recruit any soldiers unless they have enough resources to recruit at least six. In Paths to a Kingdom, the player's territory can be expanded in three different ways; military, technology, or trade. For neutral sectors, military expansion sees the player defeat the sector's occupants, technological expansion involves sending clerics to proselytise the occupants, and trade involves bribing the occupying soldiers. To conquer sectors occupied by enemy soldiers, the player must use the military option. For the military path, all soldiers must be assigned to a general, with each general having a specific set of skills, based around melee combat, ranged combat, attacking fortifications, or a combination of all three. Players issue orders to generals, and all soldiers under that general's command automatically follow him, with combat handled automatically by the AI. For the technology path, the player must recruit clerics, who are the only settlers capable of moving through neutral and enemy sectors. To research new technologies, the player must send the requisite number of clerics to the necessary monastery, where they will begin research. For the trade path, players must recruit traders. To unlock a trade, the player must send the requisite number of traders to the corresponding outpost, with the trade then becoming available at the marketplace. Development Origins and early successes (1991-1996) The original Settlers game was conceived, designed, and programmed by Blue Byte's Volker Wertich, who was inspired by titles such as Little Computer People, Populous and SimCity. Originally, he intended the game to be similar to existing god games, with early development working to that end. However, after almost a year of work, he scrapped his initial concept entirely and began work on creating a game which could simulate a complex economic system and which would feature gameplay built around a simulation of real-world supply and demand. The major innovation he introduced in The Settlers was how the game handled raw materials. In most other titles at the time, raw materials were made available without the player having to do much in the way of producing them. In The Settlers, the player would be responsible for the raw materials upon which the economic system was built by way of constructing and maintaining each link in the chain-of-production. Designing a game which could handle such complexity proved far from simple, requiring over two years of development and programming, with much of this time spent "teaching the