There is also a modern continuation from the original Creator, called "Pioneers of Pagonia"[1]. It's Early Access at the moment, but v1.0 is planned for release in some weeks (11.12.2025). And so far it looks promising, seems to be a pretty good game for Settler-Fans. As I remember, it's a reaction on the catastrophic fail of the latest official Setter-Game, which is not with Ubisoft, so I guess serving the old fans is one of the goal.
It's a shame that Pioneers of Pagonia doesn't stick to the same strict path-network mechanic, that was my favourite part of the earlier Settlers that later went away.
From the recommendation of another commenter, here's a more recent indie game that seems focused exactly on that style of path logistics:
As a Settlers 1/2 fan I spent quite a bit of time in The Colonists - can recommend it if you liked the road building/flag mechanics and the chill gameplay.
Settlers 1/2 are logistics simulators. The core of gameplay is that the map consists of vertexes on which you can place flags, and then connect flags with paths. On each path there will be exactly one porter, who will carry stuff from a flag to another. Arranging your network so that goods get where they are going in a reasonable time is like 90% of the gameplay.
It's been a while since I played these games. With settlers 1 and 2, a major portion of the game was managing the transport of resources. That meant setting up strict pathways and even blocking some resources from going down some paths to setup a "priory" route for shipping important goods.
I believe Settlers.. 3? got rid of that completely. Instead of manually placing paths and controlling the shipping routes the game would just figure it out for you.
It's weird that so many pioneer game developers are publishing new games today independently. By name alone the game is going to get some attention. How are publishers so bad at retaining creators? Why isn't this being published by Ubisoft themselves?
In this specific case, it's because of creative conflicts. Volker Wertich, the creator of Settlers 1&3, was also supposed to be creator for the newest Game, Settler: New Allies (part 8(?) of the mainline). He left after Ubisoft was not convinced from his Vision, considered it too complex, ambiguous. They release the reworked final version some years later, and it flopped hard. He then went on to create Pagonia after it came to light how much the new part sucks.
I don't think we know in detail what his original vision was, we can only assume if Pagonia is aiming to manifest it. And there is the theory that Ubisoft didn't like to have two similar games in their catalogue. They already have the Anno-Franchise, which is very similar to settlers, and had a promising new game released around the time Wertich left Ubisoft.
So the answer is probably a mix between internal politics of big companies, risk-avoidance and creative minds being too creative for the average manager. The more money you push, the more the system strifes to controlled outcomes. And Ubisoft was pushing very big around that time, to the point that they killed themselves, it seems.
Ubisoft strategy with The Settlers IP is very hard to understand.
They bought to the market a game with an akward positioning, which could be enjoyable if you see it primarily as a tablet oriented development, but with very little to do with the original The Settlers. Amusingly, it would probably have been better received with a different name.
Accordingly, I could see how the creator would feel uneasy with what's happening.
I absolutely loved The Settlers 1 and 2 as a kid. I feel like they are responsible for a fascination with distribution logistics that carried into adulthood.
By the way, there is also an open source clone of these games that is very well done: https://www.widelands.org/
I never played the first, but Settlers 2 was fantastic. I always preferred it to later installments because it had a strict grid of nodes, creating a complex graph of buildings and paths, rather than the more freeform pathing.
It was such a joy to grow the supply chains and deal with the all messy network logistics and bottlenecks. It sounds quite boring said out-loud, but we are in HN after all, I think you'll get it :)
Yes, S2 is still the best. Few years ago I finally finished all missions, the only thing missing is a more detailed story; but that's how it usually was in the 90s I guess.
Sounds like Transport Tycoon. I remember realising it said something about me that while my friends were building epic rollercoasters in Rollercoaster Tycoon I was much happier making train links between coal mines and power stations, creating a local and express rail serving linking a dozen cities…
I still tidy my house using the Settlers resource movement algorithm, moving things closer towards where they need to be even if they don't go all the way to their final destination.
