I hope they make a sequel to CS with much more simulation and some of the gameplay features of games like Simcity 2013. I don't like how abstracted, rigid, and cosmetic much of skylines is. The industries expansion was the best one by far but most of it seems to be about painting a city rather than building one.
I'd love a Tropico style game set in like 19th century german city states with city simulation and politics/industry/etc.
Completely agree! Undeniably C:S was the far better simulator out of it and SimCity, but aside from repetitive expansion to endlessly increase your population there wasn't very much actual gameplay. There's only so many kinds of transport one can add to a game before it becomes just another "place building, build waypoints, draw line" type situation, which doesn't really pose a challenge. I appreciate al the content creators who go out and make stunning, realistic cities, but I think there is potentially a neglected part of the community that, while we can respect the talent of these people, haven't had much attention payed to them as there have been so few, and quite shallow gameplay additions which only seem to function as another tool to get a pretty screenshot of a "more realistic city."
The concepts in SimCity were fun and enjoyable and felt like there could be progression without just simply building another district. You could research, create specialised cities, build up vast industries, manage trade, etc. Of course EA
horrifically screwed up with the constrictive city sizes and multiplayer functionality forced down consumers throats (personally I'm not against multiplayer, and the concepts of selling services and creating large regional projects with friends had me excited before release of SimCity). But it would be nice to see a sequel to cities skylines focus more on the gameplay and challenge the players more who want that kind of challenge.
I even think current C:S could have done it, but there has been a lot more focus on aesthetic, with missed opportunities for new and innovative gameplay from weather (snowfall/natural disasters), nightlife and work cycles (after dark), rush hours and other traffic incidents (mass transit/sunset harbour), and there could be more pressure from a more political population, maybe one that can vote you out every few years if they aren't happy, people holding protests by blocking roads and making it difficult for your services to get around until their demands are met, homelessness in parks, maybe having to deal with laws that restrict planning in certain ways from a higher up parliament which you can lobby to get politicians to choose your city for a new nuclear power plant or airport etc. So far the best we got was industries but even then the addition was only skin deep and could be completely ignored if you wanted to.
As it stands I haven't played C:S for several years now just because I feel like I did everything I possibly could within the first months of owning the game, and while the first few DLC's drew my interest for their gimmicks, fundamentally they never really did much to change the way to play the game. Even though I can't stand EA's DLC policy for The Sims franchise, I have to say that the SimCity "Cities of Tommorrow" expansion was at least filled with a good amount of features that could really shake up the way you played, I don't think any Cities Skylines DLC's have managed to live up to that.
All just an opinion though