All of these city games need to simulate bureaucracy. For example, if trying to demolish an apartment, you need to solicit 400 approvals and gain local support before doing so. Or to build to a railway you need to buy out all of the land and organize environmental studies for every square foot of it before laying track.
IIRC there was a soviet sity simulator that had some of that; but the games usually just wash it away with "cost to bulldoze".
It would be fun to have a game where you have about as much control as a "real" city and mainly what you do is pull levers behind the scenes to get people to do what you want.
While this would be more realistic the majority of players would stop playing the game. I would argue this is just like you not having to build each street in a 3d game by yourself you also don't need to fill out every form, etc. by yourself. I just image you have a lot of employees doing that for you.
Yeah. I think people saying more realistic interactions would not be fun or popular are lacking in imagination. The real problem with those games is the divorce from reality of bulldozing.
Imagine bulldozing is as expensive, complicated, and despised as in real life.
Then imagine having to fight against infrastructure cost overruns. You play a city building game, and you don't have access to roads (cars haven't been invented) so you want to put rails everywhere. You do that, but then you realise later how expensive and complicated it is to remove some rails to put down roads.
Imagine the game stopping, and telling you that the cost of roads will double when you unpause the game. You'd have to manage putting down more road than you need and the consequences of overreach.
I saw someone playing that way, they could ONLY bulldoze "city services" like roads (so they could replace a road with one with more lanes that fit in the same space, or one with bike/tram lanes) but they could NOT bulldoze zoned properties, and tried their best not to remove even things like police stations, etc.
I think they had a rule saying they could rezone or bulldoze a building that was abandoned; but that of course led to accusations of intentionally forcing buildings to be abandoned (which is a real thing that happens).
What you do is make the normal game play like CS or SimCity, but you have options to turn on "difficulties" that would basically enable different aspects/gameplay.
For example, you could add "federal/state requirements" where a new freeway/rail line/whatever would appear on the edge of the map and you have to get it to the other side, making connections as appropriate.
I'd rather have a city builder that doesn't involve starting a utopia from scratch, I want to show up to an existing rural area and industrialize it, convert an unwalkable nightmare dominated by highways into a medium density sprawl, etc.
All in game achievements should be around negotiating bureaucracy. You should be able to look at a city and have fond / traumatic memories over all the compromised mess. Campaign mode should include trying to build new subway expansion downtown, ranked on time. Cheat code activates is maximum authoritarian mode for old school bulldoze everything / eminant eminant domain / rich petro state pay with migrant worker experience. Or maybe that's just easy mode.
