Strategy in SimCity & Cities: Skylines wouldn't survive politics.
The games greatly reward spending all of your money as quickly as possible, and deficit-spending on services until your city grows into positive income. In other words, spend as much money as quickly as possible building and supporting zones, since they make money; then, even though your budget is negative while you spend on the services to support those zones, you will have not wasted precious dollars on services you can pay for in deficit.
This is a really tricky part of the game, and extremely nerve wrecking. If you neglect to spend exactly right, you end up with $0 and no way to fix a mistake once you hit the play button. On the other hand, your city will grow as quickly as it can given your budget.
You could say this is a really accurate model of real life. If you have an efficient way to spend money, should you spend all of it? You could say that governments rarely have efficient ways to spend money, but they always have a most-efficient-among-the-options way to spend it.
If there's anything to take away from the simulation, it's that cash surpluses don't make sense. Not for governments, not for Apple, not for virtual mayors or StarCraft commanders, not for anyone.
A cash surplus is a symptom of playing the game wrong, not a problem with the game. And in our politics of austerity, that's really crazy.
If you have good investment opportunities, you should not sit on cash. If good investment opportunities are coming soon, you should sit on cash. The trouble is that many forms of wasteful consumption are disguised as investment, in politics.
The biggest unrealism factor in all city sim games is that building happens instantly. I suppose it has to be there just to make them playable but I'd love to see a city sim game where building proposals get stuck in committee for years, challenged via environmental review, cut down in size and scope and eventually built as a compromised version.
Part of the difficulty of urban planning is that the feedback loops are so long. It requires you to plan 5 - 30 years into the future and mistakes are hideously expensive. Finding a way to model that would add a new dimension of depth to city sims IMHO.
This is absolutely correct, but the underlying assumption is that the player can play the game perfectly.
This just isn't possible in a world of infinite variability. Human-controlled centralized management cannot outperform a decentralized, non-planned, ad-hoc market in these cases.
It's underlying assumption that the best way to turn your city from a trailer park to a leafy green paradise is an extremely regressive tax structure always struck me as the most politically questionable part of the simulation.
The games greatly reward spending all of your money as quickly as possible, and deficit-spending on services until your city grows into positive income. In other words, spend as much money as quickly as possible building and supporting zones, since they make money; then, even though your budget is negative while you spend on the services to support those zones, you will have not wasted precious dollars on services you can pay for in deficit.
This is a really tricky part of the game, and extremely nerve wrecking. If you neglect to spend exactly right, you end up with $0 and no way to fix a mistake once you hit the play button. On the other hand, your city will grow as quickly as it can given your budget.
You could say this is a really accurate model of real life. If you have an efficient way to spend money, should you spend all of it? You could say that governments rarely have efficient ways to spend money, but they always have a most-efficient-among-the-options way to spend it.
If there's anything to take away from the simulation, it's that cash surpluses don't make sense. Not for governments, not for Apple, not for virtual mayors or StarCraft commanders, not for anyone.
A cash surplus is a symptom of playing the game wrong, not a problem with the game. And in our politics of austerity, that's really crazy.