I'm like this too. It's an incremental system that given enough time converges on the tidy state. I can take something to the foot of the stairs that I know needs to go up there, and then when I later go upstairs I can deposit at the top of the stairs, then when I'm accessing the linen closet I'll glance over and be like oh yeah, some of those items belong in here, I'll put them away now and get the others later. In some ways it's a permission structure to do part of a task without feeling like you're now chained to completely finishing it before you can do anything else.
This all drove my ex nuts though; from her perspective the whole thing was an exercise in deck-chair rearrangement that only served to increase overall entropy while in the intermediate states.
Hilariously, I don't cook like that at all. Cooking for me is all about chasing the critical path— get the water boiling, get the stove on, get the yeast foaming, get the butter softening on a plate. I wouldn't have the patience to line up little dishes of measured-out ingredients on my countertop before beginning to combine things.
The Settlers 2 was one of my favorite games growing up - really felt like they polished up the mechanics of the first game and made the UI more tolerable.
If anyone is looking for a more modern 3d equivalent but in a slightly different setting, I'd recommend The Colonists.
The way I see it, S2 was pretty lazy. They took a system that was fairly polished already and tinkered with it without understanding how it would impact the whole, like how they made a level-up system that heavily incentivizes a degree of micromanagement the UI isn't built to support.
Or take the pig farm: Clear pros and cons in S1; in S2 it's just a bad bakery. Or the perpetually broken ship navigation, and no way to do naval invasions.
I think my kids might love this. I certainly loved the original as a kid. Not even the second or third installment. The first one has always been my favorite, because it was so god damn punk rock simple.
I loved all these games as a kid and I'm 25. I played it on my DS and had Widelands on my computer.
The artificial constraint of building roads with little people acting as relays holds up today because it makes the graph theoretic nature of the problem apparent to a 10 year old.
I can intuitively see flow and choke points in a way most games don't allow. I will see a pile of junk stacked up on a given node if my road network sucks. I often attempted to build more roads. I thought it was cool seeing how stuff moved through a network.
To contrast Rimworld, I needed a theoretical understanding of graphs before I could mentally model goods' flow between raw production, storage, and secondary production. Otherwise people would just walk long distances and everything would feel slow without understanding why. I did not understand the benefit of a relay system until hundreds of hours in.
That isn't to say Settlers 1 and 2 are perfect. The lack of in-game help and tutorials killed my progress past a certain point. You will probably need to help your kid.
I did try going back to Settlers 2 last year and it was just as good as I remember it, it really holds up. At least the remake which is also the one I played when I was a kid.
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.
> To get the game to start you need one file from the original settlers 1 game because graphics and sounds are read from there.
Leaving aside the moral aspect of compensation for the artists who created the original graphics and sounds (who probably won't see any money from sales of the original game anyway), would it be legal to reverse engineer (intentionally simple) prompts for each piece of art needed, and then commission either humans or GenAI to create these, to then be able to distribute the remake without any dependency on the original?
>would it be legal to reverse engineer (intentionally simple) prompts for each piece of art needed, and then commission either humans or GenAI to create these, to then be able to distribute the remake without any dependency on the original?
Sounds like clean room design. If you can prove the art was independently created, and you weren't just abusing the process to launder the original works (eg. prompting the AI a bazillion times until it looked exactly the same as the original), then you'd probably be fine.
Of course, to legally be in the clear with AI art you should make sure it's both from sources that have proper licensing to avoid later possible lawsuit implications (Adobe's focusing on this, for example), and also keep in mind that AI art is uncopyrightable. Fortunately, the latter is a non-issue for MIT license-type projects.
In a clean room design, the person doing the implementation needs to have never seen the original. So the same would apply to the human or GenAI doing that in this case.
What if I prompt a first AI to create a detailed prompt from the original resource, and then ask a second AI to create the resource from that prompt ? The AI creating the resource have never seen the original.
