Take a look at Caesar 3. It's "only" hand-drawn, high-resolution 2D, but the amount of detail is impressive. People enter the map carrying their belongings on hand-drawn carts, erect tents, go to work, walk around on the streets, the building slowly grow all the way up to small palaces… or a mob with torches and pitchforks assembles and razes everything, only to be mauled by the local amphitheatre's lions (or wild wolves). Kids run through the streets, food is carried from the farms to the silos, to markets, to homes, …

It's similar for other games of the time, like Settlers II. Only in the 2000s the detail level was massively cut down.