The Settlers Online starts out familiarly for anyone who’s played a Settlers PC game. You begin with an untouched, newly found piece of land. The Mayor’s House has already been built, presumably with resources brought across on the boats. The first thing you need is wood, so you build a fir wood cutter to start cutting down trees. Next you build a sawmill to convert the logs into planks that can be used to build with. You’ll also need to build a forester to ensure you don’t completely use up the forest without replanting. Each of these buildings takes a few minutes to build so you can do quite a bit of waiting around as they complete. If you want to you can pay 2 crystal to complete each building instantaneously. Crystal can be bought with real currency, so this is how the free-to-play game is intending to extract revenue from players.

Build, wait, explore, wait, build…

The next step in the tutorial map is to send a geologist to find a stone deposit. This takes 4 minutes. You can halve the time by paying 25 crystal (and again by paying another 25), but you can’t get that geologist to find anything instantaneously. Now that you have a stone deposit you can build a mason to make stone blocks out of the stone deposit. Then you build a fishery that catches fish from nearby water. A Provisions House will convert the fish into food parcels. These parcels are what are called ‘buffs’ in the game, and can be provided to any of your working buildings to speed them up for a length of time. For example, a Fish Plate will increase worker productivity in one building of yours or your friend’s for 30 minutes, producing twice as much as normal for that period. The Provisions House is a bigger building so it costs 6 crystal to build instantaneously, and you can’t speed up the creation of food parcels.

Your next task is to send an explorer to explore a new sector. This takes 10 minutes, but can be sped up to 5 minutes by paying 10 crystals (and again to half that time again). Once a new sector is discovered it can be claimed for you by building a storehouse on it. This allows your settlement to expand further than just the sector you start in.

Now your geologist can search for a copper deposit, which takes another 10 minutes. Once it’s found you can build a copper mine over it and start producing copper ore. To convert the ore into a usable resource (bronze) you need a copper smelter. But the smelter needs something to burn, so you need a coking plant to make coal out of wood to provide your smelther with fuel. You can now also built a toolmaker, which converts bronze into tools.

Now you’re asked to build a barracks, but I’m out of stone so I have to wait.

Persistent game world - your settlers work when you’re not watching

Time lapses are long. The details tab of a building gives you a breakdown of an entire production process of a building including transport. For example, one of my masons, with a buff on it of a plate of fish takes 6 minutes 16 seconds to produce two pieces of stone. To build the barracks costs 120 stone…

Fortunately your settlers continue to work even when you’re not logged in, so the most efficient way of playing seems to be to do a few tweaks to your settlement and log off for the day. Then when you log in the next day you will have the resources to do a bit more building and recruiting. Spend that and log off to return the next day and do a bit more. Ubisoft even reward you for logging in on consecutive days: each day you log in you get a reward, and after 7 days you get 45 crystal.

Instead of waiting around for a few hours, you could also just buy the resources needed with crystals. But not all resources are available in the Trader. Bronze Swords, for example, aren’t, so you’re going to have to wait for those swords to be produced.

Next up is trying to recruit a unit. The most basic is the Recruit, and he costs 5 beer mugs and 10 swords. You also need to ensure you have a settler available in your settlement to recruit. Why one guy needs so many swords is a mystery. What isn’t a mystery is the amount of work it is to produce a beer: build a wheat farm, build a wheat field, build a well and build a brewery. It’s all very sensible but very time consuming (or costs a few rand if you don’t want to wait). Fortunately getting swords is easy because we already have bronze so all we need is a bronze weaponsmith.

If you wait an age (or go to sleep to return tomorrow) you will have enough beer and swords to hire a bunch of guys. But now you need a general too. For this you will need to build a tavern, since that’s where generals are generally hired. With a general and a set of recruits you can send out a small army unit to attack nearby bandits and loot their towns (it sounds more like we’re the bandits, but oh well). At this point the tutorial stops guiding you and simply requires you to reach the next level by gaining more XP through attacking bandit camps. Levels are gained by completing quests, and each level you go up allows you to use more buildings. The buildings I’ve described so far are all the basic buildings and about half of the intermediate buildings. There are still the 20 advanced and 10 expert buildings to explore. And, being an online, free-to-play game, there are bound to be more and more gameplay options being added as you play. Already there are little features which show a little popup saying ‘coming soon.’

Free-to-play means paying if you want to, and making it hard not to

Buying crystals is clearly what Ubisoft want you to do. They don’t come cheap. It’s 2 Euros for 200, which is about enough for 100 Stone, 100 Planks and 100 Coal in the Resources market, or you can buy a Starter Pack which contains 400 planks, 400 stone, 100 tools and 20 settlers. You can also spend more to get more crystals. 10 Euros, for example, buys you 1700 crystals. When I was playing a ‘happy hour’ began which added a bonus 20% on to all crystal packs. There are many ways to spend these crystals. You can beautify your settlement with basic roads for free, but if you want to make it look really good you need to spend crystals. You can buy a stone bench for 35 crystals, for example, or a bed of roses for 35. You can also replenish your stone and copper deposits by buying a Steel Chisel for 35 or a Copper Diviner for 35.

I will admit, I am not a big fan of this style of free-to-play gaming which takes more than one leaf out of Zynga’s book. The Settlers Online has not convinced me otherwise. The game is arduous if you want to get anything done in one sitting and avoid paying any money. If you limit yourself to a little while every day then you’re probably playing how Ubisoft intend the game to be played given the semi-real time nature of everything, but even then there is a lot of waiting around and more then a little busywork in the form of creating buffs to last while you’re not playing, or hurrying up building by paying crystals, or buying crystals so you can replenish your deposits, or sending out geologists to find new deposits. I can’t see myself playing without paying as the waiting is highly frustrating - but I would say 10 Euros should get you quite a number of hours of enjoyment since 1700 crystals is a pretty large amount. If you continue to play on an ongoing basis you’ll probably spend quite a bit more than that, however. The Settlers Online is a very different experience to previous Settlers games, both in the graphics (which are nice 2D sprites but not as beautiful as recent Anno games or Settlers games), the density of play and the focus on playing with friends. I don’t think it will necessarily appeal to Settlers fans, but rather to those looking for a social, daily gaming experience.

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