Your weapons workshop is one of the most important buildings you have. Keep it working non-stop. DETAILS Publisher TopWare Developer TopWare Genre Strategy Origin Europe Release Date 10/01/1998 Troops look good when they're standing still, but fall apart when it comes time to fight. Before building a new structure, your workers will have to level out the ground. City planning is as important as tactical knowhow. Here's my future weapons workshop, sawmill and woodcutter.

TopWare just doesn't seem to have their heart in this combat-oriented Settlers clone.

October 14, 1998

Let me start right off by saying that I loved Settlers and Settlers II. While they weren't the best of the 'god' games by and means, there was a really homey feel that you got from watching your villagers walk around, grow food, chop down trees, and fight with the enemy. In many ways, those games were the modern day equivalent of the old screen saver/game Little Computer People. Now the same team that created those titles has produced a new series with the same feel for Interactive Magic. The end result has all of the homeyness of the original Settlers series, but also tries to include more complicated combat – with disastrous results.

The basic storyline is pretty simple. You're a king whose son is trying to usurp the kingdom. As the game starts, you've been pushed back to one small corner of your kingdom, and your last town is in danger of falling. As the game progresses, you'll push your way back through the country that is rightfully yours, killing enemy soldiers as you go. In order to succeed, you'll have to manufacture food and weapons for your troops, a necessity that will require you to build farms, mills, and bakeries to grow, grind and bake grain and woodcutter's huts, sawmills and weapons workshops to get wood and shape it in to axes, spears and bows. Once you have all of these buildings complete, you'll need to train the appropriate personnel, farmers, woodsmen, carpenters and the like at the schoolhouse in order to get work started. Everything you build or produce requires raw materials, which are kept at a storehouse and delivered by serfs to locations when needed. Finally, you'll need basic laborers, the workmen who will shape raw materials like stone and wood into new houses.

Building cities is a lot of fun. Because it does take time for serfs to travel from point to point, you'll want to make sure that all of your buildings that rely on one another for materials are built as close together as possible. Woodcutters should be built near sawmills, which should in turn be built as close as possible to weapons shops so that your little workers don't have to cart things back and forth across town. I tried several different city designs just to find out how much of an effect inefficient layout has on player's games. The end result is pretty significant. If you want to win, you'll need to make sure things are where they need to be.

Training soldiers is pretty tricky and the entire game revolves around making sure your city has the infrastructure to do it properly. The most basic troop type is the militia unit that requires a raw recruit (trained at the schoolhouse) and an axe (manufactured at the weapons workshop). In times of dire need, these units will act as nice little roadblocks to slow down a better-prepared enemy. Once you have access to an armory workshop, you'll be able to produce leather armor and wooden shields, which will enable you to train axe fighters, lancers, and bowmen. Axe fighters will act as a strong shock troop who can rush enemy positions with great effectiveness, lancers are excellent at defense, and bowmen can cut down an enemy before they can ever get to a fight. Further building advances, like the coal and iron mines, the stables, the iron smithy and the weapons and armor smithies will allow you to build even more advanced troops like knights, pikemen and even crossbowmen. Once you've got a army together you're ready for combat.

Sadly, as much fun as it can be getting ready for a battle, Knights and Merchants just doesn't deliver the goods once you reach the battlefield. Basically it all boils down to bad AI routines for individual soldiers. Just watching your troops try to get in formation can be frustrating as each soldier has to wait until he's asked to move by another soldier before he'll take an action towards completing a formation. You'll end up watching helplessly for 30 seconds as your troops conduct a Keystone Cops type of comedy routine trying to get into a square. Soldiers will also end up ignoring your orders because of similar problems. Say you've got a group of axe fighters tangling with another army's group of axe fighters who are backed up by some archers. When you try to move another set of troops around the first set and attack the archers, one of your units will invariably take a swing at the opposing army's front line. Once any one of your troops attacks a group, whether it was your original target or not, the entire squad jumps in and starts fighting them. In this case to be cut down by the very archers they were supposed to be protecting. Creating strategies when you have to deal with troops who refuse to attack who they're supposed to gets frustrating fast.

Even without it's AI problems, Knights and Merchants would be pretty hard to recommend, as there's just not very much to do. Each different level consists of creating a town, churning out soldiers, and then attacking the enemy with troops that are identical to his own. The game's lack of variation, and its frustrating gameplay override any sort of joy you might get out of watching the people in your town mill around. Combine this with the fact that there are only 20 single-player missions to be found in the game and you've got a title that just can't hold up against the swarm of really good real-time strategy games that are out on the shelves. Although all signs point to the fact that it may suffer from the some of the same problems, most fans of this genre will want to wait for Settlers 3.

-- Trent C. Ward