Recently I did a two part post covering my most played theme park builders! This time, I will be doing the same for City Simulation games.

I find it more interesting to base it on the number of hours played, rather than simply which I think is “better”. The best game is not always the one you obsess over the most. Even with vast improvements and modernizations to the newer games, new games do not always replace the older classics.

If the hours has a + next to it, it means I could not find the exact recorded hours. This is particularly true for my old CD games with no time stamps.

An Important Note

The goal of this is not to necessary find the one true city builder. As I have been writing this, I have found that the top games on the list all have unique reasons for potentially being the best.

If I say that one game should have gone in a different direction to regular city building games, that does not mean that all should. In particular, I described that one game should be a mechanical toy-like simulator, and shouldn’t focus on economies or challenging simulations. This means that I would like another game to focus on economy instead, not that I don’t like those type of simulations.

10. Cities XXL (originally Cities XL) – 2 hours

What a piece of shit.

Sorry, I’d better warn you this post contains a swear word… that was it.

When it came out, people loved it for its huge maps and (for a very brief period) good graphics. Remember, this came out originally in 2009, so the graphics were impressive back then!

However, the original developer went bankrupt. Since then, the development was passed around to other teams, and it turned into a yearly scam. Each year they released a “new edition” of the game, which was basically an expensive content pack with little improvements. Bugs would be left unfixed, the GUI was poorly “updated” by just changing the colours of it, and the performance of the game was dreadful.

The graphics were barely updated, so by the time Cities XXL came out in 2015, it literally looked dated by 6 years.

People were so angry at EA with SimCity 2013, that the Cities XL series got a resurgence of new players and YouTube coverage. Players flocked to what they thought was going to be the best, modern city builder. Sadly, this was all misguided.

I liked the farm and zone drawing feature, the class system (with improvements) could have worked greatly to add depth to the simulation, and the map sizes were indeed XXL. But the tedium of matching up exact numbers of each social class to the exact number of building types and facilities, combined with how this system limited experimentations and try your own combinations, made the game very boring.

9. SimCity 2000 – 4+ hours

This is a much better game than Cities XXL, at least that’s what people tell me.

Don’t get me wrong, I just haven’t played much of it. It was definitely a well built, polished game when I played it briefly, which is already much better than Cities XXL. I just found the user interface outdated, the feedback from the game wasn’t very clear, and overall I prefer SC3000. For the most part, SC3000 is a direct update to this game, rather than an overhaul.

Remember, this game came out in 1993! It’s already impressive that some people still like to play it, as there are many games from this era that no one plays anymore. I am not one of those.

Therefore, most features that were in SC2000, I associated and gave credit to the third game in the series instead. Obviously, if you love this game it’s not a bad game. I just started later on in the series, and couldn’t appreciate this one as much.

Something I don’t like is the original soundtrack for the PC. The ps1 had some catchy synth versions which were okay in my opinion. I really like the theme song from the PC version, but that’s the only one that stands out.

I’ll probably talk more about this when I get to SimCity 1989.

8. SimCity Societies – 10+ hours

Hideous user interface, confusing and poor game design, and overall a generic experience without the magic of Maxis.

I will give credit to the developers, however. For a 2007 game, it looks fantastic! The art style helped the graphics look much better than City Life, and even Cities XXL in some respects.

It has some interesting concepts: scenery has a purpose and desirability to a specific resident type, buildings have unique attributes such as creativity and prosperity, there are different themed city styles and terrain styles, and these can be combined to make very unique cities!

Honestly, this game could have worked. But there were too many mistakes made. Confusing simulation where fire Stations gave the player income, the game was too easy, transport was too simplistic, and matching up the specialization values became tedious.

It had a similar issue to Cities XXL, but instead of social classes you had specializations that needed to be matched up perfectly. When you build a city with the exact number of buildings they just work, and so there’s no way to experiment or to try and build an interesting city. I played 10 hours mostly because of the 3D, and trying out the new mechanics. This quickly became boring.

