I've played maybe half of the previous releases of Settlers, although only the campaign modes and not the online competitive scene.
I remember the games (later versions at least) like Civ tried fairly hard to give multiple ways to win. So there was the normal military burn-every-building method, science research points method, or culture/merchant method.
For single play I do remember it had more of a focus on supply-chain rather than military. One of the interesting parts is starting with just a single town hall and a few villagers, and gradually building up into a large bustling collection of buildings with people carrying things to+fro.
So gameplay wise you tend to collect basic resources like wood, stone, metal, meat, grain, water etc.. But then after you feed your people and start growing a bit they might suddenly want furniture, medicine, better houses. And you also need to build arrows, swords, etc.. in order to train more soldiers faster. I also remember being able to convert gold into coins and use that to upgrade your troops to elite/veterans so that's a thing too.
In short there's a lot more resources / goods / products moving around than I remember from Civ/AoE and you want to keep that going well so you can make troops and fight effectively. And so correspondingly it's painful if you build a bunch of stuff and lose that territory! Which is why all your important buildings (or copies if you have multiple) need to be kept near your town hall.
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