As my frequent readers probably know, I am a sucker for city-building and village-building games. I buy a few new ones almost every year, and ever since the release of Banished, the medieval village sim has been all the rage. Though it looks like post-apocalyptic settlement builders are also becoming a hot sub-genre -- probably as a result of the popularity of the settlement-building in Fallout 4. Anyway, last year, Chichian encouraged me to try out a then-Early Access title called Settlement Survival. I was hooked on it for a couple months, and then set it aside with the intent to come back to it later. In the meantime, the game saw its official Steam retail release, which encouraged me to go back and give it a second go (and formal review).
Time to plan
Settlement Survival is one of the more addictive and challenging city-builders that I've played. It features a complicated web of production chains and resources, which can be a real challenge to plan and manage. Trying to unlock and use everything in a single village will take a lot of time, effort, and planning.
Settlement Survival provides a handy-dandy timeline in the top right corner of the screen which shows when all the seasons start and end, and which also shows icons for important upcoming events. Everything from the arrival of a merchant ship, to incoming immigrants, and even disasters or other random events will be forecast a whole year in advance. This gives the player plenty of time to plan ahead, and avoids the problem of the player feeling un-prepared to take advantage of an un-expected boon or to mitigate a surprise disaster.
This timeline is the core gimmick of the game, as it enables long-term planning.
There are also random events that are not forecast on the timeline, and they often require that the player have certain resources or tools on-hand. But these are rarely destructive, so worst case is that you miss out on the opportunity to get some free bonus resources (which you may or may not have needed anyway). Nevertheless, it does put a pressure on the player to build up a surplus stockpile of many goods in case one of these events pops up. Tools and beer being the most common items used for such events, based on my experience.
This timeline helps to create some medium and long-term planning and reward structures that really makes the game crazy addictive. There's the short-term goals for things like building the next building. Then there's the medium-term goals like completing the next harvest season. And then there's the longer-term goals like accumulating goods to trade to an incoming merchant ship, waiting for the next tech to unlock, or waiting for the next batch of immigrants to give you a labor surplus that can allow you to go on the next wave of building infrastructure. There's always some milestone right over the horizon, and then another right beyond that, and I find myself playing longer than I had planned, and long after I should have gone to bed, because I want to get to that next harvest, or trade opportunity, or make sure that I get through that next disaster.
This also means that random disasters don't feel as annoying because you have plenty of warning that a disaster is coming, and can prepare accordingly. Further, the disasters themselves rarely kill population or destroy infrastructure directly. Rather, they usually impact your resource-generation for a period of time. So most disasters are mitigated simply by stockpiling the affected resource ahead of time.
There are also random events that do not appear on the timeline.
The timeline also discourages save-scumming. Disasters are forecast a whole in-game year ahead of time, so re-loading to before the disaster would require going back more than a whole year. And that might not even necessarily save you, since I've noticed that the disasters still happen at the same time, even if I go back to a save from before the disaster shows up in the timeline. I'm not sure how long in advance they are generated, but the fact that I know that I can't avoid it by simply reloading and re-rolling a die means that I'm more inclined to batten down the hatches and just roll with whatever happens.
The end result is that the gameplay ends up feeling more organic, and the challenge of surviving and growing your fledgling settlement remains relatively high. When I do save-scum, it's usually to undo some mistake that I made, so that I learn from my mistake, fix it and do better; rather than to outright cheat by undoing some random event that the game threw at me.
Building bridges, not walls
Population is, of course, the most precious resource. Maximizing birth rates and minimizing premature deaths is absolutely crucial to growing the settlement. I rarely had a settlement completely collapse such that everyone died. Instead, I have had to restart or reload from earlier saves because I didn't build enough houses, birth rates plummeted, and the trickle of immigrants didn't offset the death rate. Even though the population remained relatively stable, it would usually reach an equilibrium at a point in which I didn't have enough workers to work all my infrastructure, which meant that I couldn't accumulate excess supplies for trade -- let alone start building and working new infrastructure.
Periodic waves of immigrants are absolutely essential to growing a small settlement.
I've been seeing a lot of these little settlement simulators emphasizing immigration more and more (probably because it's become a hot-button political issue around the world due to the boom of climate and conflict refugees), and Settlement Survival is no exception.
In the early game, the semi-regular waves of immigrants are absolutely essential. New births are few and far between, and children have to wait several years before they can go to work anyway. Immigrants ensure that you can continue to grow and work new infrastructure. However, as your village grows, immigrants become less essential. As long as you have adequate housing and healthcare, the birthrate will rise and lifespans will increase to the point that the settlement's growth is sustainable without the influx of immigrants. Eventually, immigrants can potentially become more of a liability, as they could potentially introduce exotic new diseases to your growing population. Even so, more workers is always good, and I've always found it hard to turn down immigrants. Better to just build more clinics, research the cures for each disease ahead of time, and hope for the best.