If I included the exact same graphics as the original, but I did paint them all by hand myself, would you think that makes a difference? No it doesn’t. And what you are proposing is just the same with extra steps. They could include graphics that don’t look the same but I guess that defeats the reason for the game.
There’s a middle ground. For instance OpenTTD has fan made artwork that matches the aesthetic of the original game without being a direct copy. Still plenty of reason to play even if it doesn’t look exactly like it does in my memories.
For me the game is mostly about the mechanics and I don't think I'd have any issue playing it with an entirely different visual and auditory design, assuming it can be made to be self-consistent.
There is no issue with creating new graphics and sounds from the scratch, OpenTTD did exactly that for Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It’s not identical but is enough to convey original intent and be freely available.
There is also a modern continuation from the original Creator, called "Pioneers of Pagonia"[1]. It's Early Access at the moment, but v1.0 is planned for release in some weeks (11.12.2025). And so far it looks promising, seems to be a pretty good game for Settler-Fans. As I remember, it's a reaction on the catastrophic fail of the latest official Setter-Game, which is not with Ubisoft, so I guess serving the old fans is one of the goal.
[1] https://pioneersofpagonia.com
It's a shame that Pioneers of Pagonia doesn't stick to the same strict path-network mechanic, that was my favourite part of the earlier Settlers that later went away.
From the recommendation of another commenter, here's a more recent indie game that seems focused exactly on that style of path logistics:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/677340/The_Colonists/
As a Settlers 1/2 fan I spent quite a bit of time in The Colonists - can recommend it if you liked the road building/flag mechanics and the chill gameplay.
"strict path-network mechanic"
What exactly does that mean here?
Settlers 1/2 are logistics simulators. The core of gameplay is that the map consists of vertexes on which you can place flags, and then connect flags with paths. On each path there will be exactly one porter, who will carry stuff from a flag to another. Arranging your network so that goods get where they are going in a reasonable time is like 90% of the gameplay.
One worker and potentially one donkey.
Exactly. It looks like a RTS but it wasn’t originally.
It's been a while since I played these games. With settlers 1 and 2, a major portion of the game was managing the transport of resources. That meant setting up strict pathways and even blocking some resources from going down some paths to setup a "priory" route for shipping important goods.
I believe Settlers.. 3? got rid of that completely. Instead of manually placing paths and controlling the shipping routes the game would just figure it out for you.
It's weird that so many pioneer game developers are publishing new games today independently. By name alone the game is going to get some attention. How are publishers so bad at retaining creators? Why isn't this being published by Ubisoft themselves?
In this specific case, it's because of creative conflicts. Volker Wertich, the creator of Settlers 1&3, was also supposed to be creator for the newest Game, Settler: New Allies (part 8(?) of the mainline). He left after Ubisoft was not convinced from his Vision, considered it too complex, ambiguous. They release the reworked final version some years later, and it flopped hard. He then went on to create Pagonia after it came to light how much the new part sucks.
I don't think we know in detail what his original vision was, we can only assume if Pagonia is aiming to manifest it. And there is the theory that Ubisoft didn't like to have two similar games in their catalogue. They already have the Anno-Franchise, which is very similar to settlers, and had a promising new game released around the time Wertich left Ubisoft.
So the answer is probably a mix between internal politics of big companies, risk-avoidance and creative minds being too creative for the average manager. The more money you push, the more the system strifes to controlled outcomes. And Ubisoft was pushing very big around that time, to the point that they killed themselves, it seems.
I believe the people likely to want this title would stay away if Ubisoft was involved.
After all, they bought then dumbed down or canceled quite a few great game franchises. Everything from bluebyte for example.
If Ubisoft was involved I’d assume it’s a heavy combat oriented rts with a settlers skin.
Ubisoft strategy with The Settlers IP is very hard to understand.
They bought to the market a game with an akward positioning, which could be enjoyable if you see it primarily as a tablet oriented development, but with very little to do with the original The Settlers. Amusingly, it would probably have been better received with a different name.
