The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom

Game is unplayable because it requires a Ubisoft launcher that Ubisoft doesn't support.

The Game: Graphics: 8/10, Story: 2/10, Multiplayer: 5/10, Gameplay: 4/10.
Its such a shame that Settlers 2 or even 3 outshine such a later title, Even Knights and Merchants holds up better in terms of gameplay.... Settlers 7 reached too far, too fast and fell.

".....It was a great game but as of 2017 Ubisoft no longer runs their servers that the game needs to communicate to in order to activate. Sorry to say the game is now bricked by the online DRM because its now offline. Such a shame.... I can still go back to my old Dos Settlers 2 game 25 years later and it works...."

Update: Since uninstalling UPlay and installing Uplay again from the support site the game now works. (The issue stems from the fact installing the game from scratch with UPlay already installed on anther Disk causes the old version to install over the new one which screws up the DRM.)

Thoughts:

Not for fans of Settlers 6. Sadly not as good. There are many additions that are an improvement, but the AI and necessity to multitask one too many micromangement production chains all over the map results in the game becoming a strain to manage it all while dealing with your opponents. This game opted for a much more competitive, strategic and time-pressure oriented gameplay over the previous game's casual and laid-back buildup at your own pace. "Victory Points" changes the entire game dynamic.

Pros

• Graphical landscape details (rivers, structures, ruins, geographical blemishes, oddities, or mountains)
  
• Varying geographical/terrain campaign map appearances from one to the next
  
• Victorian art style for characters and structures looks pleasing
  
• Voice acting
  
• Campaign min-quests felt like a nice small goal to work towards to unlock a level bonus (military or financial aid
  
• Protagonist character is agreeable and likable
  
• Combat is now handled automatically, after deciding to attack, move, or disengage. (AKA on rails) I much prefer this over the previous game with 1/3 or 1/2 of the army pathfinding getting lost. No tracking down where they went the long way around. Command a general's armry to attack, guard, or retreat to a sector. Both movement and battling is automatic. Observe, or return to building
  
• Fortifications retalitate. (None>Wooden>Stone. Military on rails must defeat sector-integrated cannon towers on their path to the keep. Good defense to thwart an army less than half-capacity, or ill-equipped with siege weaponry.
  
• Conquering sector holding timer. This prevents blitzkrieging a sector to destroy all occupying structures. Invading army must occupy the sector for roughly a minute after capture while the meter swings towards their favor. This allows time for the owner's army to arrive interrupting, at which point the meter freezes until the battle is resolved. Any quick grabs for an undefended sector would require a general well away unable to arrive in time
  
• Trifecta of Military, Science monastery and Trading outposts plays an important role in everything. Just as much as you can conquer a sector, you could bribe it to your control with gold and trade resources, or proylestize/convert the sector to your religion. Each of these three aspects can give big edges to your settlements and building capability.
  

Cons

• It's clear to me this game was pushed to be substantially far more strategic and competitive than its predecessor, geared towards multiplayer. There is a constant strain of time-pressure all the time to do everything faster, or in a formulaic way to race your opponents. Towns must be built, while production chains micromanaged, while conquering sectors, racing to research technology first and obtain exclusive trade rights before the opponent. All this must be done while defending an enchroaching enemy and buildings flash about broken chains and lack of resources because a supporting gatherer somewhere is depleted. It gets overwhelming fast, it always feels like you are behind until you can visualize victory due to an unstoppable military. It takes a long time and effort to get that military, mind you. Very little time to slow down and analyze all your production as you are needed nearly everywhere to micro-manage. In a nutshell, the game feels like it was heading towards a RTS (real time strategy), but RTS are not this needlessly overcomplicated
  
• Due to the racing your opponent all the time, economic breakdowns are disasterous. When you recover, the enemy has widened the lead
  
• AI is far superior at multitasking all the sectors needing attention and production/supply chains, including knowing when it can beat you with it's army
  
