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[Josefsson]

This is a great game!

[_r.u.s.s.]

well, i'm not sure right now but i think that settlers 2 used ipx for multiplaying

which means that you can play ipx multiplayer with your friends using dosbox, that one can create a virtual ipx network via regular tcp/ip

of course, you'd need to have a dos version.. i don't know how they ported the dos version to windows on gog where it's sold..
but i'm pretty sure they're using dosbox too, so if you managed to take out the original dos files and set stuff up manually you'd be able to create an ipx virtual connection easilly

[Pex]

I don't remember the last time I got so much carried away playing a game that I stayed up to almost 2am without realising it. This game did it to me last night

It's interesting that most of the time I stayed up late playing it was a turn based game (famous 'one more turn' rule). But with Settlers 2 it was 'let's just explore one more area, let's just capture one more enemy outpost, well, now I need to destroy that catapult...' and so on. The only reason I stopped playing (and therefore realised what the time was) was because of a nasty bug For some reason it happened that I wasn't able to move my mouse pointer all the way accross the screen, which made one third of the screen to the right hand side was inaccessable. I also wasn't able to scroll the screen in that direction which obviously made the game impossible to play. I loaded the old saved game now and everything seems to work fine, so I hope it was just a single accident rather than a rule.

Before I give my $0.02 about the game, I want to say that I never played any newer Settlers game before (my friend google told me they're up to part 7 now). I gaves first Settlers a go, but it didn't "click" for me. It took me a bit to figure out how to start the game for single player and then I had no idea what to do I guess just another game when part 2 surpassed part 1 in everything, not just bringing cosmetical improvement (similar examples imo are HoM&M, Warlords, Civilization).

What I like about the game is the whole idea of the community where everyone has a role and everything has to work well in order for the community to thrive. It's very similar to another game I loved - Cultures. I'm assuming that the authors of the latter have stolen a few things from The Settlers, but it still had some original ideas.

Another thing I like is that you can replay the same scenario and try a different approach - put your farms in different areas and your industry in some other again (only mines need to keep more the less same spots, of course). Progress with small barracks, claming just a bit of teritory at the time or buld fortresses straight away for big expansion. Clear a forest to get the land you need easily and then replant the other area where there is not enough space for big building anyway. Or keep the forests where they are and foccus your building elsewhere.

Of course, I found a few things about the game that desired some improvement. That AI again... My helpers tend to take wheat from one farm to the furtherest possible mill, and at the same time wheat from a farm close to that mill to the brewery next to the first farm mentioned. Also even if I close production in a building, they still keep bringing raw materials to it. And finally, speaking of raw materials, those priority adjustment do not work for me on default level. Unless I intervene, my donkey farms never get any wheat, while mills keep having a full stock. Similar situation is with coal - mints hog it, leaving my iron smelting and armory on 0% But then when I adjust it, nothing works on 100% anymore, even with at least one coal mine (but usually more) per building.

Another sort of complaint is that after the initial set up and building a working community, the game turns into how fast you can expand to the enemy border and then how quickly you can conquer them. There's no need to build more infractructure in the newly conquered territories (except for roads). But it could be the case only with these first few scenarios - I'll wait and see if it changes later in the game.

And final complaint is about the music - it really starts to get annoying after only five minutes or so. Sound effects are ok (unless there are sheep on the screen), but I always turn off the music.

So, all added together, this game is for my 4 out of 5

[arete]

I got cross when the enemy's soldiers, even the low-level ones, ended up always killing my generals. Even though they had about four more hitpoints It was so biased that i got fed up and stopped playing. Besides, half the campaigns had opponents with so many high-ranking soldiers to attack with that there wasn't any time to even start building an infrustructure. Although in the low levels playing was a lot of fun. Stupid goths and Nubians CHEATED!!

[Pex]

So far my elite soldiers dispatch easily those low ranked enemy ones, though they struggle with the enemy elite. But...

I thought that AI had only minor problems - it was before I played my first mission that involved sailing ships. So, this is how it all started...