PS. I dare you to image search SimCity Societies and try not to vomit at the sight of the user interface.

7. SimCity (1989) – 15+ hours

The original that started it all.

I first played this years after SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. While 15 hours may not sound a lot, it is a very simple game. I could build a decent sized city within an hour, so I’ve played it a number of times.

What I prefer about this over SC2000 is while the user interface is even older than SC2000’s, it doesn’t feel outdated; it feels timeless. It is like using a painting tool. The game is so simple that the user interface remains simple, and so it does not feel clustered or over complicated. SC2000 has the disadvantage of being a much more complex game, therefore, the user interface was expanded to accommodate that. It wasn’t until SC3000 did they do an overhaul and make the user interface much more intelligently.

Some may argue the game is a little too simple. I also don’t always know how my decisions really affect the city. In particular, I felt like there was not much I could do about traffic or pollution. However, it is so much fun just to paint a city in such a simple tool, that I can play it very casually, without over thinking about it. There’s a free downloadable version, which is nice to play every once in a while as a relaxing game.

As the first game in the series, and the first of its genre (mostly), the design of the core gameplay loop was truly genius: balancing RCI zoning while expanding your services, transport, and utilities. As a game developer myself, I am truly amazed by it still, and don’t think I will ever even come close to that originality or design. Nonetheless, much was done to expand the formula after.

It’s hard to know what I would want to add to the game, because most of the changes were made in future releases. In other words, there is no point changing this game because the sequels already exist.

6. City Life (2008) – 25+ hours

This was the first 3D city builder I had ever played.

There was a paint-bucket tool I liked being able to fill in awkward shaped gaps between buildings with plazas and parks. A much needed visual tool that helped make the city much better without needing to hand place loads of scenery with a mod. Why does this not exist in other non-grid city builders?!

The game also allowed you to draw angular roads, another reason why I played so much of it. At the time, this was a great fun 3D city “painter” that I built a couple cities with. The performance was much better in this than the sequel Cities XXL, and so I was able to enjoy the experience much more.

…In unlimited money sandbox mode. The actual simulation is dull.

Trying to play the game seriously was a pain. The bulky, ugly, and sometimes unhelpful GUI did not make the game fun. The GUI is one of the most important aspects of a simulation game, and it did not feel as smooth as SimCity 3000’s or SimCity 4’s GUIs.

Transportation and traffic was simplified, and so was not as fun to manage. Awkwardly designed tutorial popup videos were large, and not always helpful.

The simulation had the same issue Cities XXL and SimCity Societies had. They all relied on matching specific specialization values whenever you placed a building. I want a blue collar city. I need to build a supermarket for my blue collar workers, which also requires an exact number of other social groups to work there. Why should I need to build the exact number of houses and facilities for “Have Nots” as well? This became really tedious doing this for all 6 social groups.

Of course, some may argue it is more realistic that buildings require certain workers. Would you expect an “Elite” millionaire to work in a supermarket in your pristine rich capital? Nope. However, there was an issue where if you tried to cater to one social group in one area, you would need a local of another social group to run the facilities there. You would then try to build something to attract that other social group, and now half the area gets converted to that social group. This causes an imbalance you have to painfully fix.

To resolve this, the game could have allowed you to build social housing for each group, rather than housing that auto-adjusts social groups based on the local facilities. Then we still have the same problem of tedious head counting. I need 3 of this social group, 7 of this other one! I’m supposed to be building a huge city, not assigning individual workers to each shop.

I like the way SimCity does it: three simple wealth levels, mostly based on happiness rather than jobs. If a building cannot find enough workers, it simply closes and is replaced with one that can find workers it needs. In City Life, you have to do this all manually.

Some of the songs are still catchy, in particular track 6 and 7.

5. SimCity Creator (DS) – 50+ hours

A really good time traveling game, if a little primitive in some aspects and easy.

You can build a city through the ages! This includes prehistoric, medieval, modern, and the future! Whilst the modern mode feels simpler than the modern modes of all of the other SimCity games, the historical and future modes really add a lot of interesting features and mechanics to the game.