• logistics This is the worst one and what really makes the game frusterating...I don't recall settlers 6 logistics having a nightmare problem. This game it is all too often that the iron and coal are in distant sectors apart for example. The teamsters/storehouse guys I belive are teh problem for any production chain in the game. Unlike the last game, it takes substantially more time for these guys to move items around from where they are needed inputs, and outputs to the next stage. On a larger map, it easily turns into a city builder "street traffic" nightmare that can often plague these kind of games. Even placing storehouses in excess around, logistics are still a mess! It is a frequent sight to check your resource menu and see the majority of pre-production items in the hundreds and frusteratingly wondering why the inputs are not being adequetly delivered to the facilities requiring them. Simply put, when production is not localized into one sector, it slows down greatly. Unfortunately, half the maps are deliberately designed so multi-component production is not available in one sector
  
• Difficult to expand sectors in the beginning and mid-game. You start with a small amount of gold coins and soldiers. If you can't use either to get yourself a steady trading market, or a sector with gold in it, you will be playing catch-up for a long time
  
• Simple trading of resources has become like a monopoly map spiderweb. Much like the science research tree, a menu that shows all the outposts all over the map. Produce tiers of traders to obtain exclusive rights to that outpost, each that connects to another. Only the owner can trade that resource outpost. This means whoever owns it first is the only one that can trade x for y. It's a little to cuthroat and monopolizing for my liking. If your opponent happens to take the good ones, or that one resource you direly need, your in for the hurting
  
• Science/technology tree (Produce tiers of monks and dispatch to a monastery for a permanent upgrade modifier, such as 2x troop movement speed, or miners work ~50% faster.) Just the same problem as trading. Early game race for a multitude of permanent performance boosts for settlers, military, or other boons. First person to research it gets it exclusively. It feels like spam build clerics/brothers/fathers repeatedly in a biding war for research.
  
• Despite the trifecta of Military, Science, and Trade, it ultimately all falls short into the shadow of Military. The game is overemphasized on the conquest and importance of strategically attacking and controlling sectors. No matter what the map objectives are, or the resources and methods, everything turns back to military to actually get anything done with your opponent
  
[*]Victory points. A huge contributor to the need for speed. A number of conditions like quantity of populace, sectors military, technologies, unique trade outpost, or other metrics award a point. Holding the required points (typically 4-7) for 3 min is automatic victory

Conclusion:

As you can see, i dislike the multitude of pushing the player to race the opponent in almost every category. Gone is the casual build up of your city identifying one need to the next. If you don't push to gain all the boosts you can, you'll find yourself on the losing side. It gets frusterating with the number of tasks requiring your attention and tieing everything together. I had to restart later levels, especially DLC multiple times. After finishing the campaign, I tried to hang in until the end, but the DLC3 "rebellion" campaign was far too trying on my patience. I abandoned the finale after losing by less than 2 mins on the objective timer. Unfortunately, I find the game requiring you to be meticulous too often. I can't recall nearly having this much trouble in Settlers, Anno, or Tropico before. Sadly, it's a shame. This game had a lot of potential and portions I enjoyed, but the "competitiveness" seemed to rule the day

Note: Uplay installation fine for all my ubisoft games. Didn't bother me one bit. Launch from steam

Ubisoft games should come with a disclaimer that you are on your own, once they have your money.

I believe myself to be reasonable. 140 games purchased through Steam, some of which were not up to expectations. But this is the only review I'm posting, because Ubisoft support is THAT bad.

A wonderful resource pipeline management game crippled beyond playing by its always-online DRM.

This is the game that made refuse to buy ANYTHING with always-online DRM. Any hiccup in your connection, or Ubisoft's server, will instantly force pause your game until resolved. This time, game pirates win the day.

Real customers are at a distinct disadvantage here.

Death to Double DRM

It's not a half bad game, especially if you play it online with friends. But, given recent updates, there's no way in hell I'm playing this game anymore - I'm not downloading the Ubisoft DRM, or as their advertising team would probably call it, "community portal." I don't want to be part of Ubisoft's crappy community; that's why I have Steam.

