For those you haven't played them, it basically goes like this. You start with "farmers", and they live in shitty hovels, and when you've managed to produced the handful of things they need to be Completely Happy (clothes and liquor basically), you can choose to upgrade them to "workers" who live in slightly less shitty brick houses, and those guys require accesses to sausages and (I shit you not) soap, and when you have that you can move on to artisans, and then engineers, and so forth.
On the surface, and to a non-polticized liberal subject, nothing about this is offensive. However it all seems built on the idea that some forms of labour are more advanced and valuable than others, and thus worthy of superior living conditions. Not only that, but it has a pretty clear idea of what that hierarchy is, notably placing menial work at the very bottom (in the category of people for whom fucking soap is optional) but also notably placing engineers above artisans, and investors above either.
Naturally when you interact with those NPCs (in Anno 1800 the farmer is a curly haired lady who weirdly resembles Jennifer Lawrence) they always refer to you as "master" and don't seem to have any motives beyond consooming and outputting material resources but hey you can't ask too much out of a video game.
I know I'm being fucking ridiculous but this was enough for me to basically lose interest in the franchise altogether and move on to something else.
edit: Also, I wouldn't mind this progression system at all if the needs of your citizens just progressed universally, but the way the game works, you need to keep every tier of citizen active, because you just can't have non-farmers work in farmer buildings and vice versa. So essentially class is totally codified in this simulation of society and that's Totally Okay.
on a more serious note, if you're looking for german resource managers / city builders, have you checked out The Settlers? 3 and 4 still hold up graphically cause they were sprite based with some really nice artwork
I did play the original Settlers a bunch when I was a kid. Stronghold too. I didn't hear good things about the later installments in both franchises though :(
yeah settlers after 4 just becomes generic medieval fantasy nonsense
I'm not familiar with the series, in what sense did the later installments become generic medieval fantasy nonsense?
1 - 4 had a strong focus on production chains and maximising the efficiency of your workforce + they're slow. Big ressource management aspect, with like 20+ different ressources, materials, tools and weapons. 5 tried to be a RTS like age of empires so it was nothing like the previous games, and it's dog shit. 6 and 7 are ok games IMO, a bit more back to the roots, but far from good. 8 just came out, I haven't played it. But apparently it's a buggy mess, and its ingame store makes it seem like a cash grab.
GrafZahl is correct though I'll mention one thing that's huge for me and that's the 'Wusel' factor, playing the earlier Settler games is very slow but really pretty to look at because it's more or less like looking at an ant farm, your streets will have dozens of people walking past carrying all kinds of things and watching your settlers build stuff is just generally a neat thing to do, on top of that your settlers are 'too big' which really enhances the whole feel when 10 dudes are working on a building that's 5 dudes wide.
Yea i
readplay settlers