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.

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.