> Despite the name, Skylines is really a traffic management game more than anything else. Part of the fun of Skylines is just how cool your city looks.

Unfortunately, traffic management is the only part of the game that really holds up as a simulator.

Public services and pollution, in particular, are basically skeletons without any real depth to them, and they have considerably less depth than SC4. Cities: Skylines is mostly good as a) a traffic and transit simulator, and b) a sandbox game for using mods to create beautiful urban artwork. If you go to /r/CitiesSkylines or look at a number of YouTubers (I strongly recommend Infrastructurist), you'll see lots of gorgeous cities that were created by using mods like RICO, Move It!, and various forms of Anarchy (among several others) to plop down assets in ways that resemble real cities. An infinite money mod is, of course, a given. There's no real simulation going on here: you have a bunch of very talented, creative individuals using the game as a specialized canvas.

But let's talk a bit about just how public services and pollution are skeletons.

Public services are very simple: citizens want a service, and you plop down buildings that provide that service. What little depth they have comes from the traffic management sim: the service needs to be accessible, so either citizens need to be able to get to the buildings in a timely fashion, or the buildings need to be able to send their vehicles out to various parts of town in a timely fashion. If traffic flow gets bad enough that this fails to happen, citizens get upset. All you need to have effective public services is enough capacity + traffic flow for your citizens to make use of them.

There is no concept of range. If you put a school down in a city, children from all over the city will go there to get educated. If you have multiple schools, there is no correlation between where your kids live and where they go to school. Of course, there are mods that can help a little: you can easily find a mod that limits use of public services to the district they're planted in. But that's it.

Compare SimCity 4, on the other hand, where every building has a range, and each service has two funding sliders: one that controls effectiveness, and one that controls range (and you can override these sliders on a per-building basis, too). With range, you have to be careful to not let your buildings overlap too much, because then you're throwing away money. And you can overfund your services, but that's a hard choice: overfunding has diminishing returns and, more interestingly, can cause negative externalities. For example, overfunding your police can create a situation where police officers harass the community and thus make your citizens unhappy. No such complexity exists in Cities: Skylines. Nothing has externalities in Cities: Skylines. There's no disadvantage to throwing in more of everything. Well, except for water. I'll get to that later. And if you underfund your services in SC4, you have a chance to wind up with an actual, honest-to-goodness strike on your hands. And money often gets tight enough that you will periodically have to underfund something just to stay in the black, so you have to choose which service you can most afford a strike at. No strikes