Steam is already essentially DRM; for some reason, however, Ubisoft feels this isn't enough, and requires you to sign into their proprietary service as well. I don't know about the average Steam user, but a large portion of why I use this platform is so I don't have to have an account for every game I want to play, and because I know, once a game is authorized with Steam, I can play it on any of my computers, with or without an internet connection. Ubisoft's proprietary overlay DRM is not only redundant - it's unreliable, requires an internet connection at all times, and lest we forget, defeats the purpose of downloading a game through Steam to begin with.

The community aspects of Steam are are a large aspect of why I use it. In my eyes, therefore, letting Ubisoft stomp all over that by requiring the use of their servers isn't just inconsiderate for Steam users, it devalues Steam as a whole. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to go back to the mid 2000s where I had to have an account for every game I played. So, seriously, cut this shit out - I bought the game, and in doing that, I submitted to Steam's DRM. I did this for the convenience and the community having one centralized platform for mine and my friends gaming provides. Don't fuck it up by letting terrible companies like Ubisoft take a Steaming (hah, see what I did there?) dump by complicating what is otherwise a fantastic gaming platform. Ubisoft, even if your games are occasionally half decent, stop being a raging dick and let me play them when I want to, you bloated, antiquated tumor of a company.

And yes, I know this review went on a little too long, and it probably sounds a bit foolish. I guess I just get a little pissy when a company that already has my money makes it more complicated to play an already mediocre game. I'm out.

Edit #1:
In response to my overly critical view of DRM...

You guys are right; this was largely a rant about my feelings on redundant DRM; I don't necessarily have a problem with one layer of DRM, but two seems a tad excessive. More to the point was that I don't recall the game requiring me to go through UbiSoft when I initially bought it, and it bugs me that I now have to make a UPlay account to play a game I'd already paid for and had played without trouble. Had it been advertised when I bought it that UPlay was required, I wouldn't have bought it, or if I had, I wouldn't have complained; I only wrote this review after it prompted me to make an account to play a game I'd previously played without an issue.

As to the review of the game, you're right, I didn't say much about what I thought of it, other than at the end when I said I thought it was mediocre at best. But I've also played more than 9 hours of it; I just don't always bother going online, and end up running Steam in offline mode a lot.

And as to those who don't think 9 hours is enough to finish a tutorial.... I never even played the tutorial, I just started playing the game, and once I'd figured out the (admittedly interesting) resource mechanics, it was fairly intuitive other than the clunky UI and occasionally buggy building interface. That was also part of the problem; the DRM wasn't just redundant, many of the games mechanics were too. There were a number of cool mechanics, but they were implemented so ham-handedly and eclipsed by numerous cliche mechanics that it wasn't enough to play the game.

So, yeah, I wrote the original review after not having played the game for awhile and becoming frustrated when I was prevented from giving the game another shot because of my own obstinant refusal to make yet another gaming account. But, DRM or not, I'd still have given it a thumbs down.

Also, Proysen, do you really want your entire library of games to be unplayable for a few days when your dumbass neighbor backs into a telephone poll and comcast can't get a guy out there for three days? The internet is great, and you're right, most of the time we are connected if we want to be. But anyone who seriously believes in 100% server uptime needs to pull their heads out of the sand.

I really loved this game back when I bought it, but now it requires UPlay and won't run off steam unless I download a different launcher. I don't buy steam games to have to use other launchers. Boo to Ubisoft.

This is a great game. If you like the idea of RTS, but don't like the super fast twitch gameplay that requires you to have a certain number of "actions per mniute" to feel like you're being successful, this might be the game for you.

*First, I want to address UPlay. I've been playing this game recently and UPlay with it works great. I've had no issues (Oct 2015) even though this game is so old. I had to contact Ubisoft because I bought this so long ago it was apparently registered to an old account of mine. Their customer service let me know the account name, and I logged and was able to play since I remembered the password. So, thanks to their customer service I didn't have to re-buy this gem. New buyers obviously won't have this problem anyway.*

This game is a nice mix of "casual, but deep". The setting is fairly light-hearted and casual, but the game is by no means easy if you ramp up the difficulty! It has a very satisfying campaign, but skirmish modes are where the real replayability is. You can adjust maps and scenarios to your hearts content to make for some really interesting matches. Much more customizable than any other RTS I know. Additionally, you can design how your own castle on the map looks for your skirmish or multplayer games.

