The game honestly works quite well if you do think of it as a co-op game. A real life friend made a region, and I founded a city in his region. You can do thin

The game honestly works quite well if you do think of it as a co-op game. A real life friend made a region, and I founded a city in his region. You can do things like: - volunteer excess services such as fire trucks, police cars, trash pickup, recycling trucks. The last one there can be lucrative if you use the raw materials you collect to build processors. - buy water/power/etc utility capacity on an as-needed basis. Instead of having a brownout if your city grows but you forgot to scale up your electricity production, it'll just buy some automatically from other cities in the region - town hall upgrade modules, such as the "department of transportation" which allows more transit options (train/ferry), "department of education" that allows colleges and universities, etc are shared with the region. Each time you level up your city hall you are allowed to add one of the department modules. Eventually you get to a point where you need over 290k citizens, but want some of the upgrades from a department you haven't built yet. A neighboring city can build those departments to help you out. - After spending a bunch of money on university research and applying for a great works project, cities can contribute the resources needed to build these large scale products, and all the cities in the region benefit. Great works projects are things like a major airport, a huge solar collector (the size of a city), a space program, etc. Some bring tourists, some provide resources, etc. The game is extremely social, but if you'd like you can ignore it. I'm in agreement with everyone here that if you want to ignore the social and play offline, you should be able to.