I really agree with this. I've gotten into Cities: Skylines numerous times over the years and have bounced off of it each time because it was so hard to scale a

I really agree with this. I've gotten into Cities: Skylines numerous times over the years and have bounced off of it each time because it was so hard to scale a city past a certain point due to transport. I'm up for a challenge and I think transport is actually a fantastic gameplay element for the player to scale, but as it is the only way to "solve" transport feels like cheesing whatever algorithm is under the hood, rather than designing a transport system that makes any real kind of sense. I have some beef with agent-based simulations in this regard. They're fascinating in the abstract, but IMO too many game devs are obsessed with it to their own detriment. Heavily agent-based sims tend to scale really poorly (an issue I suspect is true with SimCity 2013 and Cities: Skylines) and imperfections in modeling the agents causes extreme divergences at-scale that break the illusion of realism badly. At this point I'd honestly much rather - especially with large-scale sims where you build cities of millions rather than a town of dozens - have non-agent-based statistical simulations. I want to build cities that I can imagine seeing IRL, not some metagame-game-mechanioc-defeating monstrosity that's optimized against the game's pathfinding.