To see what kind of houses and where you can build your buildings press the spacebar. There are three different sizes of buildings:
- Small: woodcutter, forester, quarry, hunter, fishery, barracks, guardhouse, lookouttower and (water-)well.
- Medium: sawmill, slaughterhouse, mill, bakery, iron smelter, metalworks, armory, mint, brewery, storehouse, watchtower and catapult.
- Large: farm, pigfarm, donkey breeder, shipyard, harbor building and fortress.
On mountains you will only be able to build mines: gold, iron, coal or granite mines.
To expand your settlement place military buildings near the border of your settlement. Building roads from one place to another is fairly simple: click on one flag and then click on another flag where you want to connect it to. You now have a road. By pressing the spacebar you will see where you can set more flags. Set up as many flags as you can: the more flags you have the faster transportation goes. If a road is used very frequently it will become paved. Paved roads are faster than ordinary ones. When roads become so occupied that goods are stocked at the flags (maximum of eight pieces) make sure you build 'by-passes'.
Start expanding as quickly as you can. If you see mountains close to your borders: reach them as soon as possible. In the mountains you will find raw coal, iron and gold which you all need to strengthen your settlement.
To build houses of any kind you need structural material. You do have an initial stock (inventory for the Americans), but this stock gets exhausted if you do not add new stock to it. Below is set out a table of the necessary structural material for each building:
| Building | Wood | Stones | Building | Wood | Stones |
| Woodcutter | 2 | - | Mint | 2 | 2 |
| Forester | 2 | - | Brewery | 2 | 2 |
| Quarry | 2 | - | Storehouse | 3 | 3 |
| Hunter | 2 | - | Watchtower | 3 | 4 |
| Fishery | 2 | - | Catapult | 4 | 2 |
| Barracks | 2 | - | Farm | 3 | 3 |
| Guardhouse | 2 | 3 | Pigfarm | 3 | 3 |
| Lookouttower | 3 | - | Donkey breeder | 3 | 3 |
| Well | 2 | - | Fortress | 4 | 7 |
| Sawmill | 2 | 2 | Headquarters | - | - |
| Slaughterhouse | 2 | 2 | Ship | 13 | - |
| Mill | 2 | 2 | Boat | 1 | - |
| Bakery | 2 | 2 | Shipyard | 2 | 3 |
| Iron melter | 2 | 2 | Harbor building | 4 | 6 |
| Metalworks | 2 | 2 | Mines | 4 | - |
| Armory | 2 | 2 |
When you run out of structural materials (wood and stones) the building in progress will be stopped and probably your 'economy' will fall over.
As in most games there is a cheat mode. This can be enabled as follows:
| Game | Type in |
| The Settlers II - Veni, Vidi, Vici | thunder |
| The Settlers II - Mission CD* | winter |
You will see a circle with exclamation mark in the right top of the screen to indicate that the cheat mode is enabled. You will now only have to press F7 to see the entire map, or ALT and 1,2,3,4,5 or 6 to speed-up the game.
* "Settlers 2: Gold edetion" is the normal Settlers II Veni, Vedi, Veci with the Mission Disk pre-built into it�
This is a fairly harmless cheat. There is another way of cheating: Advanced Cheating