The Settlers

From Wikipedia: "Many fans of the franchise consider [Settlers II] the best game of the Settlers series, primarily because future installments changed the transport management aspect considerably." In fact, Blue Byte (the devs) recently remade the game (Settlers II 10th Anniversary Edition) because it had been so successful. Blue Byte have been making Settlers versions for 15 years now. It's fairly popular in Europe, and each game sells (I'd guess) in the 200-500k copies range in the US.

Settlers II gameplay: the game plays on a hex grid. (1) Build buildings, in the interior of the grid. Minions automatically head to the building, construct it, start working there, and place their produced goods on the road in front of the building. (2) Place roads along the borders of the hex grid, connecting buildings together. Minions automatically show up on the road. Whenever a good is placed at one end of their road, they head over, pick it up, and carry it to the other side. I think buildings automatically have a flag out front, so if a needed resource (say, wheat at a baker) gets placed in front, that good automatically goes into the building. (3) Place flags on the road, to subdivide the road into smaller stretches. Your village's population rarely supports enough minions to place roads & flags all over the place, so one has to exercise care when placing buildings, or else you risk shutting down your economy.

Buildings produced stuff. Some required materials to be carted over; others gathered resources from the environment. The woodcutter's hut, for example, produced a minion that would wander the area around the hut, cutting down random trees. The stonecutter's hut needed to be placed near a stone quarry (which showed up on the game map). Mines needed all three types of food (bread, fish, meat) to go, and you needed ore to smelt bars to craft weapons to equip soldiers to take over territories, so the game missions -- "take over territory X" -- meant building a full village.

gameplay in Settlers VI, aka Rise of an Empire, released in 2007, the game I bought yesterday: build resource-gathering huts in random places, build resource-processing buildings in random places, sit back and wait. Missions have around a dozen miniquests within them, which are things like "defeat this troop of bandits" or "deliver 9 pairs of woolen pants to your neighbor" or "promote your Knight to Sheriff". Of course, each of these has prerequisites, which is what the gameplay is. Build the right buildings. But placement doesn't seem to matter much. You can't tweak production or distribution. You can upgrade buildings, but wood (the resource required for most upgrades) is something you just gather more of. It's not like it's scare or that you have to decide carefully what to upgrade. Mostly you just sit back and wait until things are running smooth enough for you to skim some off the top and declare the objective finished.

Puzzle Pirates has minigames that have nothing to do with gameplay proper. "Sailing" and "Bilge Pumps" are Tetris-like/Match 3 kinda games. You play the puzzle minigame for a few minutes, the ship defeats a foe, you move on to the next fight.

I've described Transport Tycoon as having four minigames: placing stations in cities, building efficient tracks over mountains and around rivers, setting up train consists (the set of cargo that they haul from city to city, plus which cities they stop at), and optimizing rail lines to maximize train throughput.

The station-placement "minigame" in Transport Tycoon is very different than what's in Puzzle Pirates: you only place a station once per city, so it's an important but not frequent minigame. But it is a puzzle; it's not just "select a city and hit Build Station Here". You want to place a station that captures as much of the city as possible without razing any of the important buildings. You can be lackluster about it, but I think people that like the game like the challenge of optimizing their station placement. Likewise for building rails around mountains and rivers; you could just slap it down. What makes the game fun isn't "I finshed the mission!" but rather "Isn't my rail line awesome? Do you see how cleverly this station is placed? Look at this rail line! All those trains, isn't it grand?" It's like raising kids: see what my kid did?

Settlers 6 just seems to happen by itself. I wasn't particularly clever about placement. I built a wall around the town, but there was so goddamn much stone that the wall just... man, I could have built a wall twice as big. And there were random obstructions in the way, like this big boulder and a cliff face and a river, but I just kept building walls. Not particularly clever or interesting or expensive or tricky. It's just there. It's like clicking "Build a Wall Around This City" then standing back. You have to micromanage the wall, but you can't do it well. It's busy-work.

I think the main thing is that Transport Tycoon shows you how good of a job you did. Same for Settlers II, and Sim City. The good games invest the player in his decisions. I remember the decisions I made in Settlers II, and Transport Tycoon, and SimCity. In Settlers 6: meh. The buildings are just there.