OS/2 Shareware BBS: 11 Util/11-Util.zip/gg2-aug.zip/GGUIDE2.ZIP/info/serfcity.faq

Text File | 1995-07-28 | 69KB | 1,478 lines

NOTE:  This FAQ is under construction.  If you are interested in helping
with writing various sections or if you have suggestions, please do not
hesitate to let me know.

Jack Vinson
[e-mail]

Last Update: 5 September 1994
Version 2.42



        Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about

                 SERF CITY
                 SETTLERS
                DIE SIEDLER


This is an older German game that has recently been ported to MS DOS and
imported to the United States.  Written by Blue Byte Software and
distributed by SSI in the United States.  For the purposes of this FAQ, I
will call it Serf City.

Jack Vinson
[e-mail]


Contents:
1) What is this game?
  1.1) Review by Tim Chown
2) Strategies
  2.1) The Basic Strategy
  2.2) Soldier strategies
  2.3) How I deal with an aggressive opponent
  2.4) Using lakes to advantage
  2.5) Lots of soldiers at startup
  2.6) Border Garrison strategy
  2.7) Start small and WAIT
  2.8) Hints on building your road system
3) Questions and Answers (This is really the FAQ)
  3.01) Redistribution of goods
  3.02) Long roads or bucket brigade?
  3.03) Geologists and ore veins
  3.04) Depleting ore veins
  3.05) Can you deplete nearby ore veins?
  3.06) When is quarryman done?
  3.07) Over fishing
  3.08) Serf reproduction
  3.09) How can I tell what produced items are lying on the ground?
  3.10) How do I know when I can or cannot do something (tools/supplies)?
  3.11) Which knights are used in raids?
  3.12) How does knight training work?
  3.13) How does knight morale change
4) Game Operation Details
   (for demo players and people who can't be bothered to read the manual)
  4.01) Serf Buildings
  4.02) Building Construction Costs
  4.03) Statistics Menu
  4.04) Distribution Menu
  4.05) The world map
  4.06) Geologists, or How do you find a good spot for mines?
  4.07) Transporting goods by sea
  4.08) Knights and attacking the enemy
  4.09) Two player play with two mice
  4.10) Roads and traffic
  4.11) Mission codes (spoiler)
5) Reported Bugs and Problems
  5.01) Computer hanging with sound (Gravis Ultrasound)
  5.02) Computer hanging due to memory
  5.03) OS/2
  5.04) Computer hanging due to smartdrv - and a fix
  5.05) Missing page 59 in US manual
  5.06) Computer hanging after winning a battle
  5.07) Logitech mouse doesn't seem to work
  5.08) Disappearing soldiers
  5.09) Computer reboots on attacks
  5.10) Joystick doesn't work from a saved two-player game
  5.11) Message Level bug
  5.12) Won but No Win
  5.13) Stuff can't leave Castle
6) Cheats and clever tricks
7) Where can I get this game?
8) Differences between demo and commercial release


1) What is this game?

Serf City (Life is Feudal) is a strategic simulation of feudal empires
vying for space on the same "world."  You are the king and direct your
serfs to expand your empire buy constructing a variety of buildings from
farms, various mills, mines and guard posts.  These buildings give your
serfs more food, raw materials, tools, etc so that you can continue
expanding your empire.

The game is played on a randomly generated world (which wraps in all
directions).  The numbers used to create the world are given, so that you
can reply the same world against different opponents, with different
starting conditions, or challenge friends to play the same world.

The game can also be played with two players working together or as
opponents at the same computer (one on the mouse, one on the joy stick).

So far, I can't tell whether the computer cheats, although it doesn't
appear to do so.

  1.1) Review by Tim Chown <[e-mail]>  7 July 1994

  I've played Settlers for a few hours.  Here are some comments in the
  form of a medium sized review.  I played mainly on a 486/33 with 8Mb RAM.
  The game comes on two disks with a 120 page manual, taking up probably
  about 5-6Mb of hard disk.  I think Settlers == Serf City in the USA.

  Settlers is a strategic game of city building set in the middle ages.
  As leader of a group of settlers, you start with just a castle and have
  the task of expanding your territory while providing food, resources and
  defenses for your city.  It's not a particularly novel concept, being
  a bit of a mix between the Populous type of "god-game" and SimCity.
  The appeal of Settlers comes from the style in which you control all your
  people and the graphic way in which it is presented.

  Settlers is a beautiful game.  So much so you can let the game play with
  just computer controlled cities and just sit back and watch.  To fully
  appreciate it, you need SVGA, a good graphics card and a large monitor,
  but you can run the game on a 14" plain VGA screen.  The larger screen
  lets you see more land, and gives you a much better feel for the way your
  people are behaving.  You can see all of your people "living" ... the
  farmer plants and reaps his corn, the lumber jack cuts and strips trees
  before carrying them to his cabin, the miner goes up and down his pit
  bringing out ore, etc.  All superbly animated, though the figures are no
  bigger than "lemmings" in SVGA mode.

  The control system is split in two ... one pair of icons let you construct
  and demolish new buildings and roads, the other pair let you look at all
  manner of statistics and graphs and change how your people behave.  Your
  most important buildings are the military ones (huts, watch towers, forts)
  as only they can be attacked, and you can claim new land by building them.
  Your territorial boundaries are set automatically based on where all the
  military huts, etc are, and if a boundary moves such that one of your non-
  military buildings falls into someone else's land, it is destroyed in a fast
  raging fire.

  Expanding your land is important, because at the start there is a lot of
  neutral ground to grab.  The hills have hidden resources that can be mined;
  granite, coal, iron and gold.  Forests can be cut down for timber.  Rocky
  areas can be dug out for building stones.  Lakes can be fished.  Flat areas
  can be used for wheat farming.  You also need flat areas to build the
  larger useful buildings like armorers, lumber yard, warehouses, forts and
  iron and gold foundries.  As important as the buildings is the road network
  between them.  Roads are linked by flags; each building has a flag, but you
  can put flags at road intersections (up to 6 roads can meet at one point).
  As all resources are transported by road (you actually see your settlers
  carrying planks of wood, sacks of coal, etc) an efficient road network is
  vital, as only one settler can carry items along one road between two flags.

  You can play Settlers with no computer opponents, so it's more like playing
  SimCity than a strategic conquest game.  You can also play tutorial games,
  or you can play through the 30 or so included "missions", or you can use the
  random world and opponent generator.  The latter uses a long integer seed,
  so that the same number always gives the same world and opponents, so you can
  pass good challenging scenarios onto other people to try out.  There are 11
  different computer opponents to pick from, with differing styles.  You can
  set their (and your) initial resource levels, AI levels and population growth
  rates to make your game harder or easier.   More resources at the start let
  you expand a lot faster.

  So, at the start you'll probably just plop down a few guard huts, a stone
  cutter, a lumber jack and forester (who plants new trees), and link these
  with roads and just sit and watch.  Buildings are constructed slowly .. as
  each load of planks and stones arrives at the building site the new building
  gradually rises until complete.  The sound of workers hammering and chopping
  away adds to the atmosphere, in fact all the background sounds are very
  effectively done (on a Sound Blaster at least :).  Soon you will have your
  first mini-city working, and it's very satisfying just to watch it in action.
  The fun starts when you have to defend your land from attack, and when you
  want to expand into someone else's land.  You *could* play with pacifist
  computer opponents, but if you want that gold mine that's just across the
  border temptation will get the better of you :)

  It's at this point that you realize you're playing a simulation and *not* a
  war game.  You can't control exactly where your troops go.  Instead you are
  able to set general behavior for how many troops occupy huts by setting
  values for huts at the front line, behind the front line, in the middle
  ground and in the "hinterland".  Yes, the "hinterland" ... Settlers was
  produced by the same German company (Blue Byte) that made Battle Isle 2.
  Like Battle Isle 2, it's a great game, but it has a *terrible* manual,
  translated into pigeon English, and with little or no structure at all.