Trade in a vacuum
The complicated nature of the production chain means that many of the things that you unlock in one tech tree will have implicit prerequisites in completely different tech trees. On the one hand, the level of detail in the production chains, and the massive variety in what can be produced, is impressive. On the other hand, these indirect prerequisites for many buildings severely limit the player's freedom to specialize their village in one way or another. The tech tree and unlock progression begins to feel more like a series of false choices, as the actual path that you have to follow to unlock items remains fairly rigid.
For example, a fishing dock is available in the "Agriculture" tech tree. But it requires wooden planks, which can only be built by sawmills, which are unlocked in the "Construction" tech tree. Similarly, many mid-tier processing buildings require cut stone or bricks, which means that you have to invest in quarries, stone-working (for stone-cutting), sand-mining (for clay), and kilns (for brick-making).
The player can buy and sell goods with off-map traders.
Further still, the supply of stone and iron on the map is limited. This means that you'll have to invest in the basic mining and quarry techs earlier, rather than sooner.
Sure, you could skip certain prerequisites and just buy the raw materials that you need. But doing so is expensive, and is also unreliable. The merchant ship goods are randomized, so you can't rely on the merchants having a specific raw material. Caravans to factions can buy pretty much any resource or supply, but they can be expensive and a caravan requires a sizeable investment in population that is impractical to spare during the early decades of a settlement. As such, having a settlement that harvests all of its own raw materials and produces every product along the production chains really feels like it's the only viable way to play.
Market square
I am also bothered by some of the rules for how villages must be organized in Settlement Survival. This game doesn't leave a whole lot of freedom for the player to express themselves with the organization of our village, due to the limited range of certain buildings. All houses (except for tents) can only be built within the range of a Market. And the range of the market isn't very big. It's basically enough room for 1 large block of houses, or maybe 2 smaller blocks, in every direction.
This means that houses basically have to be crammed in around the market. Otherwise, you'll quickly run out of space for houses and won't be able to keep up with the population growth. Either people will be left homeless, or they will cram into your boarding house or tents. If they're stuck in the boarding house or tent, they won't have children, which will probably lead to your birthrate falling behind your death rate, and your whole village's population will start to collapse.
The space in which houses can be legally built is limited to the small range of a Market.
This can be tough to overcome, because it would require building additional Markets before you can even place new homes. That market will require additional population to work it, not to mention the labor and time to procure the materials and actually build the thing. Then you have to start building the houses, which takes additional time, labor, and materials. If you're lucky, you'll get it all done before your population has fallen too much. If you're unlucky, you'll have to pull workers out of other necessary jobs, like farming, fishing, wood-cutting, and water-fetching, which can lead to a lack of necessary supplies, which will lead to further deaths, which will force you to pull additional workers from yet more necessary facilities.
People in the boarding house won't have babies.
Yes, this is all part of the challenge of the game. Building and maintaining the infrastructure to meet the needs of your population is the whole game. That's fine. I just feel like the small area in which houses are even legal to build is much too restrictive.
If you want to put a bunch of services and shops around your Markets because you want that Market to act as a sort of central hub of village activity, then you simply won't have room to build enough houses.
This problem is complicated by the poorly-documented functions of other range-based service buildings, such as the Church and Clinic. These buildings also have an area of effect, but the game is very un-clear about what the area of effect actually does. People who are sick or injured will walk to the Clinic from seemingly any distance. So what is the point of the building's range? Does the range act as some kind of passive prevention for injury or illness? And if so, does that only apply to houses, or to workplaces? Should I be building my Clinics right next to my Markets to maximize how much of its range overlaps with my houses and increase the lifespan of villagers? Or should I be building my Clinics near dangerous workplaces like mines and quarries in order to prevent or treat workplace injuries?
What are the exact effects of the range of the Church and Clinic?
Similarly, does the Church only provide religious happiness to people who live within the Church's range? Or will people go to the Church to pray, even if they live and work outside of its range? If it's the former, then that sucks, because aesthetically, I prefer to build my Church at the edge of the village so that I can place a large cemetery next to it. If I have to build the Church next to the Market to keep it as close to the houses as possible, then I can't build the cemetery next to the Church. Or if I do build the cemetery next to the Church, then it will take up a lot of the valuable real estate that should be dedicated to homes.
In the end, it seems to me like the optimal master plan for a village is to start with a central Market, with the Clinic and Church adjacent, and houses completely filling the rest of the Market's range. Then resource and production buildings should be built in layers surrounding the central Market and homes, or they should be built in spokes coming out from that central Market and homes. Any other layout for your village (that doesn't cram as many houses next to the Market as possible) seems to be a recipe for unnecessary hardship later in the game.
Layouts that try to centralize processing buildings and storage near Markets are not very viable.
