SETTLERS 2 Hints - Ch 7: THE SNAKE

                       by Bev Truter

This was a (relatively) easy chapter to play, compared to chapters
6 and 8. You begin on a northeast 'blob' of the mainland, with
Reds to your west, an empty peninsula SW, and the Yellows on a SE
peninsula.  There's ample coal, ore and gold on a huge mountain
range to your west, and basically you just have to keep the
Yellows at bay in their own peninsula, before building up your men
to attack the Reds. All I did was to build 2 watchtowers and 3
catapults just north of where you first meet the Yellows, and this
kept them stuck there the entire game.

If the Yellows attempt to sneak in from the east, around a
mountain you are mining, they can be kept back with just one guard
hut and a forester planting trees to block off the narrow pass
between mountain and swampy ground. As soon as your mines are
finished on this mountain, demolish any barracks to shrink your
boundaries, so if they attack and take your lonely guard hut they
will be unable to connect it by road to their territory. The same
cluster of watchtowers and catapults holding off the Yellows to
the south will also prevent them from expanding any further into
your territory from the east/lonely guard hut position.

As Sue said, as soon as you attack either Yellows or Reds, both
pile in together and annihilate you. As catapults aren't
registered as "attacks", you can hold both Reds and Yellows off
with catapults. I first wasted about 5 hours trying to battle my
way through the Yellows, convinced by some strange feminine hunch
that the gateway was at the bottom of the Yellows' peninsula. Just
shows how wrong intuition can be! At any rate, although the
Yellows were easy to keep pinned back, they were extraordinarily
difficult to fight; and eventually I just gave up, left them where
they were, and turned my attention to building up my soldiers.
After a brief skirmish with the Reds I realized that the Yellows
were only retaliating very feebly, so I concentrated on the Reds,
succumbed to temptation and read Sue's hints in SynTax 63, and
discovered it was indeed the Reds I should be battling through.

When you finally start attacking the Reds in earnest, after
checking the statistics to make sure you're strong enough, the
Yellows will stay out of it and leave you to it. The Red
headquarters is fairly close to your extended west boundary, south
of the large mountain between you and the Reds. Demolishing their
headquarters was the easy bit - I spent *ages* wandering about,
battling through Red territory trying to find the ruddy gateway,
and finally found it way over in the southwest (7 or 8 o'clock
position?), stuck out on a long, empty stretch of coast/beach.

Ch 7 took me about 12 hours to complete, and was a pleasant,
restful romp compared to the horrors awaiting me in Ch 8 ...

@~Which Bev will tell us about NEXT issue!





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