It astonishes me that not more people have played this game, as I cannot think of a true city builder that allows you to do this. It might be because of the annoying to control Wii version, which is very different! It has the same name and logo, but it only allows you to build in the modern era.

Because cities are carried over through periods (by completing certain objectives within a time limit), the cities progress through the ages. In the prehistoric era, you have hunt zones where you can access food. So you start building next to them. You cannot destroy trees to place buildings and roads, but your citizens automatically chop them down over time and convert them to wood so that you can place structures (instead of using money, which does not exist yet).

This results in you placing roads and buildings within the confines of the tree outlines. In other words, I found that my settlements had some sort of central square, where the hunting grounds used to be in the middle. And, around it swirling roads that would circle the old boundaries. This created interesting historical city centres, that would stand out in later periods when you switch over to mass grid-based design for the rest of the city.

Imagine how cool this would look in 3D with modern graphics! Especially if the old historical buildings were carried over into the next era, so that with each era you add an additional layer of new buildings around the outskirts. Like a beautiful, beautiful, onion.

This effect worked even better if you placed a historical monument in the square before progressing to the next era. These would give the city another visual cue of progression through time.

I actually prefer this game over games like Banished. Banished was a tough medieval city builder, but in SimCity Societies, survival has a purpose: to evolve. In Banished, I felt like there was no point to survive, because the only goal was to build a big, bland town. Plus, you get a lot more customization in classic SimCity fashion, therefore, you are much more connected to the city that you feel is really yours.

When I was younger, I found it challenging enough to pass the 50 hours, but I imagine now it may seem a little simple. This is why I don’t recommend this game unless you want to play something a little on the casual side.

A challenging Banished style simulation, combined with the customization and variety of content that this game has, plus the time travel, would make for an excellent experience.

4. SimCity (2013) – 90+ hours

90 hours of a game that everybody hated!

I have a lot of internal conflicts about this game. It’s beautiful, has a stunning soundtrack, gave me the nearest experience to a true 3D SimCity than ever before, and had a very ambitious simulation concept. That concept was to simulate everything. And it could have been glorious.

Do not underestimate the potential this had. Sure, Cities Skylines faked a lot of things and tried to simulate being a true agent simulation to success, but there are details that make this game shine out. Take sewage: in Cities Skylines I place more and more sewage outflow pipes until it has all gone.

In SimCity, here’s what happens if I place two sewage outflow pipes too close to each other: if I place them on the right of the map, so the rest of the city is to the left, the majority of the sewage would enter the left pipe. The right pipe would receive much less sewage, and would tend to receive more only when the left pipe temporarily blocked up with overuse.

It’s little cause and effects like these that make the simulation more interesting. It’s not just about spamming sewage pipes, there’s a (small) amount of thought that needs to go into where they are placed. This is a dynamic simulation outcome that was not pre-programmed into the logic of the poop agents.

This could have applied to electricity requiring transformers and substations to alter the voltage of each power zot, or a network of water treatment plants converting dirty or salt water into clean water. Allowing the player to custom build their own pipes and power cables would have gone great with this. Spamming the same buildings over and over in Cities Skylines (and to a certain extent, has always applied to some aspects of SimCity too) was dull because you were not thinking about how they interacted with each other. Each one was just to increment a global capacity.

SimCity could have become this giant mechanical toy that you could play with, where components could have been added to manipulate agents. Forgot to add a water treatment centre after your water pump? Looks like all of your dirty water agents will not be converted into clean!

This is faked in Cities Skylines, by allowing you to pump sewage from the rivers where you dumped it. It works ok, but I personally do not find that as fun. This system could be expanded: what happens if a transformer stops working on an electric grid? Do the buildings explode or catch fire? Does the electric grid simply cut off for that one area? Would you have to segment your city into different sub electrical grids to deal with this?