Diagonal environment, but no diagonal buildings
Worse yet, organizing your resource and production infrastructure in spokes around your central Markets isn't all that viable either. The reason for this is that the game does not allow any buildings to be built on diagonals. This is despite the fact that the maps will often generate landscapes that are full of diagonal features, and people will frequently walk in diagonal directions because it's the shortest path to where they're going.
Buildings roads on a diagonal can be very tedious.
We can force roads to run along diagonals by manually laying them down in zig-zaggy patterns, so it is possible to lay down roads along the diagonal paths that villages will frequently follow. But if you build roads on diagonals, you kind of make it that much harder to efficiently fill in the space with buildings.
The bigger problem, thus, is trying to deal with certain environmental features on the map. Settlement Survival's map generator loves to generate rivers and mountains that run along diagonals, despite the fact that the fishing docks, watermills, mines, and quarries that are supposed to be built along these features cannot be built on diagonals. I frequently run into problems in which I cannot place watermills or mines where I want because they just don't fit on the river or mountain because that river or mountain runs along a diagonal.
It can be hard to place watermills along rivers because rivers often run on diagonals.
Yes, there is a terraforming tool that is unlockable in the tech tree. This tool can be used to level river or mountain tiles into flat land and make room for your buildings. It is also easy to bee-line for, because it only has 2 prerequisite techs. However, those prerequisite techs are things that aren't necessary or useful to build until you're a couple decades into a game.
The opportunity cost of taking those 2 prereqs early will mean that you have to wait longer to get other techs that are more useful for a young, developing village. It might mean delaying the techs that unlock fishing docks, mines, quarries, or sawmills. And you really don't want to wait too long to unlock fishing docks, mines, and quarries because they can receive buffs from certain resource deposits in the environment. But those resource deposits can be completely removed from the game if certain disasters strike. So you really want to get those harvester buildings up and running as early as possible in order to maximize how long you can take advantage of those resource buffs.
Certain disasters will destroy certain resource buffs.
Gleamer Studio's village; not yours
Settlement Survival further dumbfounds me by the ways that it goes out of its way to limit the player's ability to express themselves. Not only are some settlement configurations mechanically discouraged, we can't build on diagonals, and some tech tree choices feel like false choices, but Settlement Survival also locks all of its decorative objects behind expensive coins. You'll get a small stockpile of these silver coins by completing a set of milestones at the beginning of the game, but after that, they are only acquired through trade with the other factions.
Early in the game, these coins are most useful for buying expensive items from merchant ships or the other factions. Things like livestock or new plant seeds can be prohibitively expensive to acquire through simple barter, so I often have to make up the difference with silver coins. This means that decorations are basically only accessible to mature, late-game villages that have been doing a lot of trading, or which have built a silver coin mint. Not being able to decorate the villages earlier really sucks away a lot of the personalization and sense of ownership and connection to the village.
I just want to be able to build simple decorative objects like wooden fences, a bulletin board, some park benches, and maybe some hedge rows. But doing so would cost thousands of silver coins!
Decorative objects cost resources and valuable silver coins.
I get why they cost coins. It's probably a way to make these coins feel valuable after the player has already acquired all the seeds and livestock that they want. But why are they so expensive?! I started playing this game when it was still in early access, and I do not remember the decorative objects being this expensive!
Another minor aesthetic nitpick that I have is that I do not like that windmills buff adjacent pastures. I really think that windmills look better (and more realistic) when surrounded by farms or orchards. I would much prefer that compost factories should buff adjacent farms, the farms should buff adjacent windmills, and the fodder factory should buff adjacent pastures. And maybe butchers could be buffed by having adjacent pastures.
I'm also not sure how fertilizer and fodder works. Fishing docks have a checkbox for whether to use fishing nets, but farms and pastures do not have any such checkbox for using fertilizer or fodder (respectively). At least, not that I could find. So do fertilizer and fodder get automatically delivered to farms and pastures, and automatically used if they are in the inventory? Or do I have to do something to use the fertilizer or fodder?
So while I was initially impressed with the variety and expressiveness of Settlement Survival, as I played more and more, I started to realize that I was playing all of my new settlements pretty much the same. This largely killed the future replay value for the game, as I became less and less inclined to grind through the early stages of the game to get the basic infrastructure up and running. There are options to start the game with more infrastructure and population, but it's not enough to really solve the core problem.
I basically feel like I've optimized the fun out of the game, and it's happened far earlier than I would like it to. Sure, that's probably on me, but I feel like the game itself really nudged me in that direction every chance it got.
Nevertheless, Settlement Survival hits all the important aspects of creating an addictive and challenging little medieval city-builder. If you're looking for a new game to scratch the Banished itch, Settlement Survival is a good choice.
A minor nitpick: I prefer the look of windmills surrounded by farm fields, but they only buff adjacent pastures.