I do this in SimCity 4 with the help of a little program called Cheat-O-Matic. Start a city and use the program to fill my coffers with a few trillion Simoleons then build, build, build.
Sorry, I should have said “to build buildings”. I.e., your pottery plant costs 20 wood and 8 tools, or some such. The Anno and Impressions games are pretty similar in terms of housing requirements, as I recall (more goods for higher level houses, and the top tier requires imports)
Which of these games has the nicest/most interesting features for building infrastructure, esp. public transport? I’ve played a number of railroad tycoon/bus driver tycoon kind of games, but I want more of the simcity kind of experience (rather than scheduling bus lines or something) except that I’m not too interested in people and their complaints (screw them!) or in zoning residential areas or something like that. I’ll do it if I have to but I’d like to have extended opportunities in designing infrastructure rather than for instance being able and required to provide an array of services like hospitals or schools.
Cities in Motion is probably the closest to what you’re describing. The cities come pre-built and you design your transport infrastructure around the already-existing roads and buildings. You have buses, trams, ferries, metros, and helicopters. There’s some historical progression; for example, you won’t be able to establish a helicopter line in the 1920’s. The city will also grow around you, like creating suburbs in the outskirts and you’ll have to make new line to accommodate that. You don’t have to build anything except for the transport lines themselves.
The sequel, Cities in Motion 2, is coming out in a few weeks. You might want to wait to get that or possibly pick up the original at a discount.
Cities in Motion 2 has just been released. You can get it on Steam for $20. The core of the game is still the same as its predecessor, building and managing transport lines. It’s still not a full-fledged city builder, but you can now build roads and the city will grow dynamically around the new road system.
That looks really interesting. Unfortunately there’s no way my computer could handle that 
Thanks for the tip, though!
Today’s daily deal on Steam is Simcity 4 Deluxe Edition, which includes the Rush Hour expansion. For the next 18 hours or so, you can pick it up for $5.
I wouldn’t say easy - there’s still an art to properly setting up your housing blocks and placing your amenities, programming the warehouses deliveries & industry supply chains and so forth. The art just got a lot less frustrating or prone to cascade failure because *one *damn walker zigged when he should have zagged. Besides, properly built Caesar III cities would wind up looking pretty silly with all the snaking paths coiling everywhere for perfect walker management - never, ever, ever build a crossroads in Caesar III if you know what’s good for you ! 
I also recall Pharaoh at least still had the issue of individual houses jumping in size once you reached the upper social tiers, from 4x4 to 6x6. You needed to plan for that when drawing up the Idle Fat Cat quarter, and it played havoc in the Permanently Stuck In Middle Class quarter when a few houses burned down or got vandalized by invaders and the neighbours seized the opportunity to climb the social ladder before the rubble even stopped smoking :D.
I say “easy” because once you more or less worked out an optimal solution you never really had to change it - you just placed virtually identical blocks.
Ha, yeah that happened. I had to go look online (in the days of dial-up) to figure out how to deal with that mess, along with redesigning half the city.
True enough, but that was already sort of true before the gates and roadblocks. There are “perfect housing block” designs for Caesar III out there as well. It’s just that they function with snaking, coiling paths instead of nice loops.
But your point is actually why I like the last iteration of the series (Emperor:Rise of the Middle Kingdom) so much. The Feng Shui mechanic often forces you to rethink your perfect prefab housing block to try and fit with the terrain features better. Or maybe the nice plot where you wanted to put up the Idle Fat Cat quarter is the only place on the map that also has good Feng Shui for jade workers, or there’s no good wood FS for that kind of temple anywhere near the good housing land and you’re forced to try and figure out how to build & provision a block on that island in the middle of nowhere if you don’t want the gods to be pissed for not being represented, that kind of thing.
I mean, you could also just say “screw perfect Feng Shui, it doesn’t affect anything !”, but… the OCD is strong in this one
Ditto on Emperor and feng shui. Not a hint of yellow should stain the harmony of any city in the Middle Kingdom.
Anybody want a Steam 65% off coupon for the sequel?