

The Settlers III was also famous for its peculiar copy protection: in pirated versions of the game, iron smelters would only produce pigs instead of iron, which made weapon production impossible.

Plot
The game begins with a cartoon-ish cut-scene depicting three gods: Jupiter (leader of the Roman Pantheon), Horus (the falcon-headed Egyptian sun god) and Ch'ih-Yu (the legendary Chinese dragon). A messenger arrives with a message from the god's god telling them they must find a worthy leader or the universe and everything in it will be destroyed. The player assumes the role of a leader trying to prove they are talented enough to impress their god by conquering other civilizations and capturing as many territories.

Building
As in the original game and its sequel, Settlers II, a Settlers III game is played by building up a working economy to produce military units, and then going to war against enemies. Iron and coal is needed to produce weapons that are needed to 'recruit' soldiers, which in turn requires mines and food production. All buildings require wood and stone to build, and all settlers need living space, which results in a complex chain of infrastructure required before big armies may be produced.

Order
Usually, the player will start by building foresters, woodcutters, stonemasons and sawmills to get base building materials. Residences are important to get enough settlers to carry around goods and build buildings. Fishermen, water works and farms provide the base of food production, where crops need to be either processed by a windmill and a baker, or fed to pigs who then are brought to a butcher, before resulting in bread and ham. After food production, mining for iron and coal can start. The resulting iron ore is processed by an iron smelter, and a weaponsmith can then finally produce weapons, which are used in barracks to train soldiers.

Additional buildings
In parallel to the above, it is also important to increase the owned lands to have room for building – this is done by constructing towers and castles. Also, mining and processing of gold is necessary in order to increase the motivation of soldiers, as well as building temples and supporting them with sacrifices in order to get powerful mages who are important in battle.

It also is possible to build additional things, like ships and ports, war engines with ammunition factories, storage places, trading posts, and several others.

Warfare


The goal of attacks is to capture enemy towers and castles. When capturing such an enemy building, the land ownership is transferred, and all enemy buildings in the newly owned land are destroyed. This allows tactics such as sneaking in a group of soldiers to an enemy tower which protects important buildings, and if successful, thereby destroying the enemy's economy – which is hard to recover from.

Fog of War
Such surprise attacks are possible because Settlers 3 employs a Fog of War display – only areas of the map around own units are visible. Special spy units can be used to try and spy into enemy lands, which will appear as own units to other players - but the camouflage does not work for enemy soldiers, and it is possible to let soldiers patrol around a settlement to ward off spies. (But it is also possible to distract such patrols with a feint attack and sneak in spies that way.)

Units
For actual battles, there are three types of units: Sword fighters, Archers, and Spearmen. Archers are effective against spearmen (because the spearmen are slow), spearmen against swordsmen (because of their stronger melee attack), and swordsmen against archers (because of their speed). This balancing often requires to quickly adjust tactics during battle, which is made possible by keyboard shortcuts to select all units of one type. Each unit type also comes in three versions, from weakest to strongest. The type and strength of a unit is determined by the barracks building. If it is delivered a sword, bow, or spear, a corresponding unit is created. The strength of the unit depends on the global upgrade level of the player, which is affected by manna production. The more manna, the more upgrade possibilities. Each unit type needs a separate upgrade, and upgrade cost is not linear – instead higher upgrades require more manna production. To reach the highest upgrade for all three unit types, six upgrades are necessary. Gold and gems also increase your soldiers strength in enemy territories.

Each unit is initially created with full health, and can be wounded in battle, as indicated by a little dot above each selected unit, which changes color from green over yellow to red. Players can retreat wounded units to regain full health in the healer building.

Controlling of units by the player is possible in ways typical to most RTS games of this time, by selecting them with a rectangle drawn with the mouse or by selecting all visible units, then assigning a target. Selected units can also be put into up to 9 groups, which players can quickly select again with keyboard shortcuts.

The size of battles varies a lot depending on type of map, resource settings, and play time. Early battles using only initial units consist of ten to twenty units, while in a typical map good players have recruited hundreds of units after an hour of play time. Battles often can involve several thousand units in longer games.

Defense
It is possible to build stronger defenses by building bigger defensive structures. There are three different sizes for those, a small tower, a medium tower, and a castle, but bigger buildings are considerably more costly in terms of needed building material. When attacking such a building, the troops occupying it can only be attacked one by one, and archers can shoot at the attackers from a safe position.

