i love all these little diorama creators that have popped up recently, they make it very easy to create a city that looks good. But they only hold my interest for so long. i'm looking for something with more meat on it. Any recommendations?
as an example, i remember the first time i managed to keep a city of over a million people going in Sim City 4. at this point money was tight, so the building aspect took a back seat to actually managing the city. balancing the budget, fixing congestion, and so on. it was great fun and a very different challenge than i thought i was in for.
most citybuilders these days seem more focused on the building than the older ones. for example, when i got to the point in Cities Skylines where i thought i was entering the "management" phase, i unlocked a building that just removed an aspect of the game. it was like the game thought that planning the electric grid or schools was a chore that got in the way of building a city, and as a reward it removed those chores.
basically, i'm looking for a game where rather than physically growing the city through placing individual buildings, i help the city grow. like transport tycoon, except the city is the focus rather than the interconnections.
a key part of this, i think, is time. a city that is frozen in time and where clicking with a tool just builds things, like C:S or SC2013, doesn't make for interesting growth. a city designed around historical limitations feels more like something that needs to be managed. a game where buildings and roads take time to complete and modify requires more forethought.
workers and resources comes pretty close but the central planning aspect means that i still need to micromanage the buildings. if it was all about zoning, with special buildings being unlocked by the request system in older sim cities ("x seeks permission to build a stink generator downwind of your residential area") i would enjoy it more.
i posted in another thread that got removed that really the important takeaway from what happened is that as he and his audience radicalized eachother. the people who didn't want to see the edgy stuff left, and he made no effort to distance himself from it at the time, so more edgy people started following him. in the end you had what the in-group saw as edgy humour while the rest of the world saw nazi shit. and like the "layers of irony" thing that 4chan had going a few years ago, what the in-group thinks its projecting doesn't matter.