It's not a bad game, especially for its price, but remember that this is a town, not city building game. That means that there is a hard limit to the size of the town - any bigger, and the agents (citizens) will literally starve to death en route to their next destination because it is too far from their home.
If you want to expand further, all you're doing is making exact, self-contained replicas of the same town in other places on the map. There's not much variety because each town needs the same resources, and each map has those same resources.
Like many games of this genre, the game has a reverse difficulty curve. This is especially true here because of the focus on survival. That means that the first few winters will be spent micromanaging every single resource to ensure everyone has sufficient materials, but after that initial period is over, it's impossible to fail because the town basically runs itself.
All true. But there's trading that can be quite a bit entertaining. And theres Colonial Charter[1], which is an excellent mod, but it can be daunting because of sheer volume of changes and new stuff.
Indeed, for me it's only recent city builder that captures the feeling of the original Settlers game(s). The feeling where I just want to see what my little city is up to, see the people scurrying about their little lives.
The game is relatively deep, and has tons of room for clever tactics. Also, it was developed by a single person, which is pretty impressive for a game like this.
It has mods now like Colonial Charter[0] which I've never used but heard great things about it. I'm on OS X and have run in in Wine (Wineskin specifically IIRC) but I too haven't played in at least a year. If he releases an OS X version I'll be sure to buy it though. It really is a ton of fun.
If you want to expand further, all you're doing is making exact, self-contained replicas of the same town in other places on the map. There's not much variety because each town needs the same resources, and each map has those same resources.
Like many games of this genre, the game has a reverse difficulty curve. This is especially true here because of the focus on survival. That means that the first few winters will be spent micromanaging every single resource to ensure everyone has sufficient materials, but after that initial period is over, it's impossible to fail because the town basically runs itself.