  Anyway, by tweaking the occupancy levels you can set how well your military
  buildings are guarded based on how close to the front line they are, and also
  how many troops will leave a hut to fight a battle.  You can also attack with
  either your weakest or strongest troops, but you cannot pick which individual
  troops will fight a battle; the computer picks them for you ... if you like
  being in full control you may find this frustrating.  Also, the only troops
  you can get are knights.  No cavalry, no artillery, no archers, no mages.
  But you can train knights to 5 levels by leaving them in castles/garrisons,
  and you can make your knights fight better by owning more gold.

  Combat is quite entertaining.  If you ask say 10 knights to attack an enemy
  hut, they'll slowly waddle over from wherever they're at and attack one by
  one (not all at once) and you'll see your knight and an enemy knight having
  a sword fight, usually with 3 hits proving fatal.  If your men kill all the
  occupants of a hut you capture it, and your territorial boundary will expand,
  possibly causing some enemy buildings to burn down.

  As your city (or territory) grows, you'll get a lot of congested roads with
  resources being carried around and possibly hitting "traffic" jams.  You can
  reduce these by tweaking control menus to say which materials have priority,
  i.e. an ordered list of priorities for everything, so you can make iron and
  coal high priority if you need weapons to be made (to get more knights).
  You can set priorities for which types of building get the resources ... do
  you send your wheat to the pig farmer to feed his pigs or to the miller for
  flour?  It's all there for you to control (once you overcome the rather
  hapless manual).

  You can view graphs and charts to see what resources you're lacking, whether
  you're running out of trees or fish, how your mines are doing (maybe you need
  to send out more geologists, or capture new mountain land).  You can see your
  strengths compared to your opponents.  You can see if you have enough lumber
  yards to handle all the logs you are making, etc.  If you can measure it,
  there's probably a chart or graph to summarize it.  You can even set timers
  to bring up charts/menus after a certain time, so you can tweak something,
  and then (say) 20 minutes later have the menu back for further alteration.

  Overall, it's a visual feast of a game, with great sound effects too.  There
  are many ways to play Settlers ... principally as either a SimCity game or
  as a strategic "war game".   But note it's not a traditional war game because
  you don't have control over where your troops and resources go ... like
  everything else in Settlers you change the general rules for your people to
  obey and they do their best to carry them out.  And in theory there is the
  potential for great replay value with the random world/opponent generator,
  though I'm not yet convinced how diverse the maps can be.  The map size can
  be altered from size 1 (max 500 settlers) to size 8 (max 64000 settlers),
  but the latter needs a 16Mb machine (8 Mb - Ed.).

  Having played it on a 486/66 with a 17" screen in SVGA mode, I feel rather
  cramped at home on a 486/33 and 14" VGA screen.  If you have a big screen
  then you'll really like this, or at least enjoy it more.  There are a few
  elements which if added would have made a better game ... the main one is
  that there is no diplomacy.  The default condition seems to be war, though
  that varies depending on the opponent's style.  Some MOO-like diplomatic
  relations, combined with trading, would have made this good game a real
  winner (though as is it is hard to fault, and I've spotted no bugs yet).

  More troop types would have been nice.  Some element of research for new
  items too, though there is plenty to play with anyway.  Good strategy games
  usually have research (Civ, MOO, UFO), but none on offer here I'm afraid.
  Two player modem/serial link play would also be interesting, though the game
  could get long (and there is no time skip feature, it's all "real-time").
  And  it has copy protection ... type in 3 symbols from page X ... yuck!

  It seems like a lot of "if only's", but I feel Settlers stands up as released
  as a very worthwhile game.  I got my copy in England from Premier Mail Order
  for #26.99, and I've seen it in the shops for #29.99 in Game.   At that price
  it seems good value for money.  I'm looking forward to the next Blue Byte
  release, but please please let the manual be written properly!


2) Strategies

  2.1) The basic strategy
  2.2) Soldier strategies
  2.3) How I deal with an aggressive opponent
  2.4) Using lakes to advantage
  2.5) Lots of soldiers at startup
  2.6) Border Garrison strategy
  2.7) Start small and WAIT
  2.8) Hints on building your road system

Okay, people, give me your best strategies!!!  You will get credit for the
write up.

Here are some ideas:
  What to do when an aggressive computer player is nearby.
  How to play with low initial supplies.
  How to best take advantage of mountains and lakes.


2.1) The Basic Strategy:

[Thanks to Ake Possiel and the manual for the basic ideas here.  I've
rewritten some things based on my experience.]

The basic strategies are outlined in the manual.  There are several
economic considerations happening at once in a fully developed game:
    ranger --> plants new trees for lumber jack to cut down
    logs --> lumber from the saw mill
    stones and lumber --> new construction
    wheat --> flour at windmill --> bread at baker
    wheat --> pigs at animal farm --> meat at butcher
    food (bread, meat, fish) --> mines (ore and stones)
    coal and iron ore --> steel bars from steel mill
    coal and steel --> weapons from weapon maker
    lumber and steel --> tools from tool maker
    coal and gold ore --> gold bars from gold smith
    gold bars --> guard posts

So, for a well-developed game, one must take all these factors into account
and develop a road and storage network that doesn't get too clogged with
goods moving back and forth.  Initially, you want to produce building
materials, so you'll want to set yourself in a location good for these
things.

Very quickly, you want to move towards mountains for mining.  For a
successful game, you must find gold and iron (and coal, but that is the
most abundant ore).  These raw materials are used to produce swords and
shields for your ever-expanding army, and to pay your troops.  Once you
find iron and gold, set up the mining operations and begin construction on
the buildings that process these materials.  You may want to build the gold
smith and steel mill before the mines get built as there is frequently some
ore stored in the castle.  Once you have steel build a weapon maker and
tool maker.  If you start several iron mines, you may be able to build
multiple steel mill + tool maker combinations, but make sure they are near
your castle or storage houses.  Weapons must go to storage to make soldiers
(a sword and shield for each soldier).  You should only need one tool
maker.

Don't forget to have a food supply ready once you start mining.  Fishing
huts are the easiest, but the farm combinations seem to produce more.
The ideal situation is to have food go directly to the mines,
bypassing the castle and store houses to lessen traffic congestion.  If you
have difficulty finding clear areas for farming (crops), destroy any ranger
huts in the area and build a lumber jack or two to clear-cut the forests,
providing more land for farming.  Make sure not to build too many buildings
near the farm.


2.2) Soldier strategies

I have found myself over building guard posts and running out of soldiers
to populate new posts.  Solutions to this include not building garrisons
which use up lots of soldiers and take too long to build (sometimes getting
burned down by the encroaching enemy).  They are useful in protecting
important real estate or in launching attacks on the enemy.  To get more
soldiers, you'll need to get the weapon smith moving early along with the
steel mill.

