Serflings is a remake of The Settlers 1
simpleguide.net
simpleguide.net
From the recommendation of another commenter, here's a more recent indie game that seems focused exactly on that style of path logistics:
What exactly does that mean here?
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.
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.
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.
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.
By the way, there is also an open source clone of these games that is very well done: https://www.widelands.org/
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
How does that defeat the reason for the game?