The Settlers: Rise of an Empire - The Eastern Realm

The main feature of the expansion is a completely new campaign that consists of 8 scenarios. Some of them take place in a new, exotic climatic zone of the distant India. The eastern lands naturally offer suggestive graphics and audio that significantly enhance the vanilla game. The players who prefer other game modes will also find something to their liking—the production comes with a number of additional maps for online gaming with friends and the lone wolves that enjoy plotless gameplay.

One of the main characters of The Eastern Realm is the daughter of the abovementioned merchant Praphat —princess Saraya who plays an important role in the story and expands the available hero list of the vanilla game. It isn’t the only new face in the expansion — older players who played The Settlers II: Veni, Vidi, Vici surely gray-bearded men who ran over mountains with great self-denial and kept on hammering the ground in search of underground riches. Geologists make a comeback to the series although they possess slightly different skills — they can now detect additional deposits in places where there are functioning mines already, thanks to which we receive the possibility of further exploitation of raw materials.

Mechanics

Other enhancements directly influence our possibilities of developing towns and villages. We can now build standalone wells, thanks to which it is easier to provide water in times of particular drought. Another noteworthy feature offers some automatization of trading places — a part of our economic responsibilities can be entrusted to our virtual advisors. The expansion also introduces a large set of beautifying elements that can be placed in our settlement to give it a unique appearance.

The developers also prepared an impediment connected to the characteristics of the abovementioned climatic zone. In these lands, there are rainy seasons during which it is harder to mine some raw materials, while some transport routes can be temporarily flooded.