I've wanted this game for a while now, and Impulse has it on sale for 50% off as part of their Thanksgiving sale, so I bought it yesterday. It's interesting, and very different from other strategy games I'm familiar with. In many ways it's more of a management sim than an RTS: your ability to give direct orders is severely limited, and there's a heavy emphasis on economics with many resources and production chains. The game's only serious failing is the interface. Building things and waging war are quite straightforward, but there's a huge amount of information under the hood and no readily comprehensible way to get to it. For instance, each building shows its current efficiency in its tooltip, but it's not immediately apparent how efficiency is calculated or what you can do to improve it. After playing for a little while, I feel like I'm starting to get a handle on the game, but it would be nice to have some sort of in-game encyclopedia to refer to.

If games like Dungeon Keeper, Startopia, and Evil Genius are your thing, you should definitely check out The Settlers 7.

Settlers may be my favorite RTS ever, perhaps because it is more city manager than RTS. I don't have to focus on clicking my units at lightning speed, I get to focus on actual strategy. I do admit it can be a little frustrating to see a low efficency rating on a building and have no idea what is going on, but it usually turns out to be fairly obvious. More often than not it is a lack of supplies (Or swift delivery thereof), or it is build on demand and hasn't been demanded in a while. My only real complaints with the game are that building placement can be a bit finicky when trying to get the optimum usage out of your limited land space, and that despite the claim that you have three paths to victory, you always need a good standing army to keep yourself safe. The first can be an issue, especially with how long construction can potentially take, and the second is mitigated very well by the ability to build defensive upgrades for your territory.

Perhaps the closest game I've seen to this before is cities and knights. It even (come to think of it) has many of the same buildings with the same functionality, and the same supply chains. But you can only get so creative with a grain -> flower -> bread chain, and a grain -> pig -> sausage chain.

One thing I think the game could really use is some different cultures. Gameplay would be exactly the same, but you could have the Japanese culture, which would grow rice instead of wheat, sakke instead of beer and have different building styles, etc. Might be more work than it is worth for the company though, since the buildings and characters are all very well done.

If you enjoy the slower RTS games, or even TBS games, this could be a good game to pick up, especially if it is half off.