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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
vinson@unagi.cis.upenn.edu

Last Update: 7 July 1997
Version 2.49



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
(http://www.bluebyte.com/) and distributed by SSI in the United States.
For the purposes of this FAQ, I will call it Serf City.

Jack Vinson
vinson@unagi.cis.upenn.edu


Contents:
0) What's new?
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
2.9) Low initial resources
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) Production rates
4.12) 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
6.01) Saved game cheat
6.02) Magic guard post
6.03) Where'd they go?
6.04) Steal those resources
6.05) Steal those resources II
7) Where can I get this game?
8) Differences between demo and commercial release


0) What's new?
2.49: 7 July 1997: Corrected location of demo on ftp.funet.fi. Remove
ftp.wustl.edu demo as it seems to have disappeared.
2.48: 11 June 1996: Note that attacks do not work in the Demo. Additional
note on where it can be found.
2.47: Fixed lots o' spelling errors.
2.46: Added a new cheat. Numbered the cheats.
2.45: Added info about the Critic's Choice Strategy package.
2.44: Added some suggestions by Thomas Hillebrand
.

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 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