When looking for a Doom WAD Club, I stumbled upon this place, and I’ve always been interested in the Settlers 2, but as a kid it was too hard for me.
I’ve started playing this with the Return to the Roots port, which means I can run it in superultrawide (5120×1440), not realising the History Edition also offers that. The game is charming with it’s graphics, music and sound effects, but it’s hard. It’s hard to keep an economy going while also keeping a strong military presence. I gave up in mission 5, after being steamrolled by the enemy.
I switched to the Settlers II History Edition, which makes the AI behave way different than the RttR port. This makes them less aggressive and mission 5 seems to be beatable again.
While the RttR port is nice and has some good QoL features, the aggressive AI just breaks the campaign. The only major downside is that you can’t use cheats, which means you can’t speed up the game too much. This makes some maps a real drag because you slowly have to kill the enemy with catapults and wait for his units to die down.
Mission 8 is a bitch. There seems to be a bug where ships don’t transport the goods you want (such as food for miners), which meant I was very starved for resources and made it with the skin of my teeth by savescumming, since battles are RNG-based and you can cheese it. It took me almost 19 hours (at double speed, so probably around 10 real hours).
For the last two missions I switched back to RttR, because that 4x speed is a blessing and I didn’t want to spend three evenings per mission.
I didn’t play the World Campaign, because there’s not even a story and the maps are absolutely huge.
I’m going to try the 10th anniversary version though, which is remade in 3D and allows you to empty your barracks (wow!) so you can actually decide where your army goes a bit.
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