Actually, only the food system of The Settlers should be illuminated, but there is still trouble. In the latest blog entry On the official The Settlers website, the development team talks about exactly how food is implemented in the new installment. However, there is no really new information compared to the catastrophic beta.
Instead, a discussion flared up in the chat about what The Settlers was supposed to be and what mistakes were made. Here the development team got carried away to explain a much more exciting aspect of The Settlers: The big rush problem. But here, too, the current project sounds like a bad idea for some fans.
The Settlers is currently in a test phase. In this way, the sharply criticized game should be improved until the release.
more on the subject
The Settlers: This is currently being worked on
It’s in the blog entry
In the new entry, the team wants to focus on the topic of food and explains in detail how the food supply currently works on the technical test server. However, this isn’t too different from how food was implemented in the first major beta earlier this year.
So food is still not a necessary resource. Instead, we can speed up the production of various farms. So food is an (important) means of doubling efficiency. This is where The Settlers differs, for example, from earlier offshoots in which mines needed food. The team justified this design decision as follows:
“Had we made food mandatory, players would have been deprived of the choice to use this system or not.”
The team hasn’t quite figured out exactly how food boosts settler production in the residential buildings. This is one of the issues that is currently being worked on.
However, the system continues to be harshly criticized in the comments. The most important points here include:
- As an essential resource for survival in a building game, food shouldn’t be optional.
- The system ensures playful arbitrariness and indicates a lack of complexity.
- The system makes the rounds too easy to calculate, since an optimal construction sequence always crystallizes over time.
- If mines work well even without food, military production runs too fast, which encourages rushes.
Already at the beginning of the year, the revised version of The Settlers was very harshly criticized, including by our settler expert Maurice. Here’s what the problem was back then:
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The Settlers – Maurice is appalled at what Ubisoft has made of the big comeback
This solves the rush problem
The development team then referred directly to the criticism from the comments. In doing so, they addressed the fear that the food system would support rushes. Here it was revealed how Ubisoft Mainz plans to prevent rushes on its part. Accordingly, there are now neutral factions on the maps that block all access to the opponent at the beginning of the game.
This additional hurdle must first be overcome before the attack on the enemy’s village can take place. But this innovation also caused a shake of the head in the comments. Simply clogging enemy access points with AI factions would only create a new meta, and each round would eventually become completely predictable.
how do you see it? Do you think the approach makes sense or have you already given up all hope? Write us your opinion in the comments!