Accordingly, I could see how the creator would feel uneasy with what's happening.
I absolutely loved The Settlers 1 and 2 as a kid. I feel like they are responsible for a fascination with distribution logistics that carried into adulthood.
By the way, there is also an open source clone of these games that is very well done: https://www.widelands.org/
It's one of those game you start playing in the morning and when you want to make a little pause, you realize is 10PM.
I would think it's more common that you start playing in the afternoon and when you make a little pause, you realize it's 4am.
I have done both!
Same,tThe Settlers 1 theme now immediately starts playing in my head for the rest of the day.
I never played the first, but Settlers 2 was fantastic. I always preferred it to later installments because it had a strict grid of nodes, creating a complex graph of buildings and paths, rather than the more freeform pathing.
It was such a joy to grow the supply chains and deal with the all messy network logistics and bottlenecks. It sounds quite boring said out-loud, but we are in HN after all, I think you'll get it :)
Yes, S2 is still the best. Few years ago I finally finished all missions, the only thing missing is a more detailed story; but that's how it usually was in the 90s I guess.
Sounds like Transport Tycoon. I remember realising it said something about me that while my friends were building epic rollercoasters in Rollercoaster Tycoon I was much happier making train links between coal mines and power stations, creating a local and express rail serving linking a dozen cities…
I still play the open source version from time to time. They have added a lot of new features and gameplay improvements.
https://www.openttd.org/
Same! The other game that sequels never beat for me was Populous. There’s some charm in the first one that I love.
I still tidy my house using the Settlers resource movement algorithm, moving things closer towards where they need to be even if they don't go all the way to their final destination.
I'm like this too. It's an incremental system that given enough time converges on the tidy state. I can take something to the foot of the stairs that I know needs to go up there, and then when I later go upstairs I can deposit at the top of the stairs, then when I'm accessing the linen closet I'll glance over and be like oh yeah, some of those items belong in here, I'll put them away now and get the others later. In some ways it's a permission structure to do part of a task without feeling like you're now chained to completely finishing it before you can do anything else.
This all drove my ex nuts though; from her perspective the whole thing was an exercise in deck-chair rearrangement that only served to increase overall entropy while in the intermediate states.
Mis en place meets procrastination
Hilariously, I don't cook like that at all. Cooking for me is all about chasing the critical path— get the water boiling, get the stove on, get the yeast foaming, get the butter softening on a plate. I wouldn't have the patience to line up little dishes of measured-out ingredients on my countertop before beginning to combine things.
The Settlers 2 was one of my favorite games growing up - really felt like they polished up the mechanics of the first game and made the UI more tolerable. If anyone is looking for a more modern 3d equivalent but in a slightly different setting, I'd recommend The Colonists.
The way I see it, S2 was pretty lazy. They took a system that was fairly polished already and tinkered with it without understanding how it would impact the whole, like how they made a level-up system that heavily incentivizes a degree of micromanagement the UI isn't built to support.
Or take the pig farm: Clear pros and cons in S1; in S2 it's just a bad bakery. Or the perpetually broken ship navigation, and no way to do naval invasions.
"Return to the Roots" is a faithful remake/modification of The Settlers II for modern computers, with multiplayer support!
https://www.siedler25.org/
Watching this project eagerly but it's still missing some functionality at the moment.
It has been completely playable for the past 10 years, what exactly are you missing?
The campaign. It doesn't work, and loading these maps in unlimited play hangs the game completely.
The 20th anniversary edition was a nice recreation of the game in 3D
Sellers is so nice. If you haven't I strongly encourage you to have a try.
I think my kids might love this. I certainly loved the original as a kid. Not even the second or third installment. The first one has always been my favorite, because it was so god damn punk rock simple.
[flagged]
I loved all these games as a kid and I'm 25. I played it on my DS and had Widelands on my computer.
The artificial constraint of building roads with little people acting as relays holds up today because it makes the graph theoretic nature of the problem apparent to a 10 year old.
