City builders, such as Sim City or even City Skylines are all inaccurate to various degrees. I find it more "honest" when Tropico 6 makes fun of the concept entirely: with your hackers stealing the White House from the US Government.
Strangely enough, I find Tropico to be a more believable setting.
* Citizen simulation: Citizens need to travel between different areas. Miners need to enter the mines, but when they get tired, they need to travel home to rest. Every now and then, they must travel to Church to fulfil their personal religious needs (religious citizens need more church than non-religious). Etc. etc. for all the personal needs of citizens (food, housing, religion, entertainment). Citizens also grow up: adults give birth to children, children go to school (or not: if you don't have schools they'll grow up uneducated), 20 years later they enter the workforce as either "uneducated", "high school" educated, or "college educated". Higher education levels can perform more jobs (ex: Petro-chemical engineer), while uneducated are forced into the lowest wage jobs (farming or mining).
You do need farmers and miners however. So you kind of need to balance the number of high and low educated fellows in your island.
* The economy: Tropico simulates a small island country in a world of "Superpowers". Tropico 6 has 4 ages and therefore different sets of superpowers. Early ages is "The Crown" (the sole superpower), your hypothetical king who sent you to colonize the island. Then comes "Axis" and "Allies" as the two superpowers. A few decades later you get USSR vs USA. Finally the superpowers split into the modern age (Europe, USA, Russia, China).
* You're a small fish in the world. Your entire economy consists of satisfying the superpowers with goods. More advanced goods means more money from a superpower. Too much relations with one superpower (ex: USA) will piss off rival superpowers (ex: USSR in Cold War era).
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This leads to some very believable situations:
* The city center naturally flows from the harbor: your sole connection to the superpowers of the world. While there's some trade / economy within Tropico (ex: various food items, meat, entertainment, and maybe tourism), the vast majority of your wealth will be from trade with the superpowers you're aligned with.
* Rich vs Poor citizens -- Poor citizens work the mines. Educated citizens can be university professors, pharmacists, or engineers (who can turn raw petroleum into plastic and sell for even more money to the superpowers). Rich people want to live in nice houses and drive cars. Poor citizens can't even afford to ride the bus and walk everywhere (meaning you need to plan poor communities very differently than rich communities).
* "Ghettos" -- If you have a valuable resource in a far-off corner of your island (such as Coal, Gold, Bauxite, Oil, or Uranium), you naturally have to build a mine over there. But your workers also need to live there (otherwise they'll spend too much time traveling between the city center and the mine, never actually working). Your compromise is to build a low-quality housing area... a "Ghetto", with just barely enough needs to survive. That way, your workers are encouraged to stay on that corner of the island without spending too much of their free time walking back and forth to the higher quality town center. Raw materials (mines) don't have as much value as higher-grades of products, so its not worth the investment improving that corner of the island.
Besides, if you upgraded all of the housing in the "Ghetto" area, those workers couldn't afford those houses. I guess you can enact the "free housing" edict, but that pisses of the USA-superpower (though it makes you closer to the USSR...). Free-housing also means free: you no longer get income from homes but instead lose money on every house. So its harder to make money.
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Ceasar / Pharaoh also did the rich/poor thing better IMO (the richest citizens leave the workforce!! You may suddenly find yourself in a worker shortage if you "upgrade" your citizens too far). A big issue with Sim City / City Skylines is that the entire interaction of rich / poor is completely neglected.
I think Tropico really cuts a balance in scale/scope that hits the perfect sweet spot for me. I also think the thematic elements are inherently more interesting than most other city builders. The bigger the scale, the more you have to abstract, so in Cities Skylines or large-scale city builders you literally don't have to or need to care about any individuals, nor is there much in the way of meaningful simulation of them. Skylines ultimately devolves into traffic management, since that ends up being the (perhaps realistic) breaking point when you build a large city.
Tropico manages to keep the maps at a scale that they really do build out and look like a city, but the citizens/agents are still represented in a way that makes them matter individually in some cases. The way tourism works as a means to base the economy on is also something pretty unique to Tropico, largely down to the thematic elements.
One thing that really bothers me about a lot of city builders (The Anno games are where this really stuck out to me but a lot of them do this) is the strict adherence to a fixed radius of influence for certain types of buildings. It makes the games feel like a puzzle to be optimized instead of an enjoyable construction set to build a city. It also doesn't make that much sense. If there is only one church in town and you're one house too far away from it, you're probably not going to decide that you won't go to church, right?
I really hope we get more city builders in the near future that allow less rigidly structured building. While you don't have to adhere to a strict grid in most city-builders, you are often giving up so much space that it both doesn't look very nice or sensible since everything that does fill in around the edges is still trying to smash itself in to a grid.
