History VideoGame / TheSettlers

* MasterOfAll: Amazons from ''III'' are the most balanced faction ''ever'' introduced to the series. Their buildings have highly optimal sizes, they use a very efficient 13:7 wood:stone ratio, their spells are some of the most useful in the series and their alcohol production is highly-efficient, while also providing a food source. Their war machine not only doesn't need ammo, but also can attack civilian buildings.

* TheDragon: In ''Heritage of Kings'', Kerberos spends most of the game being this to Mordred.

''The Settlers'' is a series of unique {{RTS}} videogames from Blue Byte Software, which premiered on the UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} in 1993. The series was first conceived by German developer Volker Wertich, who designed the first game and has been sporadically involved with other titles in the series.

* TooDumbtoLive: Since you don't directly control civilians in most games, you cannot order them to flee from the few threats civilians can actually face. Also found a few times in the behavior of some factions, story-wise.

* CoolButInefficient: Guardhouses in ''II''. They house more soldiers than barracks and are still a small-size building... but they take 3 stones to construct and still can only have three soldiers inside. A Watchtower, a medium building, costs only 1 stone more, can be built in the exact same amount of time, has almost twice the border radius and houses twice as many soldiers. Meanwhile, if you need just the most basic military building, [[BoringButPractical barracks is more than enough]].
* CommandAndConquerEconomy: The player must order any construction project, that's pretty much the point of the game. You do not tell your settlers what to do and where to move though, you only set guidelines and they take care of everything else. Justified because of feudalism: everything in your kingdom is your property, so you call the shots.
* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: After the first level or two, it always has better troops than you do. Although this only applies in the campaign mode. In Free Play (aka Skirmish), the AI starts with the exact same resources as the player. Computer players don't have an infinite resource pool and will in fact run out of resources if they can't gather them.
* ConstructAdditionalPylons: Not only is this trope in effect, it is actually the whole point of the game (at least early in the series), and its application is what set ''The Settlers'' apart from its direct competitors (early RealTimeStrategy games as we know them today). Instead of building an elaborate field base, the player is building a whole kingdom from scratch - and the objective is usually to expand that kingdom (often, but not necessarily, through violence) to the point where it edges out all competition. This requires careful placement of a very wide variety of buildings, each of which is absolutely necessary for victory. You must create a long economic chain which slowly converts raw resources step by step into military units. These units occupy guard huts, thereby increasing the size of your territory and allowing you to build more and more buildings. Although military force is often required to actually push your enemies back and eventually raze their castles, the primary skill being tested is your ability to build the kingdom and its economy properly; battles themselves are almost unremarkable in comparison.

* ShipwreckStart: In ''The Settlers II'', the opening cutscene depicts a Roman ship captain named Octavius as his ship, the ''Tortius'', is wrecked while crossing the Sea of Storms and he and his crew wash up on an uncharted island. The single-player campaign then picks up from there.

* ShieldsAreUseless: In ''The Settlers II'', low ranking soldiers carry shields. High ranking soldiers do not.

* FirewoodResources:
** After the woodcutter chops down a tree, he strips it of branches and carries the log ''on his shoulder'' to his house. This is carried by other settlers all the way to the Carpenter's house, where he cuts the log into planks, which are then carried off to wherever they are needed. Half the uniqueness of the game comes from actually animating all those things, which most games don't.
** Much of the other half comes from the gameplay implementation of those animations. Nifty animations aside, the fact that your little animated settlers actually ''carry'' resources from A to B forces you to organize a transport network that can handle the flow of resources without getting into traffic jams. This game averts EasyLogistics ''hard'', to the point where logistics is the main source of challenge in the game.
** This also produces the weirdness that one tree turns into one log turns into one unit of planks; the same amount of planks can be used to build either the frame of a small house, a rowboat, or the handle of a spade.

Games In The Series Include

A second unique quality is the series' "high-level management" style of play, which eschews a traditional CommandAndConquerEconomy in favour of a system where the player decides only what buildings to be build and where, which enemy structures to attack, and what the transport priorities for various commodities should be, and the peasants carry out those orders to the best of their abilities. You do not have any direct control over any of your settlers.

''The Settlers'' is a series of {{RTS}}/empire-building computer games from Blue Byte Software, which premiered on the UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} in 1993. The series was first conceived by German developer Volker Wertich, who designed the first game as well as returning to work on the third installment. He was not directly involved in the creation of the other titles, but in 2018, Ubisoft (who purchased Blue Byte back in 2001 and acted as publisher ever since) announced that Wertich was leading the development of a new title in the series, set to release in 2020. This was pushed back to 2022, and then further delayed indefinitely two weeks before it was due to launch. This eventually became ''The Settlers: New Allies'' which went on to release on PC on February 17th, 2023, with release on consoles to follow on March 23rd, 2023.

Missions in the game start with each player controlling a castle, the immediate area around it, and some basic resources like wood and stone in storage. Players use these resources to build basic structures for gathering more wood and stone to make more buildings. These extra resources are used for construction of guard huts, which expand your territory, in turn opening up more space for construction of more buildings--especially ones that produce other basic materials like raw minerals (iron, gold, coal). Yet more buildings are then erected to grow or forage for food to feed miners, process raw minerals into tools for your workers and weapons for soldiers, brew beer to make everyone happy, and so forth. The eventual goal is to expand your territory enough to establish borders with your opponents, then assault their guard posts to steal away their territory, eventually bringing down their main castle.

[[SpaceManagementGame Space within your territory is limited]], and some structures take up a lot of space, so the decision to place a structure in a specific spot can have a great impact. In addition, smart placement of roads to connect these buildings can dramatically cut down on the time it takes for resources to travel from their production sites to their processing sites and storage facilities, and failure to cut down travel times means losing the advantage. This makes the series unique among RTS games: it focuses on logistics and resource management rather than simple military might. In fact, in the first game, it was often possible to win a level without any meaningful military engagement, as the AI would tend to eventually run its economy into the ground.

A second unique quality is its "high-level management" style of play, which eschewed a traditional CommandAndConquerEconomy in favour of a system where the player decided what buildings were to be built, what enemy structures attacked and what the transport priorities for various commodities should be, and the peasants carried out those orders to the best of their abilities. You do not have any direct control over any of your settlers.

The seven mainline titles were re-released as part of a "History Collection" in November 2018, featuring additional features such as support for higher resolutions and more recent operating systems (getting the third game to run on current systems required some tinkering before, and running the first two games required an emulator or a separate (virtual) system). Reception varied depending on the game, with some actually gaining new bugs in the process, and eventually, it became clear that the rerelease had been handled by individual developers who were not familiar with the inner workings of the games.
The rerelease did, however, include some previously rare or restricted content. Notably, the ''Community Pack'' (released after the game's Gold Edition and not included in any of them, leading to some absurd used sale prices) and ''The New World'' (not included in some of the Gold Editions) expansions for the fourth game, previously only available in Germany, are included.
''The Settlers II 10th Anniversary'' as well as ''Rise of Cultures'' are not a part of this collection.

* NoPronunciationGuide: The name of Morbus' assistant in the fourth game (who also happens to be the goddess of the Amazons in the third game), Q'nqüra, is pronounced slightly differently in most cutscenes of the fourth game. Since her name is never seen in print in that game, this doesn't make it easier to call her anything other than "that woman in red".