I can intuitively see flow and choke points in a way most games don't allow. I will see a pile of junk stacked up on a given node if my road network sucks. I often attempted to build more roads. I thought it was cool seeing how stuff moved through a network.
To contrast Rimworld, I needed a theoretical understanding of graphs before I could mentally model goods' flow between raw production, storage, and secondary production. Otherwise people would just walk long distances and everything would feel slow without understanding why. I did not understand the benefit of a relay system until hundreds of hours in.
That isn't to say Settlers 1 and 2 are perfect. The lack of in-game help and tutorials killed my progress past a certain point. You will probably need to help your kid.
> "I loved my nerdy tinkering indoors so my kids must have their own Linux box by the age of 5" (instead of playing outside)
if you give them an amiga 500 with floppies (or even worse, a c64 with a datasette) i'm sure they'll be playing outside as much as they can.
The me that went through both and stayed indoors will disagree.
it's what we had then. i was talking about these days. i think they would have to be a very patient kid, who doesn't know any better.
on the topic, it's synchronistic-like, that settlers 2 was just released for amiga. only amiga 1200 though i think.
Pretty sure the poster knows their kids better than you do
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 did try going back to Settlers 2 last year and it was just as good as I remember it, it really holds up. At least the remake which is also the one I played when I was a kid.
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.
https://www.widelands.org/
And The Colonists also looks great, a modern indie successor that also has the path network mechanic that I loved at its core.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/677340/The_Colonists/
Farthest Frontier is a recently released game in the same vein: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1044720/Farthest_Frontier...
It's great, but that's not what I meant.
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.
> To get the game to start you need one file from the original settlers 1 game because graphics and sounds are read from there.
Leaving aside the moral aspect of compensation for the artists who created the original graphics and sounds (who probably won't see any money from sales of the original game anyway), would it be legal to reverse engineer (intentionally simple) prompts for each piece of art needed, and then commission either humans or GenAI to create these, to then be able to distribute the remake without any dependency on the original?
>would it be legal to reverse engineer (intentionally simple) prompts for each piece of art needed, and then commission either humans or GenAI to create these, to then be able to distribute the remake without any dependency on the original?
Sounds like clean room design. If you can prove the art was independently created, and you weren't just abusing the process to launder the original works (eg. prompting the AI a bazillion times until it looked exactly the same as the original), then you'd probably be fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
Of course, to legally be in the clear with AI art you should make sure it's both from sources that have proper licensing to avoid later possible lawsuit implications (Adobe's focusing on this, for example), and also keep in mind that AI art is uncopyrightable. Fortunately, the latter is a non-issue for MIT license-type projects.
In a clean room design, the person doing the implementation needs to have never seen the original. So the same would apply to the human or GenAI doing that in this case.
What if I prompt a first AI to create a detailed prompt from the original resource, and then ask a second AI to create the resource from that prompt ? The AI creating the resource have never seen the original.
If I included the exact same graphics as the original, but I did paint them all by hand myself, would you think that makes a difference? No it doesn’t. And what you are proposing is just the same with extra steps. They could include graphics that don’t look the same but I guess that defeats the reason for the game.
There’s a middle ground. For instance OpenTTD has fan made artwork that matches the aesthetic of the original game without being a direct copy. Still plenty of reason to play even if it doesn’t look exactly like it does in my memories.
For me the game is mostly about the mechanics and I don't think I'd have any issue playing it with an entirely different visual and auditory design, assuming it can be made to be self-consistent.
> They could include graphics that don’t look the same but I guess that defeats the reason for the game.
How does that defeat the reason for the game?
I just assumed that the goal was to make an exact reproduction of the original, but I might have gotten that wrong.
There is no issue with creating new graphics and sounds from the scratch, OpenTTD did exactly that for Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It’s not identical but is enough to convey original intent and be freely available.
There's also Widelands [0], which is basically an open source Settlers II with extra features.
[0] https://www.widelands.org/
Anyone runs this on linux?