I couldn't recommend this game more. It's too bad people feel the need to rip on a fantastic game because their ideology is against UPlay requirements. But that's what it is. If you take that into account, you'll notice that this game doesn't actually get mixed reviews from the people who take the time to actually review it; it gets great reviews (and looks how many years later!).

The game itself is OK. It's not fantastic, and unless it's on deal off, it's probabally not worth the hefty price-tag. Especially considering the huge amount of DLC that it tries to drag you into buying.
However this is only the peak of many problems. For one, it's buggy, or was when I last played it - I haven't had the chance in a long time now because ubisoft STILL hasn't verified that I have the game on my account. In fact I only write this review because they SHUT DOWN the account that owned this game.
I like ubisoft games, but their 'U-play' is just a pitiful, buggy mess that does nothing to hamper piracy and only saves them money by getting their crazier customers to buy their games twice.

I honestly think steam should pull these sorts of games from steam until ubisoft either removes U-play or at the very least makes it usable and not this intergral part of the game.

I loved this game and played it to death when it first came out. Recently updated my graphic card and wanted to see how the game runs with everything maxed out. Avter 2 hours of patching and remembering my uplay account info uplay finally decided to crash and keep crashing on me. Love the game. HATE HATE HATE uplay

Ubisoft support is worthless. Lost access to one of my two uplay accounts. Instead of verifiying me as a user and grant me access to an account that has been inactive since 2010 - they told me to go buy the game one more time.
Ubisoft/Uplay the wannabe apple-gestapo.

Regards,
Former customer

Interesting concept.
Neat reimaging of the Settlers universe and gameplay.
But...

Uplay.
Uplay alone ruins everything.
But then... so does the lunch break game timing.
I played older Settlers missions for hours. Days.
But this one? Rush rush rush!
Game over!
Meh.
Settlers 7 tried to be Starcraft 2. And failed.
Do not recommend.

i liked the campaign a lot! and the atmosphere is charming.
But... i cant recomend this game because of U-Play!

loved the original settlers, settlers 2, and even enjoyed this one when i orginally purchased it, years ago. Tried to reinstall this game last night after several years of benching it on the word that ubisoft had dialed down the draconian drm. Never got that far to find out. bundled uplay that was installed with the game was outdated and crashed. downloaded new version of uplay off their site and got to authentication screen. key already in use. support site utterly useless. uplay account on xbox, pc, etc all tied to personal email account that ive had more then 15 years. Never buying another ubisoft product on PC again. tldr - game is cool, uplay blows.

Highly recommend - this game unfortunately is really underrated, a poor victim of the backlash back in the days over Ubisoft's DRM policies. But it is one of the very rare RTS and city building genre blending games out there.

Some things that come to mind:
- Extremely charming
- Many extremely gorgeous and expansive maps and locales for you to build your medieval city in
- Multiplayer is a lot of fun, and is one of the friendliest RTS out there given the much slower pace in this game than your traditional RTS
- As a city builder game (more in the vibe of Caeser 3 than SimCity mind you), it is done extremely well too
- Victory point system makes multiplayer games really interesting

Ubisoft always on DRM made it very difficult for me to complete a game due to often being thrown out of the game whenever something happened with the connection between me and Ubisofts DRM server.

When it works it's quite enjoyable, although it has lost alot of it's soul from the original series (Settlers I to IV).

In my opinion, this was one of the first and greatest victims of the DRM wave of the past few years. While other games like Assassin's Creed had people up in arms about "Always On" DRM systems, they were still popular enough to be successful. Settlers 7, on the other hand, never stood a chance. As a strategy/city building game with a lot of unusual mechanics and a bit of a learning curve, this game was never going to appeal to everyone. But, thanks to a giant dose of Ubisoft bad PR, the target audience avoided it like the plague. And that's a MASSIVE shame, because it's great!

