Cities: Skylines

Colossal Order shipped this in 2015 into a vacuum left by a SimCity reboot that had alienated its audience, and it took the genre outright. The simulation's centre of gravity is traffic: every citizen is an agent with a home, a job and a route, and congestion is the failure state that eventually breaks your water, power, rubbish collection and emergency response in sequence. That makes road layout the primary creative act, and it is why the game supports both people who want a functioning city and people who want a beautiful one. Districts allow local policy, zoning is coarse enough to stay readable, and the map size available without mods is generous. Paradox has published a long tail of expansions of varying necessity — the transport and park ones are worth it, several others are not — and the Steam Workshop scene produced tens of thousands of assets plus a handful of mods that are close to mandatory quality-of-life. Its sequel launched in poor technical shape in 2023, which has left this the version most players still run.