Also – Cities: Skyline, absolute recommendation. Whether you’re into micromanaging a city or just sandboxing the crap out of things, it is the gold standard. Highly recommend the Workshop, but be forewarned, some mods and even assets just don’t work, as in the game keeps throwing errors at you while you’re playing. If you’re like me and you download a hundred assets and mods at once, you then have to backtrack your downloads to figure out the bad cog.
Also recommend Cities: Skylines. At times it can feel a bit like an pre-Alpha early release in the sense that the interface can be a bit clunky and the performance can be a bit slow on even high-end machines. Especially if you mod the crap out of it.
And you definitely want to mod the crap out of it. Not just to augment or replace the default building sets with entire collections of user-created buildings ranging from iconic skyscrapers to city-specific architectural themes to brand name stores like IKEA, Target, Starbucks and Walmart. You can find mods for everything from custom streets, traffic managers, map textures, lighting, interface, pretty much everything.
Try the Loading Screen Mod (I think it’s called something like that). It runs a check on every mod and workshop asset and creates a report if anything is missing.
Suburbia is a good city building board game that plays 1-4 (up to 5 with an expansion). The iOS version is also very good.
Brian
Just as a follow up to Surviving Mars. There’s a new patch today that fixes pretty much every major issue I was having with the game.
how you like in this climate, it’s Banished or Life is Feudal: Forest Village - the village is being built and growing 
**Banished **sucks - a review.
I bought it on Steam when it first came out because I like city builders and this seemed up my alley, to a point. I tend to get bored with the minutia of things so it’s possible I just lost focus and couldn’t make it work, but as far I can tell **Banished **is not a game you win, it’s a game you endure. You build your town until fails, and it will fail. It’s less a city-building game and more a survive for as long as you can and then die game.
Sort of like This War of Mine, now that I think of it.
You just described, like, every single city-builder ever.
ETA: my cities in Skylines always hit a wall at some point. A population that they simply will not grow past so they end up stagnating.
Heh, actually “build until you fail” is how cities work in real life too so I guess that means the games are accurate simulations. 
Au contraire, mon frere. My version of Cities: Skylines is modded to the gills. Why, it’s so modded, it barely runs sometimes. I could fill every square inch of my map with nothing but fire houses and unique buildings and I’d do just fine.
I think you’ve just described every city builder, Jack Batty. Except Tropico and the Anno series, I don’t think any good city builders have a “win state” attached to them, just a state where you reach a stable system that is only then upset when you want to expand again. Banished can be pretty rough, but as long as you don’t expand too quickly, you can reach a state where you’re in that equilibrium.
Naw. I’ve 100%ed Banished, and that includes a “500 people after 200 years” achievement.
Now, Frostpunk I have not yet figured out the trick to. I think it may involve letting people die out in the ice.
Tropico 6 was just added to the new releases on Steam even though it’s not actually out yet. Must be coming soon, though.
For the first time in its history, El Presidente can rule over an archipelago.
Damn that looks good. And I have a vasectomycation coming up…
To kill some time I started playing Sim City 2000 on an abandonware site and the next thing I knew it was two hours later. Man that game was awesome. Every one since has been trying to replicate it.
24 years ago, I took SC2000 into work so I wouldn’t just sit around fiddling with Windows 3.1 when there was no work to do. Which was frequent.