I've always been a fan of the Settlers series and have been playing "Settlers online" for a few days now. My initial thoughts were that the game would have little appeal due to the amount of time it takes to produce resources etc. and progress in the game, but I decided to stick with it and give the game a chance. I'm happy to say that my initial thoughts were wrong; the game does work and after a couple of days I was hooked. In-fact the concept of the game continuing to "play"; gather resources etc. while your off-line is very appealing and keeps me coming back to the game every day.
There is I consider however one serious flaw which is seems totally at odds with the principal and idea of the rest of the game. And that is the production of military units. Whilst all resources etc. are slowly built up over many hours and you can safely be off-line whilst that happens. Production of military units has to be done whilst logged into the game - no real problem with that, however it would be better IMO if they could also be produced (queued) off-line.
The real drawback though is when you do build up your military units again after losing 50+ settlers in your last battle, you can only queue 3 at a time and have to repeatedly keep going back to the barracks to queue another 3. This is not only tedious and time consuming but is totally at odds with the rest of the game where items are produced over time whilst a player can be off-line.
IMO either the creation queue for military units needs to be extended greatly or better still the queue extended AND the ability for military units to be produced off-line as and when sufficient resources are available.