For those unaware: Tropico sits approximately one step higher than "The Sims", and one step lower than "Sim City".
You don't have as many personalities / needs details per citizen as "The Sims". But every single citizen's life is completely simulated (home, walking, work, walking, church, walking, eating, walking, home. Yes, there's a lot of walking: you'll be thinking of transportation / infrastructure to make things better). Citizens also have full life cycles from birth, to children, to adulthood, and finally death.
A "Big" Tropico has maybe 2000 citizens. At this point, you need significant thought into transportation to keep things working (and one transportation hiccup can topple your entire economy). Tropico 6 is a bit better about it, but Tropico always "scaled poorly" at the end of simulations. (While Sim City / City Skylines felt like games you could keep watching for many months, I don't think I ever put much more than a few weeks of effort into any particular Tropico playthrough).
Tropico is more about playing, reaching the modern era, and then starting over again. Tropico has a "poor steady state", but an excellent "growth" phase that feels very natural. (Ex: setting up a Pro-Communism Newspaper in a neighborhood will slowly turn that neighborhood into pro-communists, pleasing the USSR. Seeing these trends play out over 10+ in-game years is very pleasing)
In contrast, Sim City / City Skylines feel like they "hold steady state" very well, but are kind of unrealistic from a growth perspective.
Strangely enough, I find Tropico to be a more believable setting.
* Citizen simulation: Citizens need to travel between different areas. Miners need to enter the mines, but when they get tired, they need to travel home to rest. Every now and then, they must travel to Church to fulfil their personal religious needs (religious citizens need more church than non-religious). Etc. etc. for all the personal needs of citizens (food, housing, religion, entertainment). Citizens also grow up: adults give birth to children, children go to school (or not: if you don't have schools they'll grow up uneducated), 20 years later they enter the workforce as either "uneducated", "high school" educated, or "college educated". Higher education levels can perform more jobs (ex: Petro-chemical engineer), while uneducated are forced into the lowest wage jobs (farming or mining).
You do need farmers and miners however. So you kind of need to balance the number of high and low educated fellows in your island.
* The economy: Tropico simulates a small island country in a world of "Superpowers". Tropico 6 has 4 ages and therefore different sets of superpowers. Early ages is "The Crown" (the sole superpower), your hypothetical king who sent you to colonize the island. Then comes "Axis" and "Allies" as the two superpowers. A few decades later you get USSR vs USA. Finally the superpowers split into the modern age (Europe, USA, Russia, China).
* You're a small fish in the world. Your entire economy consists of satisfying the superpowers with goods. More advanced goods means more money from a superpower. Too much relations with one superpower (ex: USA) will piss off rival superpowers (ex: USSR in Cold War era).
----------
This leads to some very believable situations:
* The city center naturally flows from the harbor: your sole connection to the superpowers of the world. While there's some trade / economy within Tropico (ex: various food items, meat, entertainment, and maybe tourism), the vast majority of your wealth will be from trade with the superpowers you're aligned with.
* Rich vs Poor citizens -- Poor citizens work the mines. Educated citizens can be university professors, pharmacists, or engineers (who can turn raw petroleum into plastic and sell for even more money to the superpowers). Rich people want to live in nice houses and drive cars. Poor citizens can't even afford to ride the bus and walk everywhere (meaning you need to plan poor communities very differently than rich communities).
* "Ghettos" -- If you have a valuable resource in a far-off corner of your island (such as Coal, Gold, Bauxite, Oil, or Uranium), you naturally have to build a mine over there. But your workers also need to live there (otherwise they'll spend too much time traveling between the city center and the mine, never actually working). Your compromise is to build a low-quality housing area... a "Ghetto", with just barely enough needs to survive. That way, your workers are encouraged to stay on that corner of the island without spending too much of their free time walking back and forth to the higher quality town center. Raw materials (mines) don't have as much value as higher-grades of products, so its not worth the investment improving that corner of the island.
Besides, if you upgraded all of the housing in the "Ghetto" area, those workers couldn't afford those houses. I guess you can enact the "free housing" edict, but that pisses of the USA-superpower (though it makes you closer to the USSR...). Free-housing also means free: you no longer get income from homes but instead lose money on every house. So its harder to make money.
-----------
Ceasar / Pharaoh also did the rich/poor thing better IMO (the richest citizens leave the workforce!! You may suddenly find yourself in a worker shortage if you "upgrade" your citizens too far). A big issue with Sim City / City Skylines is that the entire interaction of rich / poor is completely neglected.