SimCity 4 (and 3000) - almost perfect classic city building games

SimCity 4

That game is the closest thing that allowed me to make my imagination draw some well functioning cities including sprawling regions with enough precision and the interface was pleasant enough to do so. Even if the UI is a bit outdated, it absolutely has its early sim-esque charm, and the lighting, nature and buildings look gorgeous.

For a long time it was my favourite game ever. The god mode tools are fantastic, the terrain can be sculped freely to create sharp mountains, deep canyons or gentle hills. In SimCity 3000 the terrain was much more gridlocked, which had some benefits as it was very obvious where the slopes were too steep to build something. The nature looks super natural. With built-in waterfalls creator it would be even more perfectly natural. Catastrophies are spectacular, volcano ftw. the cones after volcanos are awesome decorations for the city terrain. The completely vanilla version was good, but after a while the game gets too simple. The absolute must have mod is NAM, the package of various transport modes and enchanced traffic stats.

Small palms can be planted in the pot. I lost most of my nice regions for some reason and the only thing I got is some lame screenshots, or photos.

It's not ideal though, even though the vanilla game crashes quite often and made me the habit of manually "auto-save" my cities once in a while, the NAM puzzles caused a lot more complete program shutdowns, at least on my PC. The puzzles was puzzling to use, such a shame they new types of interchanges can't be just draged like the regular roads, and it forces you to use 'tab' all the time. After some unsuccessful attempts to build tram lines, I cease to use all NAM lines and I just sticked to build regular types of network and just build NAM advanced buildings with much greater capacity. Bus and subway stops inside the road tile are great, but unfortunately can't be placed in front of the buildings because they cut road accessibility to it.

SimCity 3000

I didn't play SimCity 1 and 2, but SimCity 3000 was very much playable but much more limiting than the forth version. I once tried to install SimCity 3000 and I was bundled with custom building editor, which I found very impressive, although the game itself after hours and hours of SimCtiy 4, 3000 is just a downgrade in a technical sense. The 3000 however definitely has its charm when it comes to style and features that I really enjoyed and kinda miss from SimCity 4. Much more restraining grid terrain mesh was easier to precisely shape and I like the random terrain generator with clickable tiles and sliders to get desired results.

Why I like those games and what I would add

One big feature that I wish exists in any city building game is what I would call, Planning Mode. The addon that would allow to place all the buildings and transport networks without building them, just holding the place to build them later, when the money is available. I just wished to be able to hold place for bigger schools, hospitals and so on, so when the city grows enough, no buldozing would be required.

The big part of why I want this whole Lankarta app happen is that it could possible bring new life to that game for me, as the Network Map functionality could allow to create custom non-grid like regions where cities could be linked wheather or not they stick to each other.