Settlers falls into that odd "almost a sim game" category of strategy, with a slower pace and less of a direct combat focus than your average RTS game (such as Starcraft). Personally, I love this genre, but good examples of it are unfortunately rare. In the past, series like Dungeon Keeper, Stronghold, Startopia, and earlier versions of Settlers itself had a good cult following, but these days they're a bit harder to find, with lesser-known titles such as the Anno series (also heavily damaged by Ubisoft DRM), or independant titles like Reus, Towns, or Gnomoria. Unfortunately, this is further harmed by the sorry state of the Sim genre itself, with the majority of city builders being money-sucking Facebook-inspired social "games", and major blunders like the reboot of SimCity.

But, politics aside, how does The Settlers 7 stand up on its own? It's a game full of interesting ideas. Similar to the afforementioned Anno and Stronghold series (which, to be fair, were probably inspired by The Settlers to begin with), the majority of the game is spent handling production chain strategies. The number of these chains is VERY daunting to those who don't enjoy such systems, but they're pretty intuative once learned, such as farm -> wheat -> bakery -> bread. The unique twist here is the division of science, trade, and military tactics. All three require development of these production chains in various ways, but unlike most games, they don't require you to do all three simultaneously. In fact, the game heavily encourages specialization in one or two of those choices in order to monopolize (i.e. steal all the best techs, steal all the best trade posts, or have the most military muscle). Thanks to an interesting "Victory Point" system, you can win the game in a variety of ways other than just destroying your enemy. In my many playthroughs, this resulted in some wonderfully bizarre situations, including winning a game mere seconds before an army destroyed my most valuable city by just barely holding out long enough with my economic strategy.

Presentation-wise, I always loved the way the game manages to paint a board game-like set of zones to be settled, painted into breathtakingly beautiful maps, resulting in surprisingly natural-looking landscapes for a game that asks the player to flood the place with roads and buildings. Technologically, it's nothing crazy (the game is three years old at time of writing), but it has a wonderful fairy tale asthetic, light-hearted, but with more of a focus on beauty than goofiness. The campaign is a bit campy, but I found it quite enjoyable, with good voice acting and a good method of injecting each character's personality into their tactics.

Overall, I understand how this game doesn't appeal to the hardcore, as I'm sure its complexities could easily be exploited if the game was played in an ultra-competative way. On the other hand, the more casual gamer could be easily scared away by the game's unfamiliar systems. And everyone else? They were already scared away by the DRM, it seems! But, if you are in that middle group, I highly encourage you to overlook all that and just have fun. The game is a bit old now and Ubisofts money-grabs have been abandoned (at time of writing, all DLC is included with the game), so while you won't find any strangers to play with or anything, there's still plenty of content and great city-building strategy fun to be had!

6.5/10. A decent game, worth playing if you like the genre, but more about the campaign than multiplayer or vs. ai.
Don't get out of a sale because there is little replayability once the campaign is done. Worth it for fans of the genre, but if there is anything else in your wishlist I'd recommend against this.

This is by far the best game of it's type I have ever played! I am just disapointed we have not seen anymore DLC or a settlers 8!

If you like games like ANNO or Dawn of Discovery you will probably enjoy this game. It's all based around production, as the video explains, but its much faster than other BB titles like Dawn of Discovery. You have the ability to jump right into the action if you want to roll military. Or you can rush tech. The victory points offer a variety of ways to win the game. If you can turtle and hit all 5-7 victory points you will win after 3 or 4 hours in a 4 player game. The stock game comes with a good amount of maps that you can play around with. I would suggest playing the first 20 minutes of a skirmish over and over until you get the hang of how production and your choices in prestige affect your over all strategy. Because of the difficulty to really get in and enjoy the game I would give this a solid 3.5 of 5. If you can patiently learn all the little details that the game forces you to into it's a fun and addictive time sink. Side note: The Campaign is terrible but offers a tutorial for the first 6 missions. Just play Srim and you will have a good time.

An Excelent game. Really almost old school Settlers, which is really great. No more silly attacking the castle without trashing the neighbouring area's anymore and the likes. 6 made a good first move, and 7 completes it. The settlers of old is back!