Here are a few tips if you're stuck in the campaign, or if you want to complete the missions faster. I don't know if this advice apply to the original Settlers 2 (probably to some extent but not fully).

General ideas

The keys to victory are 1) to explore the map quickly by building many barracks simultaneously in the beggining and 2) to build a pool of fully upgraded soldiers as early as you can. Soldiers are upgraded with gold coins. Upgraded soldiers (“generals”) are many times stronger than base ones (“privates”). Although generals only have twice as many health points as privates (7 versus 3), they also have better fighting abilities, so they can easily beat 3 privates one after the other, and they'll even heal after the battle.

Fighting a war with privates leads to many casulaties and wastes a lot of resources. Generals are much more economical on the long run, but they're slow to get, so aim for coins from the very beggining.

Other aspects of your development (iron mines, Smithy and Metalworks) are less important, because you start with enough tools and privates — if you manage to upgrade your 50 starting privates to generals before sending them to battle, they'll probably be enough to win.

Military management

The default behavior of soldiers is a bit clumsy. Some soldiers will stay in the barracks in the middle of your territory, and on the contrary they won't fill up the buildings near the border.

But there's a way to make it work as you want. First, open the “Global Economy Settings” window on the bottom of the screen and go to the military tab. Set all the sliders to maximum ; your soldiers with now try to fill up the military buildings as much as they can. Second, always “evacuate” barracks just after they're manned (unless the building is on the border with the AI!). This way the soldiers will return to the nearest storehouse and will be available if needed elsewhere. Stop the coin deliveries too, as you want to control where your coins go.

Regarding buildings, only use barracks to expand your territory. Guard houses, not to mention watchtowers and castles, control a slightly larger area (+1, +2 and +3 radius I think) but they cost too much resources and are too slow to build. As explained above, evacuate them right after they've been manned.

It's important to react quickly after finding the AI, otherwise you may be pushed back. When the limit of the AI territory appears, immediately start upgrading the closest 2 barracks to guard houses, and fill them with soldiers. You can build one additional barrack or guard house closer to the enemy, but don't put it too close because you may lose it if his territory expands before the construction is complete. Even if you don't have generals yet, 4 guard houses able to dispatch soldiers to defend one-another should be enough to freeze the border. Later you can upgrade one or two guard houses to watchtowers for comfort.

Don't be too agressive until you have generals, you'll just waste your resources.

Catapults aren't necessary, I build them for fun only !

Economy

The most important resources are planks, coal, gold, and food. Planks are the basic resource for building, coal and gold are needed to produce gold coins in the Mint and upgrade your soldiers, and food is needed for your coal and gold mines to work. Fish is the most practical food source in the beggining, but in the end you'll need tons of farms. Hunting isn't very useful. Use the “Statistics/Goods” window and check the stocks in buildings to see what you're short on.

Iron is needed for tools and weapons, but you won't need these in the beggining of the game. Keep an eye on the number of privates left in headquarters and storehouses in the “Statistics” window, “Settlers” tab to see if you're going to need a Smithy. You'll only need a Metalworks when there are no more workers of one type.

Water, beer and stone are usually easy to produce in excess. Just keep an eye on them in the “Statistics” window. Build stone mines if necessary. Make sure only one storehouse (or headquarter) allows beer and weapons !

You'll want to tweak a few options in the “Global Economy Settings” window. Update the tools production panel as needed — you'll probably need pickaxes and scythes, but not meat cleavers. It's also a good idea to changes the transport priorities, to make sure food isn't blocked somewhere because the 200th unit of water needs to be taken to the storehouse. The order I'm usually going with is coins, food, coal, gold, iron & bar, tools, weapons, planks, others.

Development priorities

For the campain or on medium mode, the priorities are rapid exploration, plank production and coin production. At start, build a barrack in each possible direction and 2 sawmills — try to put them towards the area where your wood supply will eventually be, if you know it, to ease the traffic. Survey the visible mining sites as soon as possible, looking for gold (finding coal should be easy, and the priority is lower because you start with a stock of coal). Tip: you can send more than one geologist at a time.

Build woodcutters to clear the forests around your headquarters. They'll produce logs until you've decided on the site where to build forester's houses, and provide free space for farms. Destroy them once they run out of trees (you'll get 1 plank back). Build quarries to clear stone fields if present, and a 3rd sawmill. Build a bunch of fisheries if there's water. Start building farms, a mill, a bakery and a well but make sure you keep enough planks (>10) to get your gold industry started.

As soon as you find gold, build two gold mines and two Mints. Once these buildings are complete, build two coal mines and then focus on securing food for the four mines. Let the coins flow to the border you've established as explained above, or just pile them up if you've not found the AI yet. From there on you should achieve a smooth and rather quick victory.

However, if you want to be even more efficient and you're comfortable enough to handle one more thing, there's a way to get the most of your gold industry. Coin effect actually depends on the building where it is used : in a Castle, each coin will upgrade up to 4 soldiers. In order to take advantage of it, have a castle built next to your headquarters by the time your gold industry starts. Wait until you've got 6+ generals and evacuate ; the soldiers will go back to the headquarters. In the headquarters building window, go to the “Military Management” tab and put all the generals in garrison (later you can just forbid generals in the headquarters). Fill the castle again & repeat.

Starting with low resources (hard mode)

It's basically the same thing, just with less starting resources. To build 3 sawmills in the very beggining, exploration has to be delayed a bit.

