The Settlers IV (PC) – Review – Tiny Villagers, Titanic Supply Chains

Is The Settlers IV a cozy village simulator masquerading as a real-time strategy contest, or a devious logistics spreadsheet that lures you in with cartoon piggies before sucker-punching you with supply-chain calculus? (Answer: emphatically both.) Underrated? Definitely, outside the German‐speaking world it’s remembered chiefly by people who can still recite lumber-to-sawmill ratios in their sleep. Overrated? Only if you believe every RTS needs a nuclear launch code to matter. Fundamental? Strip it from history and half the city-builders you love lose the branch where beer literally recruits soldiers. Disposable? Tell that to the blue-tinted Viking miner who’s waited twenty-four real-world years for you to connect his gold vein to a smelter. Like that roommate who insists on brewing IPA in the dorm bathroom, endearingly weird, occasionally explosive, and impossible to forget, Settlers IV still occupies permanent mental real-estate in my retro neighbourhood.

Historical Context

Blue Byte’s Settlers lineage started in 1993, carving out a sweet spot between SimCity’s zoning zen and Command & Conquer’s caffeine twitch. By the late ’90s the RTS landscape was a mosh-pit: StarCraft (1998) birthed Korean esports, Age of Empires II (1999) made medieval nerds of us all, and economic sims such as Anno 1602 gently colonised Teutonic CD-ROM trays. The Settlers III (1998) had modernised the series with free-walking carriers, roads were out, speed was in, and, in the process, angered some flag-pole purists. So when The Settlers IV landed on 15 February 2001, weeks before Ubisoft finalised its Blue Byte acquisition, expectations were messy: restore charm, keep tempo, add something shiny.

My personal timeline then? Weekdays after class meant Neo-Geo arcade cabinets; nights meant a dial-up tug-of-war between Napster queues and Counter-Strike patches. A cover-disc demo of Settlers IV arrived via a German import magazine. Within minutes I was hypnotised by tiny Romans hefting planks while a tooltip solemnly advised, “Beer is required to recruit soldiers.” Cue rhetorical question: did teenage me abandon Diablo II cow runs for barley farming? Self-answer: selbstverständlich.

Graphically, Settlers IV showcased Blue Byte’s new 32-bit 2-D engine: alpha-blended shadows, translucent water that rippled under a fisherman’s skiff, and zoom levels that let you snoop on individual berry bushes. Not full 3-D like Warcraft III, but boy did it sing on late-Pentium III rigs. Ubisoft’s marketing ran with that angle: “Build an empire at work on grand-dad’s office PC, then take it home for the 100-hour campaign.” A low-resolution fallback even let Windows 95 dinosaurs join the party.

Mechanics

Boot a skirmish and our absurd through-line barrels, literally, into view: alcohol. Romans brew beer; Vikings ferment mead; Mayans process cocoa into stimulants. In Settlers IV your barracks flat-out refuses to hand a wannabe soldier a spear until he’s downed some frothy liquid courage. Promotions, however, require gold coins minted from coal and ore; booze merely opens the door to enlistment. Good luck rushing an opponent if your farms haven’t sprouted barley yet.

Three playable civilisations greet you at launch, Romans, Vikings, Mayans, each with unique buildings and mana-powered “environment spells.” Romans terraform, Vikings hurl lightning, Mayans turbo-charge crops with sun totems. Looming over the map, but never under your control, is the Dark Tribe: purple-suited settlers led by Morbus, a banished demi-god literally allergic to greenery. Wherever their miners tread the earth turns ashen, crops wither, and animal herds vanish, a Saturday-morning-cartoon version of industrial blight.

Campaign mode strings these mechanics into four arcs culminating in a villain chapter where you pilot Morbus himself, eradicating forests to regain god-tier mojo. Cut-scenes lean on claymation slapstick: Vikings catapult fish at Roman fortifications; Mayan shamans debate weather patterns like caffeinated pod-casters; Morbus sneezes every time a pine cone lands near his throne.

But the heart of Settlers IV is its supply web. Wheat farms deliver sheaves to mills; mills grind flour for bakeries; bakeries feed miners; miners haul coal and gold; smelters mint coins; coins polish up raw recruits who’ve already chugged their beer. Need iron swords? Fire up foresters, woodcutters, sawmills, iron mines, smelters, weapon smiths, armouries, and finally the training site, thirteen steps if you count wells and farms. Remove one link, and the whole ballet face-plants harder than a Viking after a mead bender.

Unlike the first two Settlers instalments, where players planted flag-poles to divide roads into relay segments, Settlers IV sticks with III’s free-walk carrier system. Settlers choose their own shortest path, trampling invisible dirt lanes that visually upgrade from dusty footpaths to tidy stone roads as traffic intensifies. You can’t micromanage intersections, but you can widen chokepoints with automatic paving and ease bottlenecks by breeding donkeys, pack animals that slot themselves onto high-volume routes like medieval UPS trucks.

