Intended for service in the German colonial empire, the ships were designed with a combination of steam and sail power for extended cruising range, and they were equipped with a battery of ten 15-centimeter (5.9 in) guns.

[1] By the mid-1870s, the fleet of corvettes available to the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) was rapidly ageing, with several vessels already twenty years old.

[2] At the time, the world's navies were grappling with the development of steam power, which had already replaced sails in large ironclad warships.

Cruising vessels required a much longer radius of action than the ironclads, and steam engines were not yet reliable or efficient enough to rely on them alone, necessitating the retention of traditional sailing rigs.

[3] Despite the fact that they were intended to modernize the German cruising fleet, their design was obsolescent before construction even began,[4] capable of engaging only similar vessels.

[4] Carola and Olga were powered by a single horizontal, 3-cylinder, double-expansion steam engine that drove one 2-bladed screw propeller that was 5.02 m (16 ft 6 in) wide in diameter.

[4][6] The ships were equipped with a three-masted barque rig with a surface area of 1,134 to 1,230 square meters (12,210 to 13,240 sq ft) to supplement their steam engines on their long deployments abroad, where coal might be scarce.

[4] After they were converted into gunnery training ships, Carola and Olga had their sailing rig removed, and they received heavy military masts with fighting tops for light weapons.

She also helped suppress the Abushiri revolt, sending marines ashore to fight the rebels and providing gunfire support to German forces led by Major Hermann Wissmann.

The second cruise came shortly thereafter, when unrest in the German colony of Kamerun necessitated the formation of a West African Squadron to suppress it.

After defeating the rebellion, Olga returned to Germany in 1885, and she thereafter served as a training ship, though this activity lasted only a few months before she was again ordered abroad.

After observing the aftermath of the War of the Pacific between Bolivia, Chile, and Peru in late 1883 and early 1884, she was transferred to German New Guinea, where she was tasked with supporting Germany's growing overseas empire in the region.

Her deployment to the central Pacific was cut short when she accidentally ran aground off New Mecklenburg and was badly damaged, necessitating a return to Germany for extensive repairs.

She was first sent to Chile protect German nationals in the aftermath of the Chilean Civil War of 1891, before joining Alexandrine and Arcona off Brazil in 1893 in response to the Revolta da Armada (Revolt of the Fleet) there.

Later assigned to the reserve training unit, she was never activated for the role, since the navy had determined it would be too expensive to return Marie to service.

The ship's commander exceeded his orders, which instructed him to avoid direct conflict with local rulers, though he successfully negotiated agreements that protected German citizens in the area and arrested hostile chiefs.

During this period, she helped to secure East Africa, sending landing parties ashore in Dar es Salaam, Windi, and the Kingani river delta and blockading the coast.

While in the Pacific station, she conducted punitive expeditions against locals who had attacked Germans and cruised the Chinese coast with the corvette Leipzig.

In 1891, Sophie and Leipzig sailed to Chile join Alexandrine in defending Germans during the civil war in the country, which included landing marines in Valparaiso.

[21] In April 1892, the three ships continued on to East Africa, but Sophie's stay there was short-lived, as she was recalled to Germany in June and was decommissioned shortly after her arrival.

[22] Alexandrine was laid up for several years after completion; at the time, the German navy had a plan whereby Germany's colonies would be protected by gunboats, while larger warships would generally be kept in reserve, with a handful assigned to a flying squadron that could respond to crises quickly.

[24] The ships were sent to Chile to protect German nationals during the Chilean Civil War that year; while on the way, the squadron flagship, Leipzig, ran out of coal and Alexandrine had to take her under tow.

After the Brazilian government suppressed the rebellion, Alexandrine and the other ships were then sent back to East Asia to monitor the First Sino-Japanese War.

[25] In March 1895, Alexandrine was recalled to Germany, and while she was en route, she stopped in Morocco to pressure local authorities into paying reparations for the murder of two German citizens.

On her arrival in Germany she went into dry dock to be inspected, and it was found that her hull had badly deteriorated after several years abroad.

Arcona and the rest of the division remained off China in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War to protect Europeans against riots directed at foreigners.

The ship was under repair when Otto von Diederichs seized the Jiaozhou Bay Leased Territory in China with the rest of the Division in 1897, and was therefore unable to participate in the operation, though she later assisted in defending the concession.

[28][29] Arcona then conducted survey cruises in the central Pacific Ocean and protected German nationals in the Philippines after the Spanish–American War in 1898.