I've played the old original 2d settlers and saw Rise of an Empire was on sale on GOG. Based on the reviews it was one of the stronger 3D entries to the series so I picked it up and gave it a shot.

I was instantly sucked back into the multi-tier economy gameplay and played through the majority of the game while unemployed during the pandemic. I landed a job and didn't have as much freetime and sort of forgot about the game until recently when I was back in the GOG Galaxy client.

I decided it was time to finish and powered through the last few missions over a week's time. If you enjoy setting up a kingdom of multiple resource refinement buildings you'll love this new version. The AI was a little easy, but I may have set it up that way because I wanted to enjoy myself and not get frustrated at getting zerged while working on my mead halls.

Overall a definite recommend.