The Settlers III: Gold Edition

The Settlers III (German: Die Siedler III) is a real-time strategy video game developed by Blue Byte Software, being the second sequel to The Settlers, making it the third game in The Settlers series. An isometric city-building game, it was released on November 30, 1998. The most notable difference between this game and its two predecessors is that there are no more roads—all units, including carriers with goods, can walk around freely. This simplifies the building of a settlement, since only the distances between buildings are relevant, and not how roads can be constructed between them. Military units are now directly controlled, making fighting more similar to games like Command & Conquer or Age of Empires, than to the previous Settlers games. Settlers III was also famous for its peculiar copy protection: in pirated versions of the game, iron smelters would only produce pigs instead of iron, which made weapon production impossible.