strategy elements over city-building, with more focus on combat than their predecessors. The Settlers: Heritage of Kings is unique in the franchise insofar as it focuses almost exclusively on real-time strategy and combat. After Heritage of Kings received a negative reaction from fans, the next game, The Settlers: Rise of an Empire, returned to foregrounding city-building over real-time strategy. This was true to an even greater degree in the following game, The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom, whose gameplay was based on the most popular title in the series; The Settlers II. In the first five games, the primary goal on each map, broadly speaking, is to build a settlement with a functioning economy, producing sufficient military units so as to conquer rival territories. To achieve this end, the player must, to one degree or another, engage in economic micromanagement, construct buildings, and generate resources. In Rise of an Empire and Paths to a Kingdom, the importance of military conquest is scaled back, with many maps requiring players to accomplish certain predetermined tasks tied to the economic strength of their city. Whilst the first four games feature broadly similar supply and demand-based gameplay, starting with Heritage of Kings, Blue Byte began to alter the game mechanics from title to title. So, with Heritage of Kings, there is little focus on micromanagement, daisy-chain economic processes, or construction, and more on technology trees, combat, taxation, and workers' motivation. Rise of an Empire features a significantly simpler economic model than any previous title in the series, with the complexity of the various supply chains significantly streamlined. Paths to a Kingdom features a more robust economy and focuses on micromanagement, daisy-chain economic processes, city organisation, upgrading buildings, technology trees, and trade requirements. Additionally, for the first time in the series, the gameplay in Paths to a Kingdom is flexible enough to allow players to develop their settlement based upon one (or more) of three basic options - military, technology or trade. Settlements and settlers The gameplay of every Settlers title revolves around serfs (the titular "settlers"). In all games except Heritage of Kings, serfs transport materials, tools and produce, and populate and perform the requisite task of each building. In Heritage, serfs are differentiated from workers - serfs are the only units capable of constructing new buildings, repairing damage to pre-existing buildings, gathering wood, and extracting resources by hand, whereas workers occupy buildings.