Of course, this might become distracting from the main economic simulation, but wouldn’t a purely mechanical toy version of SimCity be loads of fun? No management, just the manipulation of agents within the world. You could have micro effects, where building a fast food place next to a school could make the kids much larger. Citizens could have more attributes than cash, such as social skills, confidence, intelligence, and as mentioned above: weight and appearance. With real autonomous agents, rather than robotic citizens that drive to and from home, there is so much potential.

For those wondering why I spent 90 hours with it despite the bugs, unbalanced simulation, and small map sizes, I will explain why.

I enjoyed building cities in 3D. The wealth system is a nice addition that shows the progress of your city, and would have been made even more interesting with the addition of homeless shelters or even “council estates” for the lowest income Sims. Homeless people already existed in the game, but they seemed to walk around parks.

SimCity has the best user interface in any simulation game I have ever played, and citizen thought bubbles is a feature I actually liked. They gave you quick feedback and potential bonus objectives that I felt were fun to complete. They gave you extras, rather than simply locking off tech you could not build yet.

That’s how I think all tech trees should work: not necessarily with thought bubbles, I mean you can do tasks that unlock bonuses that help towards reaching higher tech, rather than necessarily having to reach specific requirements for specific tech that can halt your experimentation.

I also loved building multiple cities, and being able to use tech across the region. Trading was vastly improved over SimCity 4, which had much more limiting trade and most of the time I couldn’t get a deal to appear at all!

A big factor is the day and night cycle. By having it at launch, rather than adding it post-release, they were able to create an interesting schedule for all agents. Kids go to school at 9am, and come home at around 3 or 4pm for example. At a minimum, kids don’t go to school in the middle of the night! (This may have been fixed in a Cities Skylines patch, but it was not a bug- it was originally a design choice).

People said that Cities Skylines was more consistent because the game remembered where everybody lived and worked, however, I disagree. The fact that, at least at launch, everybody travelled at seemingly random times meant that there was very little consistency. Sure, in SimCity it was technically spawning new people everyday. However, the buildings themselves maintained the stats that progressed the new agents each day. Also, the fact that everybody travelled at the same time as each other gave the illusion of consistency, where Cities Skylines seemed like a mess in it’s eternal day time.

Miscellaneous points:

Much clearer data overlays to any other games.

Interesting resource management with factories and trading.

Individual crime types and police catch individual criminals (later added to Cities Skylines).

Pollution wind direction (imagine the effect on much bigger maps!).

Huge, gorgeous buildings.

Mass transit control was weak, and traffic pathfinding flawed.

Many unique building designs.

3. Cities Skylines – 139 hours

The best traffic management game ever.

I said a few negative things about Cities Skylines, but let’s get to the positives. This game kicked SimCity off the pedestal. Whilst the hours played are not much greater, I also spent a lot of time watching YouTubers playing it, therefore, I feel like I’ve spent much more time with the game.

It must also be noted that I had just come from playing SimCity 2013. So, the hours would have been much greater had I of not already spent a long time in a similar feeling 3D city builder and all of the previous city builders on my list. In other words, the fact that I played it for 139 hours is fantastic.

This is a great first attempt at a city simulator from the developers, Colossal Order. The city management needs more craft and time to mature, but considering Maxis had made 4 major city builders before SC2013, and Colossal Order had none, it’s still great.

Cities Skylines has so many great features, including large maps, policies, districts, scenarios, and in particular: extensive mod support.

Overall, this is arguably the best and most modern city builder to date! The huge amount of customization is brilliant, and of course there’s the famous (if sometimes infamous) traffic management system.

Yes, it was frustrating at first to see a city collapse due to bad traffic management. But over time as you get better at managing it, it becomes so satisfying to fix the problems and see a thriving, large city.

There are such a large amount of solutions to improving traffic flow, and with recent updates, it has become even more in depth with many features once only available with mods have now been added. This includes turning off/on traffic lights, having more road types, and one way rails.

The reason why this works so well is because the agents are directly impacted by the decisions you make. This correlation between agent-travel decision making and your choices makes your actions feel impactful, responsive, and important. With the exception of some weird lane-usage behaviour, overall, the game does not cheat in this respect.

