[casenmgreen]

SC2K had a beautiful interface, I concur, but it was broken as a sim, because of how transport was simulated. Paths were drawn, kind of like ray-traced, from each tile, and at a junction, a random route was taken. There was no directiveness. So for example if you made a little group of roads as a 3x3 set of tiles, practically no routes would exit before timing out by travelling too far, because they would keep taking random exits, and so stay within the 3x3 set of road tiles.

As such, you could not build a natural, normal transport system - for example, a central ring road or subway, with routes radiating outwards off of the ring. The only way to build a viable city was to understand how the transport sim worked, and then build a transport layout to fit how it worked.

[pavel_lishin]

As an aside, it really does feel like many games aren't about what they seem to be on the surface.

The SimCity series was less about building a city than it was about managing traffic.

SimTower was less about property management, and more about elevator management.

Factorio is less about building a factory, as it is about resource routing. Or, later, programming trains. Or later, god knows what, I haven't gotten that far.

Baldur's Gate III is less about defeating the BBEG through RPG mechanics, and more about choosing who to romance (Karlach).