Hi all,
from Fixit's list, I have Settlers III.
I bought it after ROR, played the tutorial, and then played ROR again. I don't wanna say it's a bad game, it's just a little more complicated then AOE/ROR and takes a lot more time to figure it all out.
First you have this huge amount of buildings (I think about 40-50 different ones). One building needs another one to function, and that's quite hard in the beginning. Example (It is not correct, but it's just for the example!!!): An end product is bread to feed your peons. Bread is baked at the bakery, but needs grain. Grain comes from the farm, but the farmer needs his tools first which then come again from the smith in the iron smeltery works, who uses iron as a base product. Iron comes from the Iron mines. You first need geologists to search for iron, and the geologists are "created" at a residence. (starting to get the picture?) This example is a very long thread, more overstated than the real game, but still... The treads in settlers are very realistic and that makes it very fun.
You also don't control your peons like in AOE. You just click a building and a place to build it and the game itself decides which peons should build it. You get additional peons by building a residence.
Economy/military is very unbalanced. It's about 85-90% economy and 10-15% military concerning buildings & units in my opinion. AOE has a lot more military buildings (eg academy) than economic ones (eg farm). I think econ/mili buildings & units in AOE is about 30/70.
I can't say much about internet play, simply because I didn't do that yet. Always beat the CPU first .
After all, the grapichs are a tiny less beautiful than AOE/ROR (that one still rules, together with starcraft), but it's VERY nice to see the settlers at work.
About gameplay, it's very good that you don't have to control the peons yourself. Otherwise, it would be too difficult I guess.
General conclusion :
I think all the different buildings and their people are a little too much at start, but are also the main reason why you will continue playing it after 1 month. I think when you figured out which building needs which and have a good idea about the resource-flow, then this game is very good!
I'd say: buy it if you like economy (resource handling) RTS games more, leave it in the store if you are only interrested in sending military units to the enemy.
All the people that peons can be (directly from the manual):
carrier, digger, woodcutter, forester, woodworker, stonecutter, builder, geologist, miner, iron smelter, gold smelter, tool smith, weapons smith, waterworker, farmer, miller, baker, pig farmer, donkey breeder, butcher, fisher, rice farmer, wine-grower, distiller, brewer, shipbuilder, navigator, charcoal maker, gunpowder maker, spy, swordsman, spearman, bowman, healer. As you can see for yourself: it's all about economy. Exploration and combat come at a second place.
Mr Fixit, just like you I like medival games more then science fiction, but you really should try StarCraft. The graphics are just AWESOME (!!!!!!!!!!) and the game doesn't need very much hardware. It runs perfect at full power on my P133 MHz with 48 MB RAM. (Thank u Blizard) Settlers III is a little bit slower here (can be run in 640*480 - 800*600 or 1024*768) and doesn't give very smooth images when I scroll the screen (on my P133). Game speed is never an issue though.
If any who reeds this has questions about Settlers III or StarCraft, feel free to send me an e-mail:
ivan.daems@village.uunet.be
P.S.: I also have AOE, ROR, Riven, Dark Reign, Hexen II, Need For Speed II, Monopoly World Cup & Mech Commander if you have questions about them.
Bye,
Brey