Cities: Skylines is an outstanding successor, but it lacks much of the charm of the SimCity series and feels more like a sandbox than a simulation. It's too bad Maxis decided to take the series in a simplified direction before killing it off.
If anyone knows of any other city-building simulators worth mentioning, please let me know.
> Cities: Skylines is an outstanding successor, but it lacks much of the charm of the SimCity series and feels more like a sandbox than a simulation.
I feel the opposite.
I think SimCity's charm is just nostalgia. C:S is definitely more of a simulation, as it simulates individual vehicles, including commercial traffic. All the SimCity games before SC4 used a statistical model for traffic, and SC4's path finding was very unlikely to use highways and mass transit without a mod.
And with mods, you can make C:S look like a photo [0], or add outlights to make it look like Borderlands [1].
I don't think that's quite what the OP meant by sandbox vs. simulation.
To me it didn't feel like there were many challenges or ways you could irreparable damage your city in City Skylines. You could maybe invent your own goals, like creating a specific look to your city or building the most density possible while maintaing efficient transportation. But that's what I'd consider sandbox: using your own creativity on a blank canvas with almost no chance of entering a complete failure mode you can't recover from.
The SimCity games felt more like they were a challenge needing to balance the budget and build a sustainable city all while being resilient to events like disasters. Might just be me, but I never felt like I could fail at C:S; whereas in SimCity you could make a few stupid decisions or expand too fast and start losing money, and all you could do is watch the city degenerate into a wasteland that can't be gotten out of (without cheating anyways). That made it feel more like a simulation.
This. The only times I've irreparably crashed a city in C:S is when I've been purposefully going for achievements like "<50% unemployment for 6 months".
There was a"making of" interview with the C:S devs a while back. They stated that they intentionally made the game easier because it was more fun that way.
You can definitely get un-modded simcity 4's public transportation and highways to function without a mod, you just need to know a decent amount about the game. Basically sims always take the shortest path regardless of traffic, they are randomly matched 1:1 between residential wealth level and the distribution of jobs from each job-producing building, and sims of certain income categories have restrictions on which types of public transportation they will take (e.g. $$$ sims don't take buses). One of the best ways to force or heavily encourage public transportation/highway usage is to use a tree-pattern transportation network which purposefully creates bottlenecks that are alleviated by high capacity roads or public transportation shortcuts. And you can get the cheapest most effective form of public transportation (buses) to work without any modding or special planning aside from placing them at the right density (every 6-7 tiles).
An advanced city where most jobs are Co$$ and Co$$$ can actually be designed to have very little transportation needs at all because you can zone the high wealth commercial and residential buildings close to each other.
Simcity 4 definitely feels much deeper of a game to me than skylines, perhaps simply because it's complicated and I get a sense of joy figuring out the unintuitive parts.
I agree! I believe a large part of the nostalgic "charm" of SimCity was thanks to the excellent art direction of Ocean Quigley, who's worked on SimCity and The Sims artwork from the early days.
Both of them are beautiful, but I think SimCity really is more polished, visually coherent, and better balanced than Cities: Skyline. Which makes it even more tragic and frustrating that SimCity limits you to such a small lot size, because one of the best things about earlier versions of SimCity was backing way up and looking across vast urban sprawls, every road and building which you created with your own hands!
What Cities: Skylines really got right was user modding and extensibility!
Maxis (before EA bought them) held some user focus groups while developing SimCity 2000, and asked SimCity users what they thought about additional "plug-in" content. (I don't remember how they framed it, whether they mentioned "downloadable" or "add-on packs" or "user created content"). But in general, the users were strongly against it, because they said they wanted to buy the whole game up front, and didn't want to feel like they were being nickel and dimed to get the entire experience. (And now here we are with free-to-play games with in-app purchases, alas.)
User created content and expansion packs were crucial to the success of The Sims, and users rightfully complained about being nickel and dimed by a long series of expansion packs. But the vast amount of free downloadable user created content that's available dwarfed the fixed number of items available in all the expansion packs (but you still had to buy the expansion packs to get the base objects and features (like pets or magic), in order to use any user created content cloned from those expansion objects).
It's not city building but Factorio (factory building). Be VERY careful as it's an extremely addicting game. It pushes ALL the right buttons for me and I highly recommend it. The mod community really takes a great game and makes it amazing (but play at least some Vanilla before you go modding like I did).
I play with a good number of QoL mods (I’m on mobile but reply back if you want that list) and then I normally play with Bob’s mods. Never got into Angel’s or Py’s but I like Bobs. I also play with LTN to help automate trains. I’m happy to give you a full mod list of the last 3-4 play throughs (each ranging from 50-150+ hours). I’m excited for 0.17 to come out (it’s in experimental, beta, right now) as I’m growing bored with my current megabase.
One of the great things about Cities: Skylines is the whole mod community. Its amazing some of the stuff they have added to the game. Plus, the developer continues to add amazing add-ons themselves.
Installing a mod for more intelligent/realistic behavior of various aspects of the city, and then another mod for watching citizens first person/third person view...holy shit, its the closest thing to watching p-zombies live out their lives. They wake up, goto work/school, go shopping, get food, drive home. And the economy does its thing
If anyone knows of any other city-building simulators worth mentioning, please let me know.