First off, I don't own the game. Having an interest in the series I did a good deal of research to decide over whether to buy it or not. I avoided it big time f

First off, I don't own the game. Having an interest in the series I did a good deal of research to decide over whether to buy it or not. I avoided it big time from the beginning based on the comments from people playing it pre-launch and post-launch. I don't know the current state of things but all indications were that the simulation was severely broken. I'm not sure about being "faked", as in intentional, but things just worked in ways that made no sense. For example, one experiment involved a city that was all residential with no services whatsoever. Low taxes kept population in positive for happiness so people kept moving in to replace the people that left because conditions were so miserable. The theory is that you could succeed at building a decent size city no matter how badly you managed it.