[vzola]

Am I the only one who didn't enjoy Cities: Skylines? I played without any expansion (wasn't really hooked enough by the base game to go looking for them) and found the gameplay quite limited compared to the few old city building games I played as a kid. I still play Pharaoh to this day 20 years later and it's still challenging and complex and there's tons of gameplay to explore. In comparison, I played Cities: Skylines for about a weekend, got over the initial difficulty with managing finances, and then it became a matter of building pretty roads and forcefully read people's complaints on in-game-Twitter.

[want2know]

The game is most about traffic management. This is not very surprising because the company behind it was focused on traffic games.

I like the game a lot. But to be fair: you must download a good traffic control mod to setup traffic lights and road settings to keep the traffic under control.

[AQuantized]

The only real difficulty with Cities is in managing the logistics once your city gets to an extreme scale. Otherwise it's much more about aesthetic and maximizing efficiency than overcoming obstacles.

Old Pharaoh style city builders certainly have a good deal more challenge when it comes to survival, but they're quite discrete and once you have a few templates for housing and industry nailed down I don't think they have much more difficulty to offer either.

[volkl48]

I describe Cities:Skylines as a "city painter". You can make nice looking things in it, but there's little challenge and most of the mechanics don't have a lot of depth.

I'd suggest looking at SimCity 4 for the peak of the in-depth city simulator. The systems in it go way deeper, it isn't limited by inevitable scaling problems with agent simulations (Tropico, even C:S), and there's a large, long-running modding community for it.

There's a few mods that would be considered basically essential, namely the Network Addon Mod (which overhauls the traffic simulator, in addition to a vast amount of content).

[jpindar]

I think most people enjoy it for the sake of creativity, not for 'gameplay'. Hence the popularity of mods that unlock everything and give you infinite money.

[Loughla]

After you set your initial city base and have successful finances, it becomes Traffic Simulator and Traffic Management almost exclusively.