Settlements Rising Review & Streaming Configuration

Settlements Rising is a city-builder game that takes place in pre-colonial times, focusing on the player establishing a colony. The game is easy to learn, captivating, and available to play on Steam at this link:

Settlements Rising on Steam

Gather raw materials, produce equipments, and ensure villagers thrive by managing required resources. Face challenges such as natural disasters, predators and raiders. Build ships for exploration and trade, accumulate wealth and loot. Protect your people and build a thriving community.

STEAM

This article will briefly go over the game and create an optimal configuration for streamers and content creators to set up. The game streaming was tested using Glitch as the streaming tool and Twitch as the platform.

Overall Score - 7/10

Overview Of The Game

The game doesn’t start by telling you how it works, but the interface is fairly intuitive, especially if you are accustomed to games like Sim City or Cities: Skyline. I first created my town center and then clumsily figured out that I needed my villagers to gather resources. It felt very familiar to an Age of Empires start.

About 15 minutes into the game, after building a few houses, I discovered that villagers can be specialized depending on the buildings you construct. This ranged from gatherers, hunters, weavers, to blacksmiths. It became a balancing act to ensure that I had enough food, that the villagers had clothes and wouldn’t die from the cold, while still collecting resources to progress.

I found myself playing for about 4 hours as I delved further into the game, figuring out all the build mechanics. I would have played more if I didn’t have actual work to do. There were so many buildings, professions and an entire map to explore. Overall, it was very captivating and fun.

What I Liked About The Game

• You had to learn the concept of balancing your "civilizations" resources to adequately grow
• The easiness of learning the basic mechanics will allow anyone to get started
• The variety of interesting professions, building, attributes of the civilization. There can be a lot of depth in this game's mechanics.
• How you can control how people and professions in your work together was very interesting and fun to learn. This made me very curious and want to try to build anything.
• I liked how the worlds resources tied together. Like you can get food with fishing, hunting or foraging. And if you want to create a sweater for your people, you first had to forage the materials for the sweater, and then craft it at the seamstress. Very nice world complexities.
• Not a resource intensive game on the computer
• The game's vibe was overall very relax and chill.

Areas of Improvement

While the game was great to play and kept me going up to 4 hours for the initial play through there were a few things that I think can be done to improve the game play.

1. There is a lot of items to unlock but there are no directions of how to unlock them. Have a path of how to unlock things might help.
2. There were no achievements. This might be tied into my first point but having achievements, ie you have reached 50 people, would help to give a greater sense of accomplishment.
3. It could be more challenging and no one died. My people where outside in zero weather with no clothes and no one died. It seems people can only die of old age. It would be nice if people died of cold, sickness, wolfs or other elements that increased the challenge.
4. I might have missed this but it there didn't seem a intuitive way to discover the world map. For age of empires, you can send a horse scout to search the area.
5. I wished laborers could auto-assign themselves tasks without me assigning it to them.

Testing the Streaming Performance

First, capturing the game in Glitch was very easy. It showed right up in my source, and I was able to easily add it to my ‘Game Window’ without any problems.

For content creators, if you are going to stream this game and create content, here are some considerations. The game is not a fast-paced game; therefore, 30 FPS is typically more than sufficient for this game.

The game also fits nicely into a 16:9 aspect ratio, meaning you should set your resolution to 1080p or 720p. I also tested this game with VP8 and AV1 codecs, along with CPU mode.

Here are several recordings of my gameplay with various configurations:

Configuration 1: GPU Mode / 30 FPS/VP8/500 Chunk Size/Nvidia Encoder

Configuration 2: GPU Mode / 30 FPS/VP8/20 Chunk Size/Nvidia Encoder

Configuration 3: CPU Mode / 30 FPS/AV1/20 Chunk Size/Libx264

Configuration 4: GPU Mode / 60 FPS/AV1/20 Chunk Size/Libx264

Optimal Configuration for Settlements Rising

Overall, this game is very lightweight and doesn’t use too many resources. Therefore, when it comes to streaming, you shouldn't have to make any adjustments. An optimal configuration for streaming could be:

• Streaming Tool: Glitch
• FPS: 30 FPS
• Resolution: 720p or 1080p
• Encoder: Any (OpenH264, Libx264, NVENC, etc.)
• Codec: AV1 or VP8
• Chunk Size: 20
• Bitrate: 4000 Kbps

Why Should You Stream This Game?

This game is enjoyable and really easy to play. It does not require to much and focus to progress and win. Therefore, this would probably be a good "Just Chatting" game, where the focus can be evenly split between the gameplay and the conversation.

When creating clips, I think the interest will be around what cool and unique layouts you are able to build of your cities. Or what is the perfect balance of people that keeps a civilization in harmony.