Traffic is more than just a variable, and the networks in your city become this mechanical toy. It’s the same idea I mentioned with SimCity 2013 with the sewage. Each agent can be manipulated, and lots of thought needs to go into it. It has the same principles of fun as addictive factory games like Factorio.

This is why the city management aspect feels a little weak in comparison. Health is not an “issue”, it is a variable that needs to be reduced with local clinics or hospitals. When this seems to be the case with about 8 other services, it becomes repetitive and tedious to keep building the same structures over and over.

With traffic management, the agents are directly, visibly affected by what you change. With health, they simply become more or less happy with the number of facilities. There might be minor other differences, but the game is not always clear on what the other consequences there are.

Traffic would not be the same if there were simply traffic-reduction buildings you had to place around, with each house having a traffic satisfaction value. Of course, the services in your city cannot work the same way as traffic, but there needs to be an alternative set of game mechanics. Game mechanics that allow the player to experiment with different solutions, with a range of different outcomes.

Health is solved with hospitals, and fire is solved with fire stations. But traffic does not have a simple, single solution. Of course, once you play the game long enough you may find a perfect traffic system. However, it was your own solution, and not a predesigned in-game solution that you simply had to unlock.

Health, education, crime, fire, pollution, and other systems should be formed on the basis of manipulating agents. Not just adjusting building stats. Yes there are ambulances and people who fall ill that need attention, but from the player’s perspective, they are still just spamming hospitals.

Still, these flaws mentioned are the same flaws that have been present in city builders for a long time. It is still a fantastic city planner, even if you have to mod the capacities of buildings x10 so you don’t have to build as many. This is what I did, anyway!

I do think that I build a city in Cities Skylines to make traffic to solve, whereas, I build a city in SimCity to unlock a new specialization or major structure. It’s a bit different, but you still need to pay attention to the economics and systems simulations a little, it’s a great, fun game.

2. SimCity 3000 – 300+ Hours

This was the first simulation game I had ever played, and what an amazing one to start on.

Most people’s nostalgia seems to come from SimCity 2000 or the original, but for me, it all came from this game. It still looks great today, has a wonderful soundtrack by Jerry Martin (I nearly put Jerry Goldsmith by accident!), and it has a lot of great features and content.

This was ahead of its time, with huge maps that could be zoomed out to much further than any other isometric game at the time, with as much detail in each asset as it had. Unlike most isometric games with editable terrain, this terrain could be raised in fine steps, allowing much smoother and more varied terrains.

Traffic management was a little poor. Whilst more realistic than SC2000, which simply based traffic on density, SC3000 appeared to simulate a random selection of routes, and then extrapolate them based on the local density. This is complete speculation, based on a quotation I found a long time ago in the manual stating that the Sims tend to follow each other along similar routes.

This might imply that instead of calculating every journey from every building, like SC4, it takes a few sample routes. If it is estimated that many Sims would take a similar route, the roads under that route have increased traffic usage. This makes more realistic traffic patterns for cars compared to SC2000, but it breaks mass transit.

Not to say that mass transit does not work, just that it does not work in a logical way. Busses are effective in residential zones, but do nothing in other zones. So people can get on busses, but can’t get off? Trains are effective in both zones, but this does not imply that Sims use them.

Traffic is still fun to manage if you do not overthink it, and make sure to read online wikis first about where different transportation options are and are not effective.

The game is fun for casual-semi hardcore play. Obviously, it is more “hardcore” than your typical mobile game, but it’s definitely not on the same level as SC4 or even Cities Skylines.

What is interesting about the simulation is because it is statistical, rather than agent based, there are interesting dynamics in the function of your cities. It also adds a little bit of challenge.

See, the problem with agent based simulations are they tend to rely on step-function based logic. An agent either has good health or bad health, or an agent is either happy or unhappy. It is tricky for a developer trying to balance this, so that the player does not easily have perfect agents.

In a statistical model, mathematical functions have been used to smooth out the statistics of your city, and everything is an estimation. It is harder for the player to predict how exactly an outcome will happen, especially because the formulas used will be unknown to the player.

