Well that’s quite exciting :)
I sank a non-trivial amount of time in my younger years in to both Settlers and Settlers 2. I’m hoping now that it’s not rose tinted memories!
I sank a non-trivial amount of time in my younger years in to both Settlers and Settlers 2. I’m hoping now that it’s not rose tinted memories!
https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_settlers_2_10th_anniversary
I'm gonna try Widelands from the recommendation of another commenter, it looks like it's a deeper open-source clone of Settlers 2.
And The Colonists also looks great, a modern indie successor that also has the path network mechanic that I loved at its core.
Farthest Frontier has the kind of strict grid of Anno, and is reminiscent of the older more predictable and mechanical pathing of classics like Caesar or Pharaoh. Newer indie city builders like Lethis or Nebuchadnezzar have revived this style. But transporters still move independently through the grid of paths, the main factors are distance from producer to consumer and how many stops a transporter takes in their route.
But in Settlers 1 and 2 you literally build a graph with buildings as nodes and paths as edges with a strict throughput limits per link. It's quite interesting to optimize the resource flows through this graph. It's a lot like designing a good network, except that you have tons of types of resources moving to tons of different producers and consumers, with long multi-step supply chains. It's closer to Factorio perhaps in feel, but there are significant differences.