After "conquering" a few nearby islands I decided to expand into land controled by enemy factions. So, I built a fortress but for some reason no troops came to occupy it. I wasn't sure what was going on, since in previous missions it was happening automaticly, but when I checked it turned out that I had no soldiers left. I made sure that I didn't turn recriutment off and I didn't, my armoury was working at full speed and I had some 200 kegs of beer in storage. The tricky part was that my armoury was on one island and my brewery on the mainland. AI can't recognize recruitment as a need and therefore put beer and swords and shields in the same warehouse. So I decided to build a brewery on that island and another armoury on the mainland, which solved the problem, but I had to wait of course for both productions to pick up.

What happened next was that the armoury (and iron smelting) on the island ran out of coal. Now I had around 170 units of coal in my HQ, but none in the harbour connected to it, so AI couldn't think of moving some of that coal to the harbour and then shipping it to the island that needed it. I did it manually (by setting 'Take out of store' for coal in HQ and 'Stop storing' in every other warehouse with land connections to HQ except for the harbour I needed). After what seemed painfully slow since the coal taken out of HQ was first used to fill every production that needed it (with land connections to the HQ) to the brim, harbour finally started getting some coal. But instead of shipping it to the island that needed it, it kept feeding those same productions with it In the end it turned out that I had to set coal on 'Take out of store' on the island harbour (one near the armoury) that had no coal to start with, in order for my ships to bring coal there. I have no idea why it had to be that way when before the first harbour ran out of coal it was working normally - ships were bringing coal to the island automaticly.

It doesn't end there... My production of soldiers both on mainland and the island was steady again, but for some reason the number of soldiers coming to the latest fortress was still quite low. Then I figured out that no soldiers from the island were coming. Why? Well, I had two harbours on that island. Instead of sitting in one harbour and waiting for a ship to pick them up, they kept walking from one to the other, trying to catch up a ship or something. If only by an accident a ship would arrive at the harbour right on time it would pick up a soldier, but not necessarily - some ships just preferred to go around empty with no particular mission in mind. Setting one of the harbours to 'Stop storing' soldiers didn't help either - they kept walking to it and then walking back to the other. In the end I had to pull down the road between those two harbours so the soldiers would settle in one and wait for the ships.

And when I mentioned ships, they are something special. If you call an geologist or a scout to an island, they'll bring every single one they can grab there (instead of just one). Similarly, they brought all gold coins to the the harbour connected to the latest fortification (which is good), but when I build a simple guardhouse back on the mainland in order to be able to access some mining areas, they moved all those coins back, even though the guardhouse needed only 3 coins for its only soilder to reach elite status. And I even had a mint with land connections to that guardhouse.

Now back to soldiers - I know this is not exactly AI, but the script, but sometimes I have a fortress close to the border that is full of soldiers and during the time they all become elite. Now, due to some conquests, that particular fortress becomes redundant (it's not on border anymore so it doesn't need to be fully manned). Instead of those soldiers moving straight to the newly coquered fortifications, or to those that send their troops to conquer above mentioned fortifications, they move back to the nearest warehouse/harbour, while empty places get filled in by recruits. Not only those recruits are, well, innexperienced, but in this latest mission they were also coming from another island, which meant they needed time to get there. Because of that stupid algoritam, enemy managed to reconquer a couple of fortifiations

And for the end a honourable mention of enemy AI. They don't attack you unless you attack them (at this level, maybe they get more agressive later). That is fine - they're peaceful guys, but I build forts near the border and make their building burn down - they still don't consider it as an attack. I build a catapult and keep bombarding nearby barracks - they just keep dutifully reinforcing those barracks for every soldier I kill. Of course, stupid algoritam for catapult where helpers don't bring next stone until the first stone arrives (and therefore making your rate of fire depending on the proximity of the warehouse) gives them plenty of time to do that. But eventually they run out of soldiers and my catapult destroys the barracks - enemy still doesn't consider being under attack.

