Successful Settlers players need to master more complex economies. Settlers is in a completely different niche than Age of Empires. It's a nice-looking cute family game without any blood and gore. It's just fun to play and to organize all of the little soldiers and settlers building up your settlement. Age of Empires tries to be really realistic and creates a feeling like you're playing in history.
Settlers is deep, but it's a fun game which is nice to play.
Yes that's one of our main issues. We are trying to put in some sort of special animations for the Settlers where they do funny things like reading newspapers, or if they die they have little angels flying up in the air and stuff like that. We like everything to look a little bit cute and nice. I think it's because Germans and other Europeans really like these cute and nice looking graphics. We have to convince people that this is a game which is really fun to play, even though it doesn't offer hyper-realistic graphics.