Format: PC
Year of Release: 1997
Developer: Blue Byte
Genre: Real-Time Strategy / City Building
Why I picked it: Cozy Time-Waster (or Ruthless Takedown of Manifest Destiny?)
I re-installed this game last year when I was going through a particularly rough period in my life and wanted something calming to occupy my mind. I opted to start a new World Campaign -- a game mode where you start out on a map of Europe and you eventually move to each of the other continents as you progress through each map. I wasn't in the mood for world conquest though, I was in the mood for a light-hearted feudal economics simulation populated with charming sprite-based characters. Most of what I remembered about this game from my teenage years was how much I loved the look of it and how endlessly entertaining it could be to watch the wheels of your economy in motion once everything was set up. So I started out building my agrarian settlement with sustainability in mind: A wood cutter, forester, and a sawmill to ensure a steady supply of boards for construction.... a stone mason to harvest rocks from the nearby quarries used to build the foundations... a farm, windmill, and bakery to keep my miners well-fed, and so on. It was quite a shock then when I realized about 2 hours into building this picturesque little utopia that my western border was rapidly collapsing under the weight of the Red Player's marauding soldiers...
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So in Settlers II, in contrast to most other real-time strategy games, you have no direct control over your military units. You train them up with gold coins -- an abstraction that never made any sense to me, though it does effectively make gold the most valuable resource in the game -- but once an actual conflict begins, rival soldiers stream across your border to knock on the door of your closest military barracks. As your soldiers stumble out they pair up in duels to the death with the dudes wearing different colored pajamas and all you can do is watch helplessly and hope that your guys land the last blow. Because you expand your borders by building military outposts and garrisoning them, if any of these outposts is captured by an opponent they also get the land around it and everything you've already built there is
instantly on fire. A total loss. It's absolutely crushing when it happens and something like road rage consumed me as I resolved to avenge the loss of all that beautiful infrastructure that I'd meticulously plotted out over the previous hour.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. At this point in the game my peaceful little economic empire was still getting folded up in record time because my military outposts were almost empty. I had forgotten one key detail -- in order to produce a soldier one of your storehouses must contain a sword, a shield, and a barrel of beer. If even one of those resources is missing... no new soldiers. And I had entirely forgotten to produce
any beer! Okay so pause.... let me plan this out. I'll build an entire district of breweries. I'll re-direct all of the grain and water to Brewery Row even if that means my bakeries will all drop to 0% production. I'll send all of the food I have left to the gold and coal mines and then send all of that gold and coal to the Mint to make gold coins. Soon enough I was wrecking my own economy to produce
more gold!
more beer!
more weapons! and then fast tracking all of that loot to the remote regions of my territory where it was urgently needed. Meanwhile, my village's central core was slowly drowning under the piles of accumulated common goods that my serfs were no longer transporting.
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After hours of heated back and forth border skirmishes, as the (adorable little decaying 2D) skeletons of fallen soldiers littered the countryside by the dozens, I
finally succeeded and wiped the map clean of all other colored players. At last I could relax and watch all of my hard-working little serfs carrying pigs and boards and bundles of wheat, joyfully marching to and fro in peace. I guess if you think about it, a cute little pig being marched off to a slaughterhouse and coming back out the door as a hamhock isn't exactly peaceful but the collective hum of goods being harvested, transformed, and then put to use can be in that "
everything in its right place" sort of way. Regardless, the Europe stage ends at that point and you move on to a new adjoining map -- so I chose Africa. And as the sun rose on my fledgling North African colony I knew what I had to do. This time I would get the jump on those pesky other AI controlled humans before they got to me. I would build fortresses not guard towers. I would send out whole armies of geologists to locate every vein of gold and pull it out of the ground first so no one else would have it. I would start from day one pumping out beer and weapons like my life depended on it, hoarding them away for the conquest to come. I would train every soldier in every fortress into a gleaming golden super soldier before I even encountered another faction.
There was no chance of my borders getting folded up again!
So that's what I did and it all went beautifully. I swept through those African tribesmen before they knew what hit them. I truly was the master of this new domain! But then something unexpected happened: I ran out of stone. In my haste to expand I had picked clean every quarry in sight and neglected my granite mines to the point where all of my new construction plots now sat idle waiting for that one vital resource, that most basic and abundant of resources. My single-minded quest for expansion had ground to a halt and suddenly all of the tension returned as the crisis-resolution section of my brain was once again engaged. I think you can guess what happened next so I'll just fast forward to the climax. Once again I re-directed goods until I had mined every available vein of granite like a Roman possessed. And as I completed my conquest it
finally dawned on me (yeah, I'm a little slow): Nobody had even attacked me this whole time. I was the aggressor right from the beginning and when those African factions took territory from me it was always territory that I had claimed from them first. I had brought with me to this new land all of the biases I'd formed in my last encounter with the Red Player (Vikings I'd say, based on their artwork) and had unwittingly re-enacted an act of historical villainy I never would have thought myself capable of. So all-consuming and addicting is this cycle of "harvest, process, expand, fight" that it never even occurred to me that there might be other options.
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And if you don't think the game designers were self-aware enough about their own product to have engineered exactly this kind of a realization, take another look at that cover art. The picture on the game box portrays a group of Roman-esque settlers arriving on the shore but we view this scene from the perspective of the "about to be conquered" not the conquerors. That phrase on the bottom of the original German box cover "...und Alles hört auf mein Kommando" translates to "...and all responds to my command". The implied sarcasm is subtle enough (or I'm seriously that dense) that it somehow took me two decades to actually get their point. Once I did, it hit me like a load of bricks to the head. All this time I had assumed that
Die Siedler II was just a German PC game meant to invoke the same cozy pastoral setting and feed the same history-agnostic resource stockpiling compulsion that had propelled the German board game "Die Siedler von Catan" into becoming an international phenomenon. But the cutesy graphics and cheerful music are actually designed to camouflage a game engine that is the exact opposite: a critical deconstruction of the settler-focused narrative. And that was a humbling reminder that I still have a lot to learn about, well, everything.
