Cities Skylines have a good walking and cycling modeling alongside an excellent public transport system. You can totally create a city with really little trafic. Even industrial trafic can be done essentially via rail or via seaway. It seems that most (all?) actors in the game will prefer your infrastructures over the road as long as they are more efficient. You can now even add toll gates on the road to make the incentive even stronger.

I am a fan of city simulators and I found out the reason for this is all of them copy the USA style zoning system in their rules.

USA style zoning is just stupid and is a major culprit of cities needing cars.

As far as I know there is no major city simulator that simulates non-zoned cities that are full of organic growth instead of the player, like a US mayor, deciding where people are allowed and not allowed to live and work.

As the sibling says, Cities Skylines definitely does a better job than its predecessors of legitimizing non-car strategies for managing transportation. However, as the player, the path of least resistance is absolutely to just do roads everywhere and bulldoze buildings and houses to widen roads (just like in the real world). I don't think CS has much/any modeling for the longer-time-horizon benefits of an active-transportation city, in terms of culture, health, pollution reduction, and so on.

So yes, it's a major step forward in terms of it being possible at all, but it's something you have to be pretty intentional about— and maybe that's reflective of the real world too. But it's always nice when media (games, books, movies, whatever) inspires us to dream bigger than we might otherwise have done.

You can build whole cities without cars in Cities Skyline. With mods like TPME banning private cars is easy. You can still allow services (police, fire engines, ambulances, etc), good trucks, buses and taxis but can also disable any of these on a per-road basis.

I like to create areas that have no cars in my cities. Add lots of pedestrian and cycling paths, lots of trains, metro, ferries, etc and just watch oodles of people using public transport or cycling everywhere.

It's such a satisfying game.

That because most cities right now are road/car-based. Maybe once Cytopia is further developed walk-able cities can be designed.

That's funny... I never heard about Pharaoh until last night when I read a retrospective (1),and now I read about it first thing in the morning :-)

1: https://scientificgamer.com/in-praise-of-pharaoh/

Yes, something that has the in-depth city building mechanics of SimCity with the social modeling of Pharaoh, Caesar, or Europa 1400: The Guild would be incredible.

I played some Tropico 4 and 5 in recent years and had a decent time of it. I think I ended up in a love/hate relationship with the mission structure, though. On the one hand, having a series of shorter "scenarios" with concrete goals is good for gameplay and helps give shape to the overall game in a way that old-school endless city builders lacked, plus it fits with the deeply cynical lore of the game, about you playing as a wannabe dictator bouncing between banana republics and doing the bare minimum to keep them afloat as you line your own pockets by sending cash to the Swiss bank account.

But that structure also meant that I struggled to feel as much long-term ownership over what I was creating. It felt like I could get away with cutting certain corners that I shouldn't have if the game forced me to sit just a little bit longer with the consequences of my actions. Maybe that's just a sign that I was playing it right, but I felt like I would have had a better time if I'd been just a little bit more accountable.

I didn’t say they did. I said they used vector graphics (more specifically, they use vector schematics), with the implication that these vector graphics are “lesser” even than pixel graphics in terms of potential for representational fidelity / skeuomorphism — but also that this doesn’t matter (and in fact, is a benefit), because most sim games are fundamentally about simulating abstract models, not about simulating reality; so a direct representation of the model is clearer and more "fun" than any attempt to embed that model into a view of reality.

I agree with you. My argument was against Transport Tycoon being a copy of SimCity.