Games like this one, and where the genre went
Search for games like this one and the results are a grab bag of city builders and real-time strategy games, which is honest but not that useful — this design answers a specific question, and most of what gets recommended alongside it answered a different one entirely.
What makes it different
Most real-time strategy games of the 1990s put a unit selected and a destination clicked — direct control, immediate feedback. This design does not let you move a single ware. You place buildings and connect them with roads, and from that point on the economy runs itself: carriers walk fixed beats between flags, picking up whatever a flag's transport priority says is most urgent and handing it off to the next carrier down the chain. You are not commanding units; you are designing a network and watching whether it copes with what you built. The mechanism — why flags matter more than roads, what happens when a junction gets overloaded — is worked through in detail in Roads, flags and carriers.
That indirection is the whole personality of the design. A traffic jam at a sawmill is not a unit you forgot to give an order to; it is your road network telling you something true about its own shape. Few games put the player one layer removed from the economy quite so deliberately, and it is the reason the style still gets recommended by people who otherwise have little patience for older games.
The genre today
"City building" and "real-time strategy" are both much bigger categories now than they were in the 1990s, and the two have mostly drifted apart — city builders leaning into layout and logistics puzzles with no combat at all, RTS leaning into faster, more competitive unit control. This design sits at an unusual point between them: a builder with a genuine economy and pathing simulation underneath it, plus enough of a military layer to matter. The itch it scratches is narrower and older than most of what gets filed under either label today.
Expeditions II: a game like this one, in a browser tab
If that itch is why you searched, Expeditions II is the game this site is built around: an independent new game, written from scratch in TypeScript and WebGL, that runs in a normal browser tab with no install. It keeps the ideas above — roads before buildings, carriers handing wares from flag to flag, a military layer that pushes the border one hut at a time. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any publisher; the about page covers what it is built on. Its encyclopedia documents Expeditions II's own buildings, goods and mechanics.