I’m itching to play something like Cities Skylines, but also something that isn’t just about growing and growing, rather building within certain (spatial?) limitations and/or solving problems or something. I hope this isn’t a contradiction, but I’d also like if it had a bit more focus on individual buildings and livability rather than optimizing car traffic, if that makes any sense. I guess i’m looking for something that is a bit more than just a city sculpting sandbox, but less than a full blown metropolis-society-simulator.
Maybe try Transport Fever 2. You’re not building a singular city. You’re building a logistics chain. You gather resources from their nodes. Transport them to processors. Then transport them to cities. The cities grow when they get more goods. Then you transport people across cities to help them grow. That’s the simplified version of it.
The cities grow themselves but you can influence the way they grow. You can lay the roads, trains, planes, and boats out to help cities go a certain way. On the surface that may sound like what you don’t want, but that part of the game is so small compared to what you’ll be doing most of the time, which is connecting lines to gather resources. That’s the real puzzle of the game. Even on the big maps you’ll feel like there’s a limited amount of space. Then all of a sudden you have this spaghetti layout. You’ll want to optimize it. You’ll tinker with line options and layouts to maximize profits. Then you have to manage the whole fleet. Aging trucks and trains start losing money. Vehicles literally expire so you have to update them to newer models as time passes. Resource nodes and factories will go away and shift throughout a map. There’s an always changing nature to the map and it keeps you on your toes.
It’s a deep game. It’s a modernized version of Transport Tycoon. If you want to try the retro version there’s OpenTTD. I’ve sunk a good chunk of time into Transport Fever 2 and it’s a much better game than Cities Skylines ever was.