Then I finally attack their fortification and immediately they start retaliating. How? Usually by sending a ridiculously small number of troops against my strongest fortification in the area. Only those too far to reach it attack easier targets. So, I wait for a bit, kill their elite troops and if I had patience to wait longer I could probably kill them all, but I move in for a kill and capture their HQ too easlily, cause their own catapults were on the opposite side from it (close to the friendly border) and therfore useless to stop my expansion. Like you would think that all forts I built right next to their border would've given them some clue of my intentions

So, this is the end of my comments (ok, rants). I'll keep playing the game, only paying more attention not to depend too much on AI for moving goods/resources around and I hope there won't be a mission where I actually must have two harbours on the same land mass (and connected by roads). As for the enemy AI, well, I'll just exploit it

Originally Posted by Pex

I don't remember the last time I got so much carried away playing a game that I stayed up to almost 2am without realising it. This game did it to me last night

Yeah, you know the game is addictive when the sun is coming up and you're still playing... :-)

That said, it's definitely got a few annoying quirks. Luckily though there are ways to work around most of them!

For some reason it happened that I wasn't able to move my mouse pointer all the way accross the screen, which made one third of the screen to the right hand side was inaccessable.

I had this too, in DosBox - try rolling your mouse to the top/left side of the screen if the bottom/right are inaccessible. It might "reset" it.

Or even better try running straight out of windows. When you get an error message on loading just hit "ignore" - (it just can't find a second mouse port which doesn't matter for single player).

My helpers tend to take wheat from one farm to the furtherest possible mill, and at the same time wheat from a farm close to that mill to the brewery next to the first farm mentioned. Also even if I close production in a building, they still keep bringing raw materials to it. And finally, speaking of raw materials, those priority adjustment do not work for me on default level.

Yeah, the default settings suck. I usually set everything to be equal priority - that way it won't try heaving grain halfway across the map to a Mill when there's starving Donkeys and Pigs right next door. You can then tweak this if you want to, or just turn buildings on and off instead.

The other trick is to have a storehouse near your buildings that need the raw materials, to catch the overflow. So the excess grain and ore goes into the storehouse, and then when it's needed it's just a short hop to the smelter or mill or whatever. The raw materials (mines/farms) can be a long way from the storehouse, but the manufacturing buildings should be as close as possible.

Make sure that the other storehouses/HQ are set to "not accept" the raw goods. If you've got one "city center" with a storehouse and all of your industry around it, the distribution will be very efficient. On huge maps you might need two centers.

The other key is to have enough surplus - if you're always on 0-10 grain or coal then new stuff will be sent to empty buildings clear across the map. If your buildings are always stocked then new stuff will go to the storehouse - i.e. in the direction you want it.

The AI is actually very good at distributing stuff as long as you get your layout right. If it's not working then you're doing something wrong :-)

Also check for bottlenecks on roads - if there's more than one good waiting to be picked up at any flag, add more roads. There's no such thing as too many roads.

the game turns into how fast you can expand to the enemy border and then how quickly you can conquer them. There's no need to build more infractructure in the newly conquered territories (except for roads).

Yeah, I agree - most of the missions you don't need to actually conquer anyone for territory, and you end up with just fighting at the end. And when you outgun everyone else by 3-1 it's a foregone conclusion...

You might want to try editing the World Campaign missions - make a new folder called "WORLDS" in the main game folder, copy over the maps from DATA\MAPS2 and change the extensions to .SWD. Then you can open them with the editor. Add some extra starting positions closer to your own, and maybe adjust the resources.

So far my elite soldiers dispatch easily those low ranked enemy ones, though they struggle with the enemy elite.

It should be roughly 50/50 for the elite vs. elite. Your generals should eat enemy privates for breakfast. And if your privates are fighting enemy generals, you're doing it wrong ;-)

So, I built a fortress but for some reason no troops came to occupy it. I wasn't sure what was going on, since in previous missions it was happening automaticly, but when I checked it turned out that I had no soldiers left. I made sure that I didn't turn recriutment off and I didn't, my armoury was working at full speed and I had some 200 kegs of beer in storage. The tricky part was that my armoury was on one island and my brewery on the mainland. AI can't recognize recruitment as a need and therefore put beer and swords and shields in the same warehouse. So I decided to build a brewery on that island and another armoury on the mainland, which solved the problem, but I had to wait of course for both productions to pick up.

