Silverhawk170485: I'm currently playing Culures 2. It's a very nice mix of Settlers and The Sims. You can say "Settlers Extended" to it.
Every settler is unique and has his/her needs like a home, something to eat, sleep, marriage and so on. Also every settler has to be managed seperately. It means a lot micro management. That makes the gameplay ab bit slower compared to other games in this genere, but you're going to love every settler of your clan, knowing him/her by his/her unique name. It's not like having a lot of anonymous workers.
Caesar.: Sounds intriguing. What happens if you don't micromanage each one of them? Do they made bad/random decisions, or just stay idle until you remember they exist?
Would you recommend playing the first installment before trying Cultures 2?
Settlers you don't assign to a workplace are civilians and do nothing but standing around, eating and sleeping. Unassigned Settlers don't really make sense, even if every workplace is occupied at the moment, because you can also assign them as carriers who carry different stuff from one place to another. For example the corn from the farm to the mill and the flour from the mill to the bakery. This speeds up the production process.
If you don't assign a settler to his/her own home they don't recover that good when they are sleepy. And you need homes to make babys. The funny thing is that you can even choose which gender the baby has.
The difference between male and female is that the females are only there to run the household and making babys. A bit sexist on this point. ;)
You have a mighty tool in form of a window where you can manage your Settlers. There you can filter them according different critera, for example what kind of work they do, married or not married, assigned to a home or not, and so on.
I didn't play every part too. But the series has a campaign with a story and a main character. I realized in later parts there is the same character but now he has a wife and son, also as main characters. I think that the story spans over the whole series and continues with every part but it didn't really feels necessary to play every part to know what is going on in the part you are playing right now. Every part has it's completed story.
I also have to say that the first part isn't that userfriendly like the other parts and the gameplay is much slower, even with time acceleration.
So I would say it is not really neccessary to play tha first part, only if you want to hear/see the whole story.