Therefore, there is some experimentation and investigation required to figure out how the simulation works. The biggest mystery is the fluctuation in RCI demands, which can make or break your city.

The agents in modern titles use boolean thresholds to decide what a success is, whereas, the old simulations would typically use mathematical curves, where it was nearly impossible (if impossible) to achieve true perfection. Somebody on YouTube did figure out how to build a “perfect” city, but that took years of effort. It is possible to achieve stabilization in most other city builders quite early on, with no pressure to keep expanding.

It’s the mystery of the statistical model that created challenge, whether players like it or not. I will admit it can be sometimes frustrating wondering why my demand is shooting up and down, as abandoned buildings appeared all over the map. While less realistic, it offered the opportunity to experiment and investigate the simulation, as explained earlier. That was the game, to figure out how it all worked.

This game has flaws, and I probably would not have played as much if it had come out later. It was the right game at the right time.

1. SimCity 4 – 500+ Hours

You start off in region mode, a very ambitious feature for its time. You can build multiple cities, each specialized. The unique cities would trade with each other, a huge aspect missing from Cities Skylines. Some buildings came with regional requirements, rather than local requirements, allowing cities to help each other to progress.

As each game became more complex in the series, this became the most complex of them. The game’s difficulty came from the multitude of variables that had to be balanced across your cities.

Yet again, it comes with a great soundtrack by Jerry Martin. This is probably my most listened to game soundtrack of all time! Whilst I prefer some of the songs more from SC3000, the larger number of songs and greater variety make the SC4 soundtrack much more compelling to listen to.

The transport system was also improved over SimCity 3000, where Sims would pathfind to each location and use mass transit correctly. This resulted in mass transit placement being much more rewarding and satisfying to build, though not quite reaching the same levels as Cities Skylines did. The only issue was some quirks with calculating the most optimal paths.

With a large number of factors to consider when placing buildings and laying out your city, it kept me busy for hundreds of hours figuring out how to balance it all. There was still some mystery to how demand and other variables worked in the game, though not as fluctuating as SC3000.

Yet again, it is not as clear cut how these work when compared to the modern agent based simulations. I also love the huge population allowances and large map sizes, which were possible by not simulating every single person as an agent.

One issue I have with agent based simulations, going back to the manipulation I mentioned earlier, is how they don’t really affect the city. They have a direct impact on traffic in Cities Skylines, which is why that’s so satisfying. But the agents don’t seem to have any other individual quirk or value. You can’t have sporty, charismatic, or logical citizens. Everyone is the same, rendering an agent based simulation pointless beyond the traffic model.

Even non-city builders like Airport CEO and Sim Airport have the same issue of non-unique agents who may as well be simulated statistically. In those games, I’d love massive sprawling airports even if people just faded in and out over the course of a long period of time. In SimCity 4, you have the best of both: huge populations, and a (mostly) accurate traffic pattern simulation, requiring much thought and planning.

Cities Skylines does somewhat use statistical modelling for its non-travelling agents, but the city collapses if agents do not get around. Did one truck not reach your coal power plant in time? Have a population much higher than the car limit? Uuh-ohh. No wonder I had to have 81 garbage trucks to serve my last small town in Cities Skylines! (This is exactly true).

Now I have two contradicting points: on the one hand I want an agent based simulation with unique agents. Or, huge populations of statically simulated people with faked (but mostly accurate) traffic patterns.

If it’s possible to do both, by statistically modelling unique behaviours or traits, then that would make for a great city simulator. I know everyone keeps arguing that agent based is the future, but look at SimCity 4. I believe with the right development team, they could create a much more personal, quirky set of citizens using a performance-focussed statistical model.

One minor problem I have with SimCity 4 is having to go around and manually set budgets for every building. I wish there was an option to automate it to a certain percentage of capacity. For example, always set the capacity to 105% of the number of people there. U-drive mode and it’s missions felt like a tack-on. Though, a 3D version to drive around in would be great fun!