A messenger sent by the head cheese (bet you never knew there was one guy who ran the whole show for every religion, did ya'?) visits the gods and tells them of the boss' displeasure in their laziness and lack of effectiveness as deities. They're all sitting around on a luxurious floating marble city getting fat, bloated and smashed off of the food and alcohol offerings from their worshippers. Settlers III opens with a cartoonish animation of three gods from completely different mythoi who should obviously never be seen together: Jupiter (leader of the Roman Pantheon), Horus (the falcon-headed Egyptian sun god), and Ch'ih-Yu (the legendary Chinese dragon). Like the others, Settlers III is a good game, but there's nothing really new or innovative here. So, with the release of Settlers III, I was expecting about the same. Although neither of the two previous installments broke any new ground in the strategy genre, they were decent games that provided gamers with some of the most highly detailed economic systems available in any strategy game. The Settlers series from Blue Byte has been a fairly successful franchise for the company, especially in Europe.