Watching those barrels shuffle along self-made trails is equal parts hypnotic and panic-inducing. One missed grain delivery can starve your brewery; one brewery hiccup can leave the barracks dry ; one dry barracks means the Dark Tribe knocks in your wooden door before you can say “prost.” A single pine tree auto-planted by the game’s eco-AI once blocked my busiest intersection; shortages rippled outward until my spear-line faced Vikings armed with iron axes and hangovers, not ideal. (Did I rage-quit? Obviously not; I bulldozed the tree, cursed the RNG gods, and quadrupled barley output like a man possessed.)

Zoom all the way in and the micro-detail still astonishes. Viking geologists taste rocks before labelling them “gold”; Roman tavern queues shuffle forward with impatient foot-taps when beer stocks dip; Mayan farmers loft maracas to scare crows. Click enough times and units spout pop-culture quips: a stone-cutter channels Indiana Jones, “It belongs in a temple, but I’m keeping it!”, while the brewer, clearly sampling his wares, occasionally barks, “Et tu, barley?” That line isn’t in the official manual (my Pythonic comedy origins betray me), but the spirit fits.

When combat finally erupts, dozens of brightly-armoured sprites trade blows while environmental spells sizzle overhead. Romans might flatten a plateau to march their cohort; Vikings call down storm clouds that zap enemy wells; Mayans turbo-grow wheat fields faster than you can say vanilla latte. Dark-Land corruption creeps across the minimap like purple ink, sterilising fields and forcing frantic counter-terraforming. It’s less about microed skirmishes and more about macro supply nerves: whose beer lines, ore loops, and mana crystals will hold longest?

Multiplayer ups the tension. The fog of war hides rival traffic patterns, so players spy with outposts or gamble blind. Nothing feels better, or worse, than realising your neighbour stockpiled twice your beer when spearmen start knocking. I once watched a Roman opponent rush my base with Tier 0 drunks while their gold-powered elites queued quietly behind them; by the time I recognised the feint, purple Dark-Land crept under my barley fields and the game politely popped up the defeat screen. Lesson: never trust an enemy who builds two breweries before a barracks.

In 2002 Blue Byte doubled down with Trojans & the Elixir of Power, a full add-on that added a fourth playable race, puzzle missions, and new Dark-Tribe plague weapons. Trojans recycle enemy iron instead of mining it, meaning every battlefield becomes a thrift shop. Watching scavenger settlers strip swords from fallen foes and repurpose them into fresh blades is absurdly satisfying, a proto-green-economy metaphor wearing a bronze helmet.

Legacy and Influence

So why isn’t Settlers IV front-row in English-language RTS retrospectives? Timing and vibe. 2001 belonged to polygon chic (Civilization IIIEmpire Earth) and console tactics (Advance Wars). Reviewers praised Settlers IV’s hand-drawn charm but knocked its “slow pace,” missing that snail-tempo crisis management was the entire joke. And with Blue Byte’s humour steeped in German puns, localisation never hit Blizzard-level bombast.

Yet its fingerprints linger. Firefly’s Stronghold fused food variety with army morale, straight from the Settlers keg. Haemimont’s Tropico shows visible supply chains and citizen slapstick that feel distinctly Blue Byte. Modern colony sims like RimWorld thrive on zoom-in voyeurism first pioneered by Settlers ants. Even Ubisoft’s own Anno 1800 features beer festivals that echo Settlers IV’s tavern hustle, family DNA never lies.

Within the franchise, IV marks the last fully 2-D outing before 2004’s polygonal Heritage of Kings ditched automatic paths for direct haulage, shedding much of the charm. Ask five fans which entry embodies “true Settlers” and you’ll hear five answers, but the beer-loving middle path? That’s IV, the Goldilocks fusion of whimsy, tension, and micro-macro slapstick. Ubisoft’s 2023 History Edition patched in widescreen support and Windows 11 compatibility, tacitly admitting the keg still has foam left.

Most lasting, perhaps, is Settlers IV’s sly lesson about invisible systems. You can’t out-click a failing bakery; you must solve upstream grain flow. In an age when global supply chains turn real-world headlines, revisiting a 2001 game to untangle logjams feels eerily relevant. When semiconductor shortages throttled console launches in 2020, I half-joked that the planet needed a regiment of Roman carriers to lug silicon wafers between logistics flags, my friends laughed until they realised I wasn’t entirely kidding.

Closing Paragraph + Score

Boot The Settlers IV today, via Ubisoft Connect or a lovingly preserved CD through a Windows 98 VM, and two things strike you. First, the resolution stretches like pixel taffy across a 4K monitor. Second, the diorama magic ignites instantly: brewers wiping brows, donkeys braying at invisible traffic cops, gold coins clinking into smelter vats. Five minutes later you’re triaging a barley bottleneck because a self-sprouted pine tree blocked a footpath, and half your would-be legionnaires are thirsty civilians again. Could the AI use fresh synapses? Absolutely. Could the interface benefit from drag-and-drop queues? Without question. But iron out every creak and you’d steam-press the soul right out of the experience.

Final verdict: 8.5 / 10, call it an export-strength lager: rich, slightly sweet, maybe too foamy for the impatient, yet brimming with design yeast that modern games still cultivate. Settlers IV doesn’t merely let you wage war with beer; it reminds us that every great victory begins with a farmer, a well, and a loaf of bread. So here’s my belated toast: to Blue Byte’s merry pixel army, forever marching down self-made paths, prost!

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