If, at some point, your guard posts are not getting filled stop building
new ones and concentrate on improving your transportation infrastructure.
It may also be necessary to change the transportation priorities in the
distribution menu so that weapons, steel, iron ore and coal move faster
than building materials.

To gain in soldier strength, you need to have them sitting in the castle,
storage houses or either of the two large guard stations (tower and
garrison).  In order for guards in the huts to get stronger, they need to
go back to the nearest castle/storage house and swap with any stronger
knights there.  If there aren't any stronger knights the soldiers will
simply return to their original posts.


2.3) How I deal with an aggressive opponent
[Thanks to Richard Abbott <[e-mail]>]

"I must not fear, Fear is the mind killer"
also
"Use greater force against itself"

My plans for dealing with an aggressive opponent are that of a flexible
defensive response. Primary to this are the construction of a counter
attack force as a priority, build a big garrison behind the front line and
ensure that it gets filled with gold. Keep this full at all times.

Put a strong border force of huts, so that the loss of one is not a major
calamity, if there is the space a double row is better but his is an ideal
and not very likely.  Knights defending have an advantage and so use the
aggressive instincts to give your knights the edge, and should a building
fall, respond immediately with a counter attack. Possibly changing over
from strongest defending to attacking before this occurs.

Expand away from the aggressive opponent who will be losing more soldiers
(and hence serfs) than you, and also will be expending more resources than
you, and in time when your empire is big enough it is time to turn the
tables and attack.


2.4) Using lakes to advantage
[Thanks to Richard Abbott <[e-mail]>]

If possible I like to build my transport main net to include a lake where
the transport of goods is faster than over land. I have found that three
flags and a triangle of routes works well in rounder lakes, and four flags
with a diamond of routes plus the diagonal that is most important also
works well.  I always use fishermen in a lake, being careful to avoid over
fishing as this gives a steady supply of food for the mines.  The only draw
back is that the route to the mines is often long, steep or even both.



2.5) Lots of soldiers at startup
[Thanks to [e-mail]]

At the very start of the game, look how many swords and shields you have in
stock.  Bump up the number of knights in the castle by this number.  (This
can be fairly high).  They will quickly be built (you may have to bump up
the knight/serf percentage).  When you build guard huts etc. draw off this
stock until you've got a positive knight growth rate.  This gives you the
advantage of ready knights, a strong castle, and early training for your
knights.

[This is done by going to the knight training/recruiting menu and bumping
up the number of knights used to guard the castle.]


2.6) Border Garrison strategy
[Thanks to Bradley Richards <[e-mail]>]

I find the larger garrisons very useful to place on an established border.
It's just too easy for the computer to attack and take a small guard hut,
since it only contains three soldiers.  So my general strategy, anywhere I
expect to place important buildings, goes like this:

  1.  Claim the territory quickly, by building guard huts.  The huts must be
near enough to the border to protect step #2, but you can't build two military
buildings right next to each other either.  So positioning takes a bit of
thought.

  2.  Protect the area by building large garrisons (I usually build the
12-person one--not sure what it's called in the English edition).

  3.  VERY IMPORTANT!!!  Destroy all guard huts which are in range of the
enemy (i.e., have the thick black cross).  It does no good to have strong
border garrisons, and then leave the enemy a wimpy little guard hut to attack.
This means that your second-line guard huts must be positioned so that you
still "claim" all of the territory you want, while being far enough back from
the front-line so that they can't be directly attacked.

You mentioned the problem of running out of soldiers to man new guard huts.
It seems that the game insists on filling all existing huts before it sending
soldiers to new ones.  You can force it to send soldiers to the new ones by
reducing the manning-level of buildings (this is in one of the two knight
menus).  This is useful if you just *have* to take that particular bit of
land, but haven't gotten your blacksmith going yet.

2.7) Start small and WAIT
This one is courtesy of Carla Dunagan <[e-mail]>
The surest winning strategy I have found is this:
1. Clear out some good land.
2. Expand to mountains and find _gold_.
3. Figure out where your mines are going to be; at a minimum, a coal mine and
   two gold mines (I usually go two coal and three gold, coal seems to produce
   faster).
4. Find a place to put the bakery, with the windmill nearby, such that they can
   feed bread directly into the mines _without_ going past/into the castle.
5. Find another place to put two gold smelters, preferably without using the
   same road as your food supply.
6. Lay another road to feed gold straight into the nearest storage facility
   (I rarely build warehouses, but if you do, it's just as good as the castle).
7. Drop two farms if possible, and feed the roads as straight as possible
   to the windmill.  Keep in mind that the less zigzagging you do, the more
   land is available to the farmer; you can afford steep hills here to avoid
   switch backs.
8. Make sure there's a road from your mines to your castle and from your bakery
   to your castle; this way the excess has somewhere to go.
9. Ensure that everything critical (mines, food supplies, and foundries) is
   WELL defended.  Again, towers if possible.
10. Leave.  Go to work or to bed, whichever.
11. Come back eight hours later.  You'll have a horde of messages; some will
    say you've been attacked, some that mines no longer produce (these are
    repeated periodically, so expect duplicates), several that because of such
    and such building you've lost some land.  Scan through these, burning down
    mines that don't produce (and kiss that food goodbye; I wish there was a
    way to tell mines to drop their food at the road before going up in flames,
    but I haven't found one).
12. Check out the knights menu.  Your morale will be incredibly high (expect
    200%+; I usually get somewhere in the 300%'s, and last game I came back
    to a whopping 617%).
13. Attack.  Attack everything you can reach, one knight to a target.  If it's
    a castle, attack with more than three but less than ten.  You will win
    almost all of the fights; expect a 5:1 to 10:1 kill ratio in your favor.
    Most of your troops will be captains, as you haven't got supplies to make
    new wimpy knights.
    If your enemies didn't attack much while you were away, or if they've got
    only one or two knights in their huts, you can safely turn the bottom
    setting of _every_ building-range-staffing-thing to "minimum".  I do this
    without bothering to look around and haven't regretted it yet.  It makes
    a massive difference in how fast you can attack.

Notice that nowhere in there did I mention tool shops, iron mines, iron
foundries, blacksmiths, etc, etc, etc.  At least in the first ten or twelve
missions, there are enough supplies to get by; the supply of swords and shields
you start the game with is usually enough to handle 40-80 knights.  When you
can take a castle with losses of one or two rather than 20 or 30, you don't
NEED any more weapons than that.

Note with regards to available knights: the more efficiently you guard your
land (using small numbers of towers, ideally) the less knights are tied up
in defense.  This may seem obvious, but for several of my first games I built
more huts than I really needed to hold my borders.  Sometimes while advancing
on an enemy I will burn down huts just after I take them (checking for gold
first, of course) just to free that knight up.  Sure, he's gotta walk all the
way home first, but better that than hold a hut that guards empty land I'll
never utilize.

If you prefer to avoid the eight-hour-idle strategy, and thus don't have
overwhelming motivation when you attack, I've found this to be extremely
effective: your first targets should be, in no particular order: 1. Huts
between you and the enemy castle. 2. huts that, when captured, will burn down
enemy warehouses. 3. huts all around the enemy castle.

When you isolate or destroy all the enemy storage facilities, they will find
themselves unable to create more, expand, etc, etc, etc.  They also can't
train soldiers worth a damn.  Even if you're not ready for a real strong
offensive, isolating their castle alone can damage them more than any other
single action.

