The Settlers: Fourth Edition

The Good
A very detailed and very pretty looking settlement simulation game. Chop down trees to build buildings, mine ore, smelt the ore into metal and build weapons. Grow food, feed your sheep, slaughter the sheep for meat. You can spend hours watching your settlers walk around busily working. Trying to come up with the most efficient arrangement of buildings so everything is made quicker is a fascinating task.

The Bad
The game is extremely hard. It takes 14 tutorials just to learn how to make a sword. You cannot learn it on your own or through the manual because the interface is not intuitive. The AI is very skilled and aggressive and you have to be very good or you'll quickly become overwhelmed by hordes of enemy units. The first roman level if fairly easy because the AI is penned in by a desert, but after that you need to be very quick or you'll be crushed. The game is supposed to be about settling, but there is only one "free-settle" level which comes with the game, and all the single player scenarios are combat based.

The Bottom Line
A complicated simulation RTS game where you build a settlement. The focus being on combat and on supply chain management. You can lose the game because you built your grain mill too far from the wheat farm, creating a bottleneck and slowing down your weapons production. Quite satisfying if you can get it right.