Serf City: Life is Feudal
Description official description
A strategy game with cartoony graphics and an innocent line in humour. At the start of the level you choose a starting point, the intention being to get lots of flat land as well as resources to mine and ideally existing sources of trees, stones and water (for fish). Your people are vying for supremacy with up to 3 others.
The gameplay focuses on resource management. Each building requires a certain amount of wood (and stones for some of them) to be constructed and requires particular resources to perform its function successfully. Food must be produced (either fish, bread (requiring a windmill, grain-farmer and baker) or pork (requiring a pig-farmer and butcher as well as the grain-farm) to feed the people working in mines to produce the iron, coal and gold (as well as additional stones).
Huts and Watch-Towers are built to expand your territory, sometimes at the expense of an enemy's land (clever play involves targeting an area where your opponent has a crucial building, thus compromising his production).
To finally win the level, you must defeat your opponents. Combat is fought one-at-a-time by the little soldiers and a victory results in all surrounding buildings being lost.
The game features 30 preset missions. 6 tutorials missions will help beginners to learn the game mechanics. The game also offers the possibility to play semi-randomly (based on a 16-number key) generated maps. The map size varies from small maps, for quick matches, to large maps to, depending on how much RAM is available, huge maps, for very long matches as the fact that the in-game statistics can be displayed on a 50-hour scale illustrates. These semi-random maps can be played in single-player mode but can also be played by 2 players on one system, if you have 2 mice, in which case the screen is vertically split.
Spellings
- 工人物语 - Simplified Chinese spelling
Groups +
Screenshots
Promos
Credits (Amiga version)
13 People
Programming | |
Idea | |
Graphics | |
Intro- Extromusic | |
Soundeffects | |
Ongame-Music | |
Producer | |
Manual | |
Intro | |
Game Testing |
Reviews
Trivia
1001 Video Games
The Settlers appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Combat
The way the battles were handled in this game was infamously polite and hilarious. If you wished to attack an village, your soldiers would walk up to the enemy barracks and knock on the door. Then one of their units would come out and you would duke it out mano a mano. Repeat until either you or they ran out of units.
Development
One of Massive Development's (today a JoWood company) first projects was the porting of the highly successful Blue Byte game from Amiga to PC. To do this, Massive developed an Amiga to PC assembly language translator. Serf City: Life is Feudal sold several hundred thousand copies worldwide.
Awards
- Amiga Joker
- Issue 02/1995 – Best Game in 1994 (Readers' Vote)
- Issue 02/1995 – Best Strategical in 1994 (Readers' Vote)
- GameStar (Germany)
- Issue 12/1999 - #25 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
- Power Play
- Issue 02/1994 – Best Amiga Game in 1993
- Świat Gier Komputerowych (Poland)
- Issue 01/1995 - Golden Disk Award for the best foreign game of 1994
Information also contributed by Stillman
Related Sites +
-
Siedlercommunity (german)
A complete german site which offers descriptions, strategies, cheats and more for the first and the second part of "Die Siedler".
Identifiers +
- MobyGames ID: 425
Contribute
Know about this game? Add your expertise to help preserve this entry in video game history!
Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Robert Morgan.
Amiga added by Rantanplan.
Additional contributors: Trixter, Ummagumma, Terok Nor, Unicorn Lynx, Martin Smith, BostonGeorge, Patrick Bregger, Karsa Orlong, FatherJack.
Last modified February 27th, 2023.