The Settlers III

The Settlers III is a game about the idea that wars are won by whoever keeps their production in order. Three gods send their peoples, the Romans, the Egyptians, and the Asians, to a contested territory, and the player builds a settlement for one of the cultures that must produce everything itself, from bread to swords. The third installment dropped the road system from the previous game and let settlers walk freely, which sped things up and simplified them, but the foundation stayed the same: nothing gets made without raw materials, and nothing moves without someone to carry it.

The heart of the game is the production chain. A woodcutter fells trees, a sawmill processes the logs, a stonemason quarries rock, farms grow grain, a mill and bakery turn it into bread that feeds the miners in the pits; ore and coal become metal at the smelter, from which a forge makes weapons, and only then can a barracks train a soldier. Every broken link shows up elsewhere immediately, and the player spends most of the time solving bottlenecks, surpluses, and building placement so settlers don't walk needlessly far. The military side is more straightforward: guard towers are occupied to expand your territory's borders, and combat is decided by the number and level of soldiers plus support from spells, which priests must save up for by sacrificing resources.

Visually it's one of the most beautiful 2D games of its time, full of finely animated little figures that are fun to just watch, accompanied by calm, almost lulling music. It's precisely this contrast between peaceful building and eventually quite fierce war that makes the series something distinctive. Commercially it was a very successful title, especially in Europe where the brand had a strong following, and the game got an expansion adding a fourth nation. Today it's easy to pick up, it just takes patience: the first hour is about logs and bread, and only then comes the army, giving a reason for all that logistics that was built up. The series' influence shows in every later building game that relies on production chains instead of simply subtracting resources from a stockpile.