The biggest difference is probably that you have less tools. Thus it's only possible to build one Mint because there are only two Melting Pots, and the second one is needed for the Iron Smelting Works. It's necessary to start the iron industry early to get more melting pots, scythes, rolling pins and axes.

Lastly you start with only 25 privates so it's even more important to upgrade them before you start to lose them !

That's it ! Let me know if this was useful.

Tinm

Thank you Tinm.

Very nice overview of tips. Have you tried Vikings btw? It's a great expansion, but sadly not easily available. It automatically turns off gold delivery, so you won't 'lose' gold to barracks if you don't turn it off quickly enough yourself, and it makes it much easier to get weapons and beer to the same location, plus many other small improvements.

Some of the missions there are more tricky as well, because you start with much fewer resources and privates than in the normal campaign. Something like 12 privates, 2 smelting pots and so forth (though I don't recall the exact numbers here, so don't shoot me :D). It was a lot of fun, so I recommend it.

Another small tip to add to your great selection above. Remember to use as many carriers as possible on roads, so they are more efficient. I also like to place two sawmills around the HQ from the very start, so they can quickly get those plans to the HQ for carriers to get to construction sites. Later on you can put up more sawmills as you expand. I also prefer to have a big industrial zone, more or less, around the HQ. That way the trips are shorter.

Another fine tip can be to spend some room for extra roads out of the HQ so there is less chance for a pileup and massive delays.

Like you mentioned, a great way to upgrade privates to generals is to create a fortress. Then place for instance two storehouses nearby it. Recruit privates in the one that is closest, and disallow generals from going there. In the one that is further away, disallow all other types but generals. That way all the generals will go there. When the last private has been upgraded to 4-strength (whatever his name was, I don't recall), send them all packing. Then turn off the evacuate button when they have all left and entered the storehouse(s). Then the partly upgraded units will get back to the fortress, plus new privates, because the generals are further away.

You can also use something similar to store generals near the front. Build a storehouse there, and make sure the generals are only allowed in this storehouse near the front. Naturally you can have more storehouses like this if you have several fronts. That way they'll quickly get to the frontline when generals die on the battlefield.

For attacking, it can also be a good idea to have many watch towers or even fortresses (strongholds, wasn't it?) clustered together at the front. That way you'll attack with overwhelming force, and won't risk that the defenders win the battle with lots of units near death, and that you can't re-attack to kill them before they are healed. Go in strong instead, and take them out straight away, before pushing further into their lands. Soon enough you get a big snowball that can't be stopped. Once you see one defender in the AI's barrackses and so forth, you have effectively won, as they have run out of troops.

Thanks for your precisions ! Yes I also find it important to make sure there's more than a single route around the HQ. It's up to every player to come up with a road system that works, but it's a fun and not too hard part so I didn't talk much about it. ;)

I haven't played Vikings yet, only the GOG version. Maybe I'll try to get my hands on a German version of Vikings ”somehow“...

^ somhow...

It's becomming increasingly rare to find, but either go on amazon.de here

or

(maybe I should not say this, but since it's becomming abandonware I think it's excusable) look for a torrent named:
die.Siedler.II.die.Naechste.Generation.Wikinger.GERMAN.Clone-GRATIS
I would like for GOG to sell it or even add it to the s2-10th as an optional download, but I think that won't happen.

In the UBI forums there is a topic about how to install the german addon on the english version of the game: here , look at post #7 for instructions.

i know, it's an old thread, but thought I'd still add a few observations. For background, I've played through the Roman and World campaigns of the Gold Edition.I believe there are some gameplay differences between the versions, so if something doesn't apply, it could be a version thing.

Military
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I did a test of how long it took to build the different buildings. Since the absolute time depends on a lot of different factors, I'll just post in relative time units:
Barracks - 1 time unit
Guardhouse - 2 time units
Watchtower - 4 time units
Fortress - 8 time units

About catapults... It takes a lot of resources to build a soldier and even more to build a general, including several expendable and time-consuming resources. The only expendable resource required for catapults is stone. Granted, stones can be somewhat scarce in some maps, but it's generally not the case. Especially when the opponent has upgraded soldiers, catapults is a great way to advance (assuming the opponent gives you enough time to use them).

Food
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Meat is a bit of a mystery in this game. I couldn't find any straight answers on the net on when to use them. Hunters are notorious for depleting the area quickly. And producing meat doesn't seem to make much sense. Why build a large building (pig farm) instead of normal building (mill)?

Let's start with the basic question if all food is equal? If some food were worth more (resulting in additional mine products), there would be an incentive to spend additional resources to get that particular kind of food. However, all food is equal. One piece of food yields exactly one mine product. There is nothing special about meat.

Next, let's talk about the hunters. Planks should only be a problem in the beginning. Once you have the engine going, planks are a free resource, so building a hut for the hunter is relatively painless. Generally, you will get a few hunters and bows to start with. If you only rely on fishers and bread, you're on most maps going to need more workers of that type than what you start with. And that means producing tools that are both expensive and time-consuming. Even though the hunters are somewhat crap, they're still better than nothing and can provide support in the phase between having the plank engine running up until the industrial engine is producing coal and iron in sufficient quantities.

My reasoning around the pig farms/slaughterhouses is about the same. There doesn't appear to be any kind of advantage (production time or other) in producing meat over bread. So all things equal, producing meat is a losing strategy. However, you often start with a few butchers/meat cleavers. Instead of producing rolling pins for additional bakers or fishing rods, why not use these free resources, for the minor inconvenience of having to build a pig farm instead of a mill?