Oh, almost forgot: go for their sawmill too.  I've noticed wood has to go all
the way back to the castle before it comes out to be used, but I don't know
that this is still true if the castle is unreachable.


2.8) Hints on building your road system
This is provided courtesy of Alan Ho <[e-mail]>:

Hints on building your road system:

It is very easy, if you are not careful, to have overwhelming
congestion at your roads.  Understanding how the road system
works helps to avoid this problem and allows you to build a
large, prosperous city with no traffic jams.

1.  Merchandise versus personnel: in this game, when you build
a city normally, personnel flow is /insignificant/ when compared
to merchandise flow.  People do not travel to and from work every
day like we do (they stay at their work place, with a few
exceptions, such as constructors), but merchandise is produced
every minute or so.  If you build your road network thinking
about the merchandise flow, there will be no problem.  An
exception is at war time: knights add a sudden large load to
your roads.

2.  Basic concept: network flow problem: the best way of
understanding your road system is by thinking of it as a network
flow problem.  Think about shops, farms, mines and castles as
places that generate and receive merchandise.  To be free of
traffic jams, your road system must have a /flow capacity/
adequate to handle all the flow of merchandise (and people, but
that is minor).  It must be able to transport [x] number of
stuff from location A to location B per minute, and [y] stuff
from C to D, and so on, /per minute/.  Otherwise, the roads will
all clog up.

    Note that this is a quite different concept than first
impressions; as long as traffic jams are concerned, it doesn't
matter so much how long it takes for your coal to get to your
foundry, but rather how many pieces of coal can go through that
road from the mine to the foundry per minute.  Traffic jams
occur when more merchandise has to go through your roads and
flags than their flow capacities.

3.  Roads: merchandise are transported along roads by "transporters".
Each road has (normally) at least one transporter working on it.
If the road is busy, more transporters are sent to the road, up
to a maximum of half (rounded down) the length of the road.
Therefore, the "flow capacity" of a road does not depend so
much on its length, but on /the single steepest section/ of the
road.  This is similar to a water pipe: a pipe's flow capacity
doesn't depend on its length, but its narrowest point.  Of course,
this is only an approximation; the flow capacity of a long road is
somewhat reduced (because transporters have to stop and wait
momentarily when they "meet and swap"), and there is also personnel
flow and other matters.  That "rounding down" also has an effect.

    This is an important consideration when building roads on
slopes: a long, winding road of eight yellow sections can transport
more coal per minute than a road of four red sections, even if a
miner can transverse the red road faster.  Say if it takes 30
seconds to go through the yellow road and 24 seconds to go through
the red one.  Since there are 4 transporters on the yellow road,
it can handle 8 coal per minute, while the 2 transporters on
the red road can handle only 5 coal per minute.  If a road have
some very steep sections and some flatter sections, the road tends
to "clog up" at the steepest section, where the transporters line
up and wait for "swapping".  Try to build an evenly steep, winding
road to your mine, because personnel flow is scarce to the mine and
the main flow is merchandise.

    The transporters go from this flag to that flag, and then back
to this flag.  This means that they can conveniently take merchandise
in both directions with no delay.  In mathematical terms, a road
has a flow capacity in each direction.  It doesn't matter that your
food and your coal use the same road to the mine, because they go
in different directions, but avoid having several mines using the same
road.  Keep this in mind; it makes your roads twice as effective.
Don't put mine/warehouse, windmill, bakery, farm on a road in that
order, because the wheat will be going the same way as the bread.
In this case, double up on that section between the windmill and
the bakery.  Do not build your city so that several different (or
same, whatever) merchandise use the same road in the /same/ direction.

4.  Flags: at all times, only one serf can be "active" in a "space",
whatever that means (two serfs meeting on a road can "swap").  When
many roads meet at a flag, the flow capacity through the flag limits
that of the roads leading into it.  This does not mean that we construct
less roads; on the other hand, construct more roads, so that people and
stuff can go around a crowded intersection.  The flow capacity of a
flag is about twice the weighted mean of the very sections of the roads
leading into it.  The weight is, of course, the relative frequency
of use of each road.  The doubling is due to the fact that a road has
transporters half its length.  This is largely reduced if the flag
is a building flag and merchandise has to go in (going out doesn't
matter that much; merchandise going out takes 1 time, going in takes
3 time.  It's the worker that takes stuff out, but it's the transporter
that takes stuff in).  In short, you don't have to worry about a flag's
flow capacity unless goods enter its building or more than four roads lead
to it.  This also means that three parallel roads using the same flags
doesn't work much better than two.

    Intermediate flags on a road slow transportation of merchandise
somewhat, due to co-ordination problems of transporters.  A long road
has a higher flow capacity than a shorter road with several flags on
it.

5.  Castle/Warehouses and Personnel: near castle/warehouses, the
personnel flow is larger (especially at wartime) and you have to take
that into consideration.  The main personnel flow in the game is
knights (they go in tens); following them are the transporters,
geologists, constructors and levelers.  Knights are especially
bad because they tend to come and go in packs.  Avoid excessive road
construction/modification during wartime (and, no geologists!).
Knights and transporters can block the passage of more important
personnel (such as a blacksmith or a boat transporter), so be careful.

    One personnel counts somewhat like half a merchandise item,
because he doesn't need a transporter.  (It's like a pig that can
run by itself).  For personnel, the actual travel time is often
more of a consideration than the flow capacity of roads (think
about knights reinforcing during a structure being attacked).

6.  Waterways: waterways have the highest flow capacity.  In practice,
the flow capacity of a waterway is limited only by its flags (and the
land routes leading to it), as long as you have enough boats.  As
already mentioned above, the length of a waterway has little or no
effect on its flow capacity, as long as you have enough boats.  Make
sure that you have all the boats you need: 1 boat per 2 sections of
waterway.

    A flag has six routes leading out of it.  Depending on the
shape of the coastline, you can have more or less water or land
routes.  Contrary to popular belief, in critical areas try to place
the flag at a point where you can have more land routes than waterways
leading out of the flag, because it's the land routes that limit the
flow capacity of the waterway.  If you special-click on a waterway
flag that appears crowded, you can see that it is usually the land
routes that are jammed.  If you need several waterways out of a flag,
instead place two flags close to each other, and build a short coastal
road between them (which are always flat; sorry, fisherman).  You can
then build your waterways from these flags.  Parallel waterways are
hardly ever needed; save your boats for somewhere else.

7.  Factories : forgers and blacksmiths make one item out of two.
Build foundries and blacksmiths near the mines to cut down on the
number of items that has to be transported.

8.  Conclusion: in order to build a large, prosperous, high-productivity
city, lots of flat lands on which to place large buildings is very
important.  When you don't have to worry about shortage of land, you
can make a much better city plan.  A well-planned city with several
gold foundries and several blacksmiths is much more productive than
one with lots of mines and hungry miners because their food is all
laying out in the open waiting to be transported.  Do not place your
castle too close to the mountains, because you'll need to build your
foundries and blacksmiths between your castle and the mines.  Deserts
near the castle are extremely inconvenient, but lakes are no problem
as long as you can conquer the other side.

    Following the above guidelines, I've built large, highly-
productive cities with no traffic jams at all.  Try it!