Strength
The strength of soldiers depends on two factors - the amount of gold a settlement had stored, and whether they are fighting on friendly or enemy territory. The strength on friendly land is always at least 100%, while the strength on enemy land without gold is initially very low, for example only 25% in a four player game. This makes it hard to attack early in the game. By producing more gold, the strength can be increased to over 100%, possibly making the attackers stronger than the defenders in their own land.

Support units
Soldiers can be supported by priests and pioneer units. Priests can cast powerful spells, for example converting a group of enemy units to a player's own units, by making the own units fight with greater strength, or by making enemies weaker. More powerful spells cost more manna points, which are gained by sacrificing beverages to temples. Pioneer units transform unowned land or unguarded enemy land into owned land. That way, they can claim mineral-rich land or enemy stashes. Additionally, when used as support units of an army, the changed land ownership results in a strength boost for soldiers standing on owned land.

War machine
Each nation can also produce war machines. The Romans use catapults, the Egyptians ballista, the Asians cannons, and Amazons a magical gong. Such machines are costly to build, and they need a constant supply of (also costly) ammunition (except of the Amazon gong). Furthermore, they are hard to move and cannot defend themselves against enemy troops. But they allow taking down enemy defenses from a distance and without fighting, which still makes them effective in many situations.

It also is possible to build ships to transport units and goods across continents. The number of units transported on a single ship is limited, and therefore it requires many ships to transport a big army. It also is risky, since war machines can sink ships. But ships can be used to transport small groups of soldiers far behind enemy lines, or even build up a second settlement.

Nations
The player can choose between four different nations, all with different capabilities. The original game comes with the Romans, Egyptians and Asians. An addon later added the Amazons as fourth nation. Each nation has differences, which are important for the strategy of a game.

Romans
The Romans need wood as well as stone for their buildings. They are the only nation whose priests have a spell which turns enemy soldiers into their own, and easily produce manna by offering wine. Wine can be produced in wineries, which need no other goods or support buildings.

Egyptians
The Egyptians require a lot of stone for all buildings. This means that they have a disadvantage in long games, since stones will eventually run out and they will no longer be able to build residences. On the other hand, they can build very quickly at the beginning of the game. Their buildings take much space and they are the only nation that can build on desert terrain. Producing manna is difficult for them, requiring water and grain to brew beer.

Asians
The Asians require few stone and much wood for their buildings. This means that in very long games they can still expand their settlement, even when the Romans and Egyptians have already run out of stone. For Asians, like the Egyptians, it is expensive to build manna–it requires rice and coal to distill rice wine. However, they are the only nation with a relatively cheap spell to speed up the fighting of their troops, which is very effective. And it is also possible to gain manna from building many temples, which is easy for Asians if they have a good wood production, therefore they can upgrade troops without having to produce sacrifices first. And the main advantage is in the fact that they can build siege weapon - cannon, which is the most effective among siege weapons of the 3 represented nations. The cannon requires sulfur mining.

Amazons
The Amazons in general need less stone than the Romans, but more than the Asians. Their manna production is relatively cheap, requiring just honey and water. They have as the only nation a war machine which can use manna as ammunition, enabling them to destroy enemy buildings without fighting.

Multi-player
One of the biggest changes to the game compared to the two predecessors is the multi-player capabilities. It is the first Settlers game with full support for Internet play. There is an official game lobby which can be entered by the player from within the game. BlueByte was also running an official ladder, where individuals or clans could compete by marking games as ladder games.

Reception
The game was moderately well received as a typical RTS game which focuses on micro-management. Many reviewers thought The Settlers III didn't add anything new to the series and that replaying the game was too repetitive.

A review by IGN Staff described the game as good but not ground-breaking. The swapping between two discs was disliked and they found the artificial intelligence to be poor and noticed units didn't obey commands. An Allgame review by Nick Smith described the gameplay as having a "sedate, relaxed pace" but thought it was the same as earlier Settlers titles. A GameSpot review by Ron Dulin appreciated the game's graphics but thought the cutscenes and menu interface were lacking. He liked not having to build roads and the inclusion of gods in the game was good but felt overall it wasn't much of an improvement on its predecessor and that some might find it "immensely repetitive".

A GameBoyz review by Nick Burger described the graphics as "very well presented" but noted that The Settlers III lacked depth. The reviewer did not like the combat sounds and found very little difference between missions. He also noticed a glitch in sea vessel and catapult unit's pathing logic. The GameVortex reviewer liked the animations and the ambiance that the sounds produced. Robert Perkins thought the game would be daunting for those unfamiliar with the intricacies of resource management found in the game.