I was a fool for skipping Widelands, the only game as good as The Settlers
Between fifty game releases a day, and among them official successors and open source remakes, most 90s games your grandma bangs on about have some modern equivalent that somewhat fills the gap.
But not The Settlers. There hasn't been a Settlers game since 1996. Whether they were good or not, its many sequels, as early as 3, started missing the point of the design. It's the roads, man. The roads!
This isn't about iconography for its own sake. It's a design thing, an ethos. The heart of The Settlers was that your towns lived or died based largely on how well you designed your transport logistics. It was all about the roads. It doesn't even fit into a genre really, let alone the lopsided RTS the sequels collapsed into. It sounds like a typical town builder, especially today when there's a wealth of games about placing a woodcutter and a farm, but I'm tempted to say it's not even about gathering resources.