3) Questions and Answers
  3.01) Redistribution of goods
  3.02) Long roads or bucket brigade?
  3.03) Geologists and ore veins
  3.04) Depleting ore veins
  3.05) Can you deplete nearby ore veins?
  3.06) When is quarryman done?
  3.07) Over fishing
  3.08) Serf reproduction
  3.09) How can I tell what produced items are lying on the ground?
  3.10) How do I know when I can or cannot do something (tools/supplies)?
  3.11) Which knights are used in raids?
  3.12) How does knight training work?
  3.13) How does knight morale change

In this section, we attempt to answer common questions about the game.
This is really the FAQ...


3.01) Redistribution of goods

Q. Is there any way to redistribute goods from one storage facility to
another?  I have three warehouses.  One has over 200 units of lumber, and
the others have none.  So ALL construction has to wait for delivery from
the first warehouse.

A. Yes, but it is a bit tricky.  In the distribution menu, second row, right
icon you get to specify which items are most important to get out of the
castle or store house when it's being emptied.  Set that to what ever you
want to get out of a particular storage facility, then special click on the
facility and go to the third screen.  The top section lets you tell the
serfs whether they should deliver to, not deliver to, or empty the
facility.  If you tell them to empty (needs a special click), you will then
see goods start piling up in front of the facility while it is emptied.
When you want to stop, just go back into the menu and tell them to start
picking things up again.  The stuff removed from the building will
(generally) go to other storage facilities.  It may be wise to give
transportation priority to the items you removed so they don't clog the
road ways too long.

3.02) Long roads or bucket brigade?
Q. The manual leads me to believe that having one non-stop road is a
more efficient way to get goods delivered from point 'A' to point 'B',
but it seems to me that if you have lots of 'x' that has to be moved,
you're better off having a sort of bucket-brigade method.

A. The computer decides when you are moving too much along a particular
routes and assigns more transportation serfs to that route to relieve the
congestion.

3.03) Geologists and ore veins

Q. I'm not too thrilled with the way a geologist tells you about the
"underground riches".  In many cases, I'm looking for something in
particular, like iron.  I'll send out a handful of geologists, and
they'll tell me about all the stones and coal that they found, but
is there any appreciable iron in the same locations?  They also tend
not to dig where I want them to dig.

A. The various types of ore tend to collect, mimicking ore deposits of the
real world.  Geologists seem to do random walks, so I try to start them
from a couple different locations in the same mountains.  Note how
many mines can be placed on the mountain before laying paths and flags.
This will give you some idea how many mines may appear.  It also seems that
the more of the mountain you own, the longer the geologist will search.

3.04) Depleting ore veins
Q. Once you excavate all of one resource from a spot, is that spot
useless for any other mining?  I could swear that at the beginning
of my game, one area showed "Very Much" in all of the resources.
Then after I exhausted the gold, the geologists planted blank signs
in all those spots.

A. Basically, yes.  Each spot only contains one type of ore and they become
depleted, although I have been able to get up to 25% output from a second
mine at the same spot (geologist told me there was more ore).  I don't
trust the assessments at the beginning of the game, since they never seem
to be completely accurate with the findings of my geologists.

3.05) Can you deplete nearby ore veins?
Q. If you set up one mine and exhaust that spot, do you also exhaust
the surrounding sectors?

A. No.  I've mined out one spot, destroyed the mine and surrounding paths
and then been able to mine in nearby locations.

3.06) When is quarryman done?
Q. How do you know if/when a quarryman has exhausted all of the
local resources?

A. The easy solution is if all the rocks in the area have been removed.  If
there are still rocks nearby and your quarry man has done nothing lately,
destroy his house and build another somewhere else.  Also, the quarryman
always climbs onto a rock from the space to the lower right of the rock.
If that space is occupied by a building, the quarryman cannot access the
rock. (Thanks Alan Kwan <[e-mail]>)

3.07) Over fishing
Q. They speak briefly of over-fishing an area.  How do you know if
you've done this?  Is there some way to get the status of a lake?

A. The Statistics menu can give you some idea of your fish output.  This
would be the icon in the lower left.  Click on the fish symbol to see a
graph of recent fish output.

3.08) Serf reproduction
Q. I'm a little confused about the way that serfs are generated.  Do
you only have so many to draw on?  If I ask for 100 geologists,
will I get them?  And if I only have a certain amount, how do I
know how many I have?  What can I do increase my population?

A. This depends somewhat on your initial set up.  Each player has three
bars under their picture.  The first is supplies, the second intelligence
(humans are always max intelligence) and the third is reproduction rate.
If the reproduction rate is high, you will get Serfs faster than if not.
Food has no affect on reproduction rate.

3.09) How can I tell what produced items are lying on the ground?

A. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to find out.  If there is
a serious log jam, it will show with a minus on the flag's status screen
(special click the flag).  Create more paths from that flag or make more
routes that bypass the area.  The serfs will use them, if they need/can.

3.10) How do I know when I can or cannot do something (tools/supplies)?

Q. I built several mines at one point and since my city was rather large at
the time, I just let them go on their merry way.  It was nearly an hour
later when I noticed that two of the mines weren't producing because they
didn't have miners.  This was due to the fact that there weren't any
available picks.  Is there somewhere that will tell me if something cannot
happen due to a lack of something else?

A. This isn't easy, but the statistics menu, top row has information
telling you (via those dials) whether you have available workers.  This is
talked about in the section about the statistics menu, but not very well.
Basically, if the dial is red for that profession, then there are none
available until you either create their tools (usually) or have new serfs.
It may be better to just check your current storage to see if you have to
tools/supplies required for the particular job.  I've also noticed that if
the tools are far away from the structure it takes quite some time before
the serf gets there.

3.11) Which knights are used in raids?

Raids are conducted by those knights which are nearest the enemy guard post
being attacked.  Each of your guard posts will let a number of knights go,
depending on their capacity information which you can set from the
distribution menu.  For example, a hut on the frontier has a default
setting of Full/Good which says that in normal situations there should be
three knights (full), but on raids and for training there can be two
knights (good).  Therefore, if you raid an enemy near that hut, one of the
three knights will attack.  Similar checks are made for all posts that are
close enough and they will supply the number of knights you request in the
attack menu (one each from several huts).

Which knight in the post attacks?  You can tell your posts to send out the
strongest into battle, or keep them at home (for defense) and send the
weakest into battle.  This is done from the bottom middle icon of the
distribution menu (knight running amok).  Within this menu, there is an
icon in the lower-middle section which has a check-mark and a "-".  The
default check-mark is in the top for "stronger knights stay home."

3.12) How does knight training work?

(See pages 27 and 41 of the US manual)
Thanks to Kip DeGraaf for help here

Knights are trained (improve levels) while they are in the castle, storage
houses, guard tower or garrison.  They do not train in guard huts.  They
train slower in guard towers and garrisons than in storage "because they
are working".  This all happens automatically.  If you want stronger
knights in guard huts, you must send your knights back for training.
Knights can be trained by sending them back to storage houses (or the
castle) which have excess knights.  Clicking on the knight training icon is
only useful if there are more highly-trained knights in the store
houses/castle.  Special click on the store house/castle and look at the
personnel (second page) to see if there are well-trained knights residing
within.  Training is conducted by clicking on the icon in the lower right
which shows a picture of soldiers going to and from the castle.

