Been playing this economy management RPG thing called Settlements and it is very, very charming. It uses a pre-rendered style that I normally find profoundly ugly, and every prompt is like a Windows 95 text box, but I genuinely love it. Has the feel of a game that released in 1999, based on a boardgame some Linux nerd designed the rules for over 20+ years.
Rough pitch: The apocalypse happened. The world has been covered in dangerous briar, which infects the minds of humans and animals alike with spores. You are tasked with rebuilding humanity, starting with two settlements. All settlements in the game are limited to six buildings in size, because growing too large causes the briar to push in and kill everyone.
I found this out personally by fleeing from settlement battles one too many times, causing my “doom meter” to max out, which made the briar overwhelm my settlements in, as the game put it, “a tidal wave of millions and millions of bodies.” Grim.
(Shout-out to the “Ranged” stance icon being a Call of Duty sniper rifle lmao)
Every character in this game has a full stat sheet and some minor visual customization elements like face or portrait background. Min-maxing each one to a particular task is actually pretty important, and each task ties to attributes and skills alike (attributes increased through paying money, skills earned by Doing Stuff). The better your character is at something, the faster they do it, the more likelihood you get a “rare proc” on a craft, stuff like that.
Characters can only learn 15 skills without any upgrades, and only a few more with, and once they are full they don’t earn any more skills. Deleting skills you learned accidentally (say, while someone subbed in on a production building while the normal character is scouting) is something you do astonishingly frequently in this game! And I genuinely like it too. Feels like I’m actually molding these characters into what I want them to be, instead of just having them soak up the entirety of the world’s knowledge through Merely Existing.
Production isn’t terribly complicated, but the super-limited confines makes specialization important. The game recommends that you dedicate one settlement to raw resource production and one to refinement and research, at least to start, and that’s definitely a good idea. You lose a little time in “supply” - moving stuff from one settlement to another, or within a settlement - but you make up for it in skill balancing. Research is also predicated on your researcher either having various crafting skills or other people in the same town to help.
Periodically you get attacked by monsters, or you can set out to fight monsters, and that’s when the combat layer shows up. It seems really complicated, but it’s actually pretty simple. The monsters aligned with a character’s row will attack them on that monster’s next turn. You get a few different abilities - dependent on your weapon and leadership skill levels - to attack enemies, heal yourself, buff your defenses, and manipulate threat. There is also a reserves list which automatically uses ranged attacks and heals slowly over time.
The end result is a sort of constant swap game. You’re juggling threat between your various units, swapping them with a reserve when they get low, and trying to distribute damage evenly so you can gradually pick off much larger hordes than the measly 8 people you can take into battle (4 in front, 4 in reserve). Everything else is sorta passive skill-check dice-roll kind of combat. I thought it was stupid the first time I got into a fight, but now that I’ve learned how, I can easily defeat huge groups of enemies. Feels good.
If you’re into economy sims or tactical RPGs, this will probably be up your alley. There’s kind of a learning curve, and the interface is painfully amateurish, but in the end I got really sucked into it, and I’m gonna keep playing. I love over-ambitious stuff like this, and Settlements manages to cohere really well despite its split mechanical ambitions. Smart game.
