That was my problem with the game as well. You don’t really have all that much freedom and there isn’t that much emergent behaviour. You just replay the same road builder scenario where the only interesting part is designing intersections.
I’d love to see a city builder game with an extremely powerful policy builder feature. Let me design new rules and see how the city responds. For example, let me implement congestion charges on roads, even if it’s just a text input with its own DSL like you have with minecraft command blocks. Then you could really break out of what the developers designed and start actually doing simulations.
Cities skylines has the policy builder feature like you describe. One of the policies you can implement is congestion charges. You can set the policies city-wide, or in certain districts.
In the latest builds with the newest DLC, you can even ban cars completely with pedestrian only districts/roads.
I’d love to see a city builder game with an extremely powerful policy builder feature. Let me design new rules and see how the city responds. For example, let me implement congestion charges on roads, even if it’s just a text input with its own DSL like you have with minecraft command blocks. Then you could really break out of what the developers designed and start actually doing simulations.