The down side to this is that ALL guard posts which can send knights back
to store houses/castle leaving you defense slightly lower than you might
like.  You will also not be able to attack while your knights are being
transported about.  All the knights on the road tends to cause major
traffic jams, particularly if you have a large settlement and not many
storage houses.


3.13) How does knight morale change

As far as I can tell, the morale of your troops is only affected by how
many gold bars is in storage at the guard posts (and in storage
facilities).  When knights take over enemy guard posts, morale only goes up
if there is gold in that hut.  The reverse happens if a hut with gold is
lost.  Knight morale goes up by 25% if you manage to take an enemy's
castle.  Of course their morale will decrease by the same amount if you
lose your own castle.

Morale is indicated in the knight training and recruitment screen as a
percentage.  The number just below morale is how many gold bars are in
storage and at the guard posts.


4) Game Operation Details

This is basically information that is available in the manual, even though
no one seems to be able to find it.  Both the US and German versions of the
manual are uniformally panned as being pretty horrible.  If you have the
demo, this much more than the one page README.

4.01) Serf Buildings.
4.02) Building Construction Costs
4.03) Statistics Menu
4.04) Distribution Menu
4.05) The world map
4.06) Geologists, or How do you find a good spot for mines?
4.07) Transporting goods by sea
4.08) Knights and attacking the enemy
4.09) Two player play with two mice
4.10) Roads and traffic
4.11) Mission codes (spoiler)


4.01) Serf Buildings.

Small buildings and mines must be at least two spaces apart.  Large
buildings and guard posts must be three spaces apart.  Nothing can be built
upon a rock, tree, wheat field, desert, snow, water or coast.

Every building has a flag to the lower right.  If the flag cannot be placed
in the lower right, the building can't go there.  Flags cannot go on trees,
rocks, wheat or water.  They must be placed at least two spaces apart.

This section describes each building that can be built in Serf City, along
with what it creates and what their inhabitant need to be able to do his
job.  Buildings are listed by screen and then left to right, top to bottom.
The buildings in the second and third screens take up more land and must
have the land leveled (by a shovel-wielding "leveller") before construction
may begin.

FIRST SCREEN:

Quarry man - he goes out and cuts up the rocks surrounding, brings back
some stone for building.
Needs a pick.

Guard hut - they push the boundary out, and keep you safe.
Holds max of three guards and two gold bars.*

Lumber jacks house - he chops down trees, and brings back logs.  These can
go to the lumber mill to be made into lumber for building.
Needs an axe.

Ranger hut - cutter will run out one day, so he replants them.

Fisher - he goes fishing if water nearby and increases fish in castle, need
that to retain birthrate.  Also need food for miners.
This guy needs a fishing pole.**

Windmill - Takes the wheat from crop farmer and grinds them into flour
bags (for the baker).

Boat maker - Makes boats from lumber (not logs).
Needs a hammer.***

SECOND SCREEN:

Butcher - takes dead pigs and makes meat (food).  Needs a butcher knife.

Weapon maker - takes coal and steel to make swords and shields.  Needs
hammer and pliers

Steel - Takes coal and iron ore to make steel for the weapon maker and tool
maker.  Needs hammer?

Lumber mill - cuts up logs to provide lumber.  Needs a saw.

Baker - takes flour bags and makes bread (food).

Gold - takes coal and gold rocks and makes gold bars to pay the soldiers,
making them fight better.  Needs hammer (?)


THIRD SCREEN:

Tool maker - takes steel and wood to make tools.  Needs hammer and saw.****

Farmer (crops) - creates wheat for pigs farmer or wind mill.  Needs scythe.

Store House - exactly what it sounds like.  When you city/kingdom get big
these are nice to have.  Probably not necessary for demo.  Very necessary
in the full game.

Farmer (animals) - raises animals (pigs) using wheat from crop farmer.
Produces dead pigs for the butcher.

Garrison - guard post, hold maximum six knights and four gold bars.*
Two lumber, two stone to build.

BIG garrison - holds maximum of twelve knights and six gold bars.*


NOTES:
* To get soldiers you need a sword and a shield (for each soldier) in your
castle or store house.

** Fishers can deplete lakes, but large lakes can handle two or three
fishermen.

*** Boats are pretty cool when you have lots of water in your world,
although you generally don't need more than what is already in the castle.
See below for how to use them.

**** The tool maker makes all the tools.  For the demo he may or may not be
needed, depending on how many supplies you start with.  You can control
which tools he makes, or at least the proportion of tools that he makes in
the distribution menus (click on 'computer icon' and then the middle-left
icon with a picture of a guy and some tools).


4.02) Building Construction Costs
Thanks to Alan Kwan <[e-mail]> for compiling this very usefull
table.

    This is the complete table for how many wood and stone are
required for each building.  "Sequence" refers to the sequence by
which the constructor utilizes the material.


Building        Wood    Stone    Sequence
--------        ----    -----    --------
Quarryman's Hut        2    0    ww
Lumberjack's Hut    2    0    ww
Forest Ranger's Hut    2    0    ww
Fisherman's Hut        2    0    ww
Ship Maker's Shop    3    0    www
Windmill        3    1    wwsw
Guard Hut        1    1    ws

Butcher Shop        2    1    wsw
Blacksmith's Shop    2    1    wsw
Bakery            2    1    wws
Sawmill            3    2    wwssw
Iron Foundry        3    2    wwsws
Gold Foundry        4    1    wwsww

Farm            4    1    wwwsw
Pig Farm        4    1    wwwsw
Tool Maker's Shop    3    3    wwssws
Warehouse        4    3    wwwsssw
Guard Tower        2    3    wwsss
Garrison        5    5    wwwwsssssw

Gold Mine        5    0    wwwww
Iron Mine        5    0    wwwww
Coal Mine        5    0    wwwww
Granite Mine        4    1    wwsww


4.03) Statistics Menu
Icon with a picture of a graph (second from right).  This menu gives you
the statistics of your kingdom.

The top row describes your capabilities with those small dial-like
indicators.  Red shows that you don't have the possibility to perform a
particular function (no serf, wrong equipment, bad routing), green is that
you probably have too much.

The middle row shows how much you have in storage (left), what buildings
you have and are constructing (middle) and what your serfs seem to be doing
(right).

The bottom row shows you things like your supply of every one of your goods
(bottom left), and your overall comparison to the other kingdoms (bottom
right).

4.04) Distribution Menu

Icon with a computer and a bunch of arrows (right icon).  This menu allows
you to set various distribution and job priority preferences.


4.051) Raw material distribution

The top row directs raw material distribution.  For each type of product
there is a bar and a picture of the building where it can go.  If you want
all the steel to go to the Weapon Maker, make his bar completely green and
turn off the one for the Tool Maker.  The size of the green bar gives you
some indication of what proportion each building will get.  If the bar is
twice as big for the weapon maker as it is for the tool maker, the weapon
maker will get twice as much steel.

In all of these distribution menus there is an icon with two very small
arrows (up/down) which you can click to get back to the default settings.


4.042) Tool maker priorities

The second row, left is for the tool maker and tells him what his
priorities should be for the various tools.  As above the amount of green
indicates relative production rates.


4.043) Delivery and emptying priorities

The other two icons in the middle row indicate transportation priority.
The one in the middle tells the "transporter serf" which things they should
pick up first, and the one on the right tells the serfs in the castles
which things they should take out of buildings first when they are being
emptied.


