I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Have you tried Workers and Resources yet? It’s janky as heck but has some unique ideas that no other city builder does (like the real-time building).
Also I feel like Cities: Skylines 2 being a letdown is a pretty common opinion, Colossal Order has really gone downhill.
Yeah I tried them all. None of them come close to the magic of SimCity 4. They’re all scaled wrong, more like settlement builders or incorrect numbers representing population or worker counts. Janky like Workers and Resources. Songs of Syx is great but crawls to a halt on my system due to a memory leak after 30 minutes. The Transport Fever series is excellent but they’re not city builders. Some of them are good. Great even. None of them can fill the hole left behind by SimCity 4.
EDIT: A word.