Or you could just set one storehouse to "not accept" beer and weapons - it will send all the ones it has to the other storehouse. One at a time, yep, but quicker than reproducing everything :-)

What happened next was that the armoury (and iron smelting) on the island ran out of coal...

I'm not sure what happened there - I've never tried shipping coal to industry an island.

Well, I had two harbours on that island.

That's probably the problem - more than one harbour per island screws things up completely. Also I read somewhere that you shouldn't connect islands by roads if there's also harbour connection.

There's so many little things that can go wrong with expeditions and islands, it's the most annoying part of the game to learn. But if you get it right it will work fine. You have to plan a bit more carefully - do you want the Armory etc on the island, or back on the mainland? And what goods do you set the Harbours to accept or not accept.

If you call an geologist or a scout to an island, they'll bring every single one they can grab there (instead of just one).

I hadn't noticed that - but I usually call all the geologists to a new hill anyway :-) They prospect the whole hill and I "build" a mine on every spot I want one eventually. But I don't connect them all with roads - just one or two or whatever I want right now. When a mine runs out I delete it and connect up a new one. That way you don't have to prospect a hill more than once or twice.

they moved all those coins back, even though the guardhouse needed only 3 coins for its only soilder to reach elite status.

Using coins on a single soldier is expensive! Ideally you should only be giving coins to soldiers in full watchtowers and fortresses... barracks and guardhouses should be immediately set to "not accept" coins.

Why? A single soldier will take 5 coins to go from private to general. But 9 soldiers in a fortress will take 12 coins to ALL become generals. So you get roughly four times as many generals from the same amount of gold.

I have a fortress close to the border that is full of soldiers and during the time they all become elite. Now, due to some conquests, that particular fortress becomes redundant (it's not on border anymore so it doesn't need to be fully manned). Instead of those soldiers moving straight to the newly coquered fortifications, or to those that send their troops to conquer above mentioned fortifications, they move back to the nearest warehouse/harbour, while empty places get filled in by recruits.

Yeah, you basically want to tell your soldiers where to go, but there's no simple commands for "go here". But there are ways to move them where you want them using the sliders.

First up, training - you want to fill towers and fortresses with privates so you can send them gold, then you want those generals to head back into storage. Assuming you know what each slider means by now, choose "Weak Defenders" and "Max # of soldiers" in all three locations. All your buildings should fill up. Set your towers to accept coins and let them upgrade.

When they're done, choose "Min # of soldiers" in all three. All your buildings should keep 1 soldier and the rest will head back to storage. Repeat as many times as you like to train up as many generals as you can/want.

Secondly, you can now change to "Strong Defenders" and max out the "border" occupancy rate - this will send your new generals off to the front.

Another trick is when you've taken over a bunch of enemy buildings and they've all got 1 of your generals sitting in them uselessly. You want to keep the building but you want your general back for attack.

Make sure your border occupancy slider is on maximum and change to "Weak Defenders". Then connect the newly-conquered building(s) by road (and set to not accept coins). Privates will march out of storage and fill up your new conquests. This means when you attack you'll get the general back out.

Basically you'll need to do a fair bit of adjusting to get the results you want - but there is a way to do everything you want. As long as you have enough soldiers of course...

And yeah they do walk all the way back to storage before going out to new locations. So - build a storehouse close to your front line before an attack, and be patient... or if you've got enough soldiers open another front so you can be attacking in one direction while the other is waiting for reinforcements.

And for the end a honourable mention of enemy AI.

Yeah, the AI sucks at attacking, defending, training soldiers, and doesn't build nearly enough catapults considering how genocidal the human players are.

They do a reasonably good job of building an efficient settlement though.

