The WuslersThe Wuslers

A relaxed settlement builder in the tradition of The Settlers II. You build a settlement with woodcutters, a sawmill, a bakery and mines, and you watch the Wuslers carry every single good along the roads you laid out yourself. Nobody rushes you while you do it, because there is no timer and no click frenzy, just a living system that you watch bustling along and expand piece by piece.

Watch and Listen

Feel free to take your time and simply watch. Zoom out and you hear your settlement as a whole, zoom in and you hear the single sawmill at work and the Wuslers walking past it. Fourteen music tracks play along at the same easy pace, and whenever it is too much or too little for you, everything can be adjusted in the options to your liking.

Every Good Is Carried

From the first log to the finished loaf, everything here travels on the back of a Wusler, which is why no warehouse ever fills up on its own. If the bakery runs out of flour, then either the flour is still sitting at the mill and somebody has to walk over and fetch it, or you have not built the farm yet. Between any two flags exactly one carrier walks back and forth, so a stretch of road that is too long quickly turns into a bottleneck. Optimize your transport routes and build warehouses as intermediate storage along the way. You will spend a lot of time watching your Wuslers and you will see exactly where things get stuck, and most of the time it is a road you laid yourself twenty minutes ago.

Chains That Interlock

The forester plants the trees the woodcutter later fells, and the sawmill cuts the logs into planks for your next buildings. Grain becomes flour at the mill and bread at the bakery, the pigs from the pig pen go to the butcher and the fisherman brings his catch up from the shore. You need all of it for your mines, because a mine yields more the more food arrives there, and more still when that food comes in several kinds. Anyone who wants to get the most out of their iron has a farm, a mill, a bakery, a pig pen, a butcher and a fisherman running at the same time, and every one of those buildings actually stands on the map and wants supplying. Eventually the vein runs dry, and then you can build a deep shaft on the spot, which costs more and demands a lot more food, and on top of that a steady supply of wood to prop up the shafts.

The Land Follows Your Buildings

You gain territory by building a Barracks, Guard Hut, Watchtower or Fortress and garrisoning it with soldiers. Once the garrison has moved in, the border pushes outward and you get new building sites and new mountains with ore veins. You never have to select units or order them around, you build and garrison, and step by step you get closer to your opponent. With gold you can also promote your soldiers, which raises their rank so they take more punishment and hit more often.

Solo, Against the AI or Eight at Once

• Campaign with more than ten levels, each on its own map with its own task. The first one guides you step by step, after that you are on your own.
  
• Skirmish against an AI that runs a real economy, with the same roads and carriers as you.
  
• Multiplayer with up to eight slots, teams of any size, humans and AI mixed, including across PC and Android tablet.
  
• Assist Mode, where the AI plays a seat and someone sitting next to you can still give it orders, so that anyone who cannot manage on their own yet can still join in.
  
• Map Editor built right into the game.
  

So you sit at the PC, someone in your family takes the tablet to the sofa, and you play on the same team against the AI. Each of you runs your own settlement with your own storage and your own territory, you cannot attack each other, and in the end you win or lose together. You build side by side and look over each other's shoulders.

Whenever you are short of something, the only answer is to build more, more roads and carriers and yet another farm for that hungry deep shaft. That is exactly where the snowball effect of a strong economy and logistics lies: every building that is properly supplied makes the next one easier, and your little settlement grows into one big bustle. Or, as the motto goes, "The Wuslers must grow".