Settlers 6 has far too much emphasis on looking good. It looks good ok but it seriously overlooks the economic aspect.
User Rating: 5 | The Settlers: Rise of an Empire PC
I got this game because I loved settlers 3 and the reason I loved that game was because of the complexity of the economic management of your city and the difficulties that created for building up your city. I've not played any more recent setters so I don't know how much this game deviates from them but I know that it has dumbed down massively compared to settlers 3. In settlers 3 it was really difficult to build up a successful economy for your city and it was really satisfying when you did because you could see everything being created and being shipped around and then stored. In settlers 6 its incredibly easy to build up your economy, everything is incredibly cheap to build and upgrade and within no time you have all the economic buildings available, providing that you get promoted. Your economy basically runs itself as well, you just build the buildings and everything works like clockwork, you don't have to bother about carriers or getting more workers all that is now done for you. All you have to do is more or less build more buildings, its incredibly simplistic and mind numbingly un-challenging.
As I was trying to reach the Archduke title the first time and couldn't figure out why my population had stopped growing I realised it was because there wasn't enough economic buildings for them to work in and so I had to actually go around building loads of completely unneeded resource gathering buildings just to attract people to my city, so in effect in this game it pays to have a totally inefficient economy. For me there is no pleasure in building up a city just to have nice looking buildings because a successful city in this game does not require a well run economy, in fact it requires a totally inefficient economy. In settlers 3 you could only have a good and successful city if you had a strong, efficient, well run economy so I could take pleasure in seeing that I had a good city whereas in settlers 6 a nice city(and you will always get a nice looking city) has nothing to do with how well run your economy is. 