The only way to adjust the difficulty is with resources... so if you want to make a mission or map more difficult you can use the editor and maybe give the AI more easy gold.

I also like your idea of having to use conquered land - so maybe adding some extra computer players blocking access to iron and farmland would work to give that effect.

Some of the World Campaign missions are pretty cool - Africa is huge and a real challenge in terms of organisation. If you do the WORLDS/copy/rename thing you can play them as individual maps.

[Pex]

Haven't really had a chance to play this game since I wrote the previous post, but I thought I should reply to this thread anyway.

Originally Posted by fortydayweekend

I had this too, in DosBox - try rolling your mouse to the top/left side of the screen if the bottom/right are inaccessible. It might "reset" it.

Usually all I need to do is save the game, exit to dos(box) and restart it, so it's not such a big problem, just a minor annoyance. It doesn't happen that often either.

Yeah, the default settings suck. I usually set everything to be equal priority - that way it won't try heaving grain halfway across the map to a Mill when there's starving Donkeys and Pigs right next door. You can then tweak this if you want to, or just turn buildings on and off instead.

I'm' putting everything on equal priority as well, though it also means that you need to have at least one raw material production per one building that uses it. The reason I used quotations it that it's not necessarily raw material - I build two iron smeltings, one for armory and one for metalworks.

The other trick is to have a storehouse near your buildings that need the raw materials, to catch the overflow. So the excess grain and ore goes into the storehouse, and then when it's needed it's just a short hop to the smelter or mill or whatever. The raw materials (mines/farms) can be a long way from the storehouse, but the manufacturing buildings should be as close as possible.

Yeah, I've been doing that. Although all that micromanagement tends to annoy me sometimes, it's also necessary to make everything work fine. But...

Make sure that the other storehouses/HQ are set to "not accept" the raw goods. If you've got one "city center" with a storehouse and all of your industry around it, the distribution will be very efficient. On huge maps you might need two centers.

Problem is with harbours. You can tell your harbour not to accept coal if you want to ship that coal to another island. But if you use same raw material in more than one place (as in different islands) that's when it becomes tricky.

Or you could just set one storehouse to "not accept" beer and weapons - it will send all the ones it has to the other storehouse. One at a time, yep, but quicker than reproducing everything :-)

Yep, but again the problem is when harbours come into play. If you set a harbour not to accept something, you won't be able to ship it to a different island. But if you have a harbour full of beer and another full of weapons, AI can't realise that it needs to move one of them to another harbour in order to produce soldiers. Like I said, I solved the problem by actually telling harbour that didn't have beer to 'take it out of stock' and that was the clue for my ships to bring beer there. Funny but efficient.

There's so many little things that can go wrong with expeditions and islands, it's the most annoying part of the game to learn. But if you get it right it will work fine. You have to plan a bit more carefully - do you want the Armory etc on the island, or back on the mainland? And what goods do you set the Harbours to accept or not accept.

Like I said, it only works to a certain level. And planning is possible when you're replaying mission and know exactly where raw materials are, but in reality you often just build one stage at time and sometimes using limitted space you have as efficiently as possible.

But don't get me wrong. It's still a great game. It's just a pitty some of those issues exist and spoil the overall experience sometimes.

[Tomica]

Are there any user modifications to this game?
I don't mean the custom scenarios.

I mean, were there any user-made graphics for this game?
New unit types?

I saw the games in which those places were "empty", so the games could receive more unit or terrain types.

[Eagle of Fire]

Adding new unit types could theoretically destroy the balance of the game. And that's what make The Settlers and The Settlers II different from modern games.

So I guess not...

Where is the nearest vein of gold in the Europe map (world campaign map 1)? The guys from the Greece region have some and they are slaughtering me. I have looked in the Italian mountains and in the big mountain north of Italy (the Alps?). I can only find iron and coal.

P.S. your forum captcha is terrible and annoying. Just use Recaptcha when you need a captcha, and drop this 6 glyph garbage the forum uses.