4.044) Knights:  Manning guard posts

The icon on the bottom right (two soldiers and arrows) lets you decide how many
soldiers should be at their posts.  There is a maximum and minimum value
which both range from "full" to "bare minimum."  The four levels of knights
are

Level            Flag at guard post
Frontier       - thick cross
Second line    - thin cross
Interior       - thin line
Interior/safe  - white flag


And the manning levels are as follows for each type of guard post: (thanks
Devin Ben-Hur)

    Hut    Tower    Garrison
Full    3    6    12
Good    2    4    9
Medium    2    3    6
Weak    1    2    3
Minimum    1    1    1

These can be important for attacking the enemy and your strategy for
defending your kingdom.  The default settings tell you knights to heavily
defend the frontier, and leave interior guard posts less well-defended.
One of the strategies involves setting these all to their lowest values so
that knights remain in the castle and continue training.


4.045) Knights:  Training and recruiting

The bottom-middle icon (with the crazy soldier) gives you a menu with several
functions.
  - At the top, you can select the percentage of serfs that become soldiers.
  - Below that are a pair of numbers: the morale (%) of your soldiers (100%
is not the limit) and how much gold (total) is in storage and at your guard
posts.
  - To the right of that there is information about how many
serfs can become soldiers according to the number of jobless serfs and the
amount of weaponry in storage.
  - The square with the numbers 1/5/20/100 allows you to "force recruit"
soldiers from your existing serfs.  Clicking on the number recruits that
many new soldiers, limited by the number of swords & shields (need both for
each new soldier) and the number of jobless serfs.  This only works when
soldiers can be "built" and that is indicated by the number to the right of
the sword/shield and serf pictures.
  - Near the bottom and middle is an icon which indicates whether the
stronger soldiers defend your guard posts (top half) or be used for
attacking.
  - The icon near the bottom-right allows you to send your less-trained
soldiers to go back to the castle/store houses for training.
  - The bottom two numbers indicate how many soldiers remain in the castle
for defense.  The top number is how many you wish to have in the castle,
and the bottom is how many are currently there.  Click on the +/- to change
the top number.


4.05) The world map

In the demo version you can only have worlds sized 1, 2 or 3.  In the
commercial release, you are able to go from size 1 (very small) to size 8
depending on how much RAM you have.  I have 4 Mb of ram and am limit to a
size 5 world.  With a minimal boot (as described on the insert card), one
needs 8 megs for a size 8 world.

In any case the map does "wrap" so that if you take over the world, your
kingdom is contiguous and touches on all sides.  If you look at the
overview, a size 5 world will just fit in the entire over view window.


4.06) Geologists, or How do you find a good spot for mines?

If you watch the computer players, you will notice that they have little
guys in white hats running around the mountains with a hammer and placing
flags indicating ore veins (black for coal, red for iron, yellow for gold,
white for stone, and blank for no ore).

To get this geologist, place a flag in the mountains and build a road to
it.  Click on the flag, and you will see an icon of a serf with a white
hat.  Click on him and a geologist will leave your castle/store house and
start looking.  The geologist will not come out if there are no hammers in
storage (he won't have anything to dig with).


4.07) Transporting goods by sea

To use the boats, place a flag at two points along a lake and then
construct a path over the lake connecting them.  Any sea lane that runs
against the shore is illegal.  The sea lane will show up as a slightly
different color line on the lake.  They can help ease congestion if there
is lots of traffic.  They will not transport serfs, just material.


4.08) Knights and attacking the enemy

See the section on the Distribution Menu for details on how knights are
trained and the decision on which knights conduct the attacks (4.034, 4.035)
and some of the knight questions in section 3.

Attacking other settlements can only be done via their guard posts and
castle.  A special click on the building will bring up the attack menu if
you are close enough and it is occupied.  The screen shows four pictures of
knights, indicating how many knights are close (wielding sword), nearby,
far away and really far away (sleeping knight).  At the bottom of the
screen is the number of knights you wish to use for the attack.  Knights
are drawn from the closest buildings first, since they get there fastest.

Once you've decided how many knights are going to attack, a click on the
crossed swords will send them off with no possibility of recall.


4.09) Two player play with two mice

This is from a discussion on the internet from the newsgroup
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic.  Some people have tried the following
suggestions and found it did not work.

Badger <[e-mail]>:
Two mice do work.  Load up your computer normally, do NOT try to
get a second mouse driver working.  The game itself is a mouse driver,
when it knows where to look.  (DOS doesn't like two mouse drivers.)

In the options menu, click on the "right side" words with your normal
mouse.  You will then see a little window that lets you set joystick
sensitivity and control type.  Switch to second mouse, and tell the
beastie where your second mouse is.  Proceed to start a two-player game
(or one-player co-op) and you'll get a split screen with two active mice.


4.10) Roads and traffic

The main traffic limitation occurs at flags.  If a road is heavily trafficked,
the game will eventually place several people on it to transport goods.
However, only one serf can be at a flag at one time.  What this means is
that intersections are the choke-points of your traffic system.  [Bradley
Richards]

One interesting function that doesn't appear to be in the manual is that
when you have a road running just past a flag, you can special-click on
that flag and bring the road to the flag.  If this is possible, there will
be small red arrows on the flag, indicating the direction which the road
should be "pulled" to the flag.  This is particularly useful when you place
a building just off the road - you can pull the road to the building and
not lose one of the transporter serfs.  (The best way to understand this is
to try it and see.)

Traffic moves slowest on the steepest roads, of course.  The manual says
something about the speed on the entire road being set by its steepest
section, but I am not sure that is true.  The serfs speed and slow
depending on what section of the road they are.

Roads along a coast obstruct fishing.

Comments from Chris Smith <[e-mail]>:
   The manual says someplace that a single red segment makes a road slow even
   if the rest is all green.  That's clearly false; it looks to me like it's
   full speed for green, half speed for yellow, 1/4 speed for red.  Steep or
   shallow doesn't seem to matter, just the color.

   What I think they're talking about there is throughput, not latency.  If
   an all-green road can hold 12 serfs, a road the same length with a yellow
   segment can only hold 6, and a road with a red segment can only hold 3.

   So yellow+yellow is the same speed as red but has twice the capacity.
   Yellow+green is faster than red (and has twice the capacity).
   A red segment connected to a flag is particularly bad, it bottlenecks
   the whole intersection to 1/4 of its all-green capacity.


4.11) Mission codes (spoiler)

Here are the mission codes, as posted by Paolo Pesci
<[e-mail]>.  If there are errors, please mail him
directly and he can contact me.

Level 1    : start (of course)    Level 11 : chopper    Level 21 : pasture
Level 2    : station        Level 12 : gate        Level 22 : omnus
Level 3    : unity            Level 13 : island    Level 23 : tribute
Level 4    : wave            Level 14 : legion    Level 24 : fountain
Level 5    : export        Level 15 : piece    Level 25 : chude
Level 6    : option        Level 16 : rival    Level 26 : trailer
Level 7 : record        Level 17 : savage    Level 27 : canyon
Level 8 : scale            Level 18 : xaver    Level 28 : repress
Level 9 : sign            Level 19 : blade    Level 29 : yoki
Level 10: acorn            Level 20 : beacon    Level 30 : passive (the fun one)



5) Reported Bugs and Problems
  5.01) Gravis Ultrasound
  5.02) Computer hanging due to memory
  5.03) OS/2
  5.04) Computer hanging due to smartdrv
  5.05) Missing page 59 in US manual
  5.06) Computer hanging after winning a battle
  5.07) Logitech mouse doesn't seem to work
  5.08) Disappearing soldiers
  5.09) Computer reboots on attacks
  5.10) Joystick doesn't work from a saved two-player game
  5.11) Message Level bug
  5.12) Won but No Win
  5.13) Stuff can't leave Castle

Bugs 5.11-5.13 Reported by Alan Kwan

5.01) Gravis Ultrasound
People have complained that the game will occasionally hang with Gravis
Ultrasound.  The (repetitive) music can be turned off so that you only hear
the sounds of construction and fights.

5.02) Computer hanging due to memory
Some have complained that the computer hangs because they have just barely
enough memory.  The suggestion from SSI is to create a boot disk (floppy)
that doesn't load anything besides the bare minimums.  I've had to do this
with a few games and have not had any problem, yet.

5.03) OS/2
Doesn't seem to run well under some versions of OS/2.

5.04) Computer hanging due to smartdrv
From: Scott Whitecross <[e-mail]>
"Due to smartdrv, the game wouldn't save till after I was out of the save
game box, after it said game saved.  It would then lock 50% of the time
(very frustrating.)  After turning smartdrv off, the game saves
immediately when I hit the save game button, and the computer hasn't
locked since."  Scott also has the Gravis Ultrasound board.

5.05) Missing page 59 in US manual
From: [e-mail] (Jennifer Schlickbernd)
Look on Pg. 8.  You'll see 3 symbols.  The code for page 59 uses the
first 2 symbols (a circle bisected by a squiggly line and a Roman numeral
2 leaning to the left)

The code is:

Roman 2 Circle Roman 2.

This information was posted by SSI in CIS's Game Vendor forum.

5.06) Computer hanging after winning a battle

Problem: Computer hangs after winning a battle.  Seems to occur on
non-MSDOS machines.
Solution: Use MS-DOS or OS/2.

It was also mentioned that cracked versions of the game will also crash at
this point.  If this is happening to you, go out and buy the game.
Unfortunately, this has also been happening to people who have store-bought
versions of the games.  Cross your fingers.


5.07) Logitech mouse doesn't seem to work

A couple people have reported that the mouse pointer will not respond to
mouse movement with the Logitech mouse.


5.08) Disappearing soldiers

I noticed recently when watching a battle that one of my soldiers simply
disappeared.  It was just after he beat up an enemy soldier and was going
to hit a guard hut.  (This is August 6, 1994.)


5.09) Computer reboots on attacks

This is probably related to the computer handing after winning a battle,
but half-a-dozen people reported this problem on the newsgroup.  The
situation varied, but the computer rebooted with no warning when attacking
the enemy.


5.10) Joystick doesn't work from a saved two-player game

Problem (as reported by Keith Pyle <[e-mail]>):
If you choose a two player game, one player will use the mouse and the
second will use the joystick.  The joystick player will be asked to
calibrate the joystick before the game is started.  All will work
correctly until you save, quit, and later restart the game.  After you
restart, the joystick won't be recognized and the second player will
not be able to move the cursor in the right hand window.

Solution:
You can work around this problem by starting Serf City and picking a
new two player game.  As soon as you calibrate the joystick and the
new game is started, quit back to the main screen and load your saved
game.  The joystick will continue to work until you next save and quit.


5.11) Message Level bug: when you select message level 2 at the
options menu, messages for geologists and new buildings are not
supposed to pop up (at times they may become annoying).  But
they do.  When you switch to message level 1, they stop appearing,
along with some others.

This bug renders message level 2 ineffective.  Any patches?


5.12) Won but No Win:  sometimes the victory screen (the one
that states that your enemies surrendered) doesn't show
up in a clearly won game.  I encountered this bug once
during mission 7.  I captured every (enemy) guard post except the
castle, but no victory screen.  I then burnt the (enemy) castle,
but still no victory screen.  I was then the only kingdom
in the world, and controlled more than 90% of the map.
All the four statistic graphs showed (naturally) 100%.

Even more strange is that after I exit the game, at the main
menu screen it was still showing the password for mission 7,
but I could select and play mission 8.


5.13)  Stuff can't leave Castle:  once somebody I know encountered
this bug.  Suddenly, nothing stored in the castle can come out.
No wood, or coal, or anything.  This isn't due to any traffic
jam, because all intersections around the castle are empty, and
all transporters in the region are idle.  Even when we ordered
the castle to evacuate stuff, still nothing comes out.  People
(knights, geologists, transporters etc.) can still come and
go.  He went on to win the mission, but after many hours.
Saving and reloading doesn't do any help.

The save file for that game is still available.  If anyone
wants it, send me a mail with the address you want the file
sent to.

Solution:  Although fairly drastic, destroy all roads from castle and
destroy all half-built constructions.  Then build a road directly to a new
construction site.  [Thanks Lucian Wischik]


6) Cheats and clever tricks

So far there haven't been two many cheats turned up in this game.  There is
the obvious "saved game cheat" which exists on most games -- If you don't
like what happened, go back to the last saved game a play differently.
This is also useful if the game ever decided to lock up on you.

"Magic Guard Post" cheat: In general when you lay guard posts, you are
unable to build another one "close by."  However, if you find a position
where you want a post, but the game won't let you this cheat will help.
Special click on the main display (right button first) and then drag to
move the view.  Now clicking on the construction menu will allow you to
build a guard post.

"Where'd they go?" cheat:  When an enemy attacks a guard post, you cannot
destroy it to prevent them from getting the gold inside.  HOWEVER, you can
order a new construction on the same site, but opening the construction
menu and special-clicking on any building will destroy the guard post and
confuse the enemy.  Be carefull with this, because I ended up crashing the
game after doing this.


7) Where can I get this game?

This is a commercial game by Blue Byte Software in Muelheim, Germany where
it is called "Die Siedler".  In Europe it is "The Settlers" and is
distributed by Kompart UK Ltd.  It is distributed in the USA by SSI and
available and various software stores.  (Some have had it faster than
others, i.e. Electronics Boutique.)  Price is around $40 US.

There is also a demo version which limits you to one hour of play and does
not allow for saving or have some of the features of the commercial
release.  The demo version is available at some FTP locations.  (If you
don't know what ftp is, ask around your local site.)


ftp.wustl.edu  /pub/MSDOS_UPLOADS/games/settlers.zip
               /pub/MSDOS_UPLOADS/games/settlers.txt
[note, this site is often overloaded.  your best chances are during off-hours.]

ftp.funet.fi   /pub/msdos/games/gamedemos/settlers.zip
               /pub/msdos/games/gamedemos/settlers.txt
[yes, this is Finland.]


8) Differences between demo and commercial release

The biggest difference is that the demo only runs for 1 hour.  This really
changes how one plays the game as some strategies just cannot develop over
the course of an hour of play.

Other features in the commercial release that are not in the demo:
  - SVGA mode: smaller pictures showing a larger playing area
  - Save and load game features
  - Wide variety of sound cards are supported
  - Combats with other kingdoms: add a wonderful dimension to the game
  - Training/practice games are available
  - "Mission games" where you accomplish a given task
  - Worlds up to size 8 (really huge), the demo world is size 1,2 or 3
  - Messages about happenings in other parts of your kingdom