Cities: Skylines

It's hard for me to express what I mean, and that's why I put "serious" in quotes. There are different ways to do simulation. Like with aircraft you can do full Navier-Stokes CFD with a very fine grid and you need a supercomputer for that. But you can also do simplified forces and moments with state-space equations for PC simulation like Microsoft Flight Simulator.

I don't think it's necessary to simulate every resident in every house in a city. I would rather that whole neighborhoods or districts get computed as a single module. There's no need to simulate every air molecule for a flight sim.

I want the simulated city to look like Google Earth in 3D mode. I want campuses of related buildings to fill irregular parcels. I want the distances to be 1:1 with real cities, infrastructure project costs to be millions of dollars, and aggregated population numbers in the dozens of millions.

I think a serious sim would let the user import GIS data from a real city and then do what-if scenarios and get a rough idea of how changes would affect the real city.

I'd also like to pick a role for the player that is a real kind of organization. Like the player can act as a city government, or as a developer, or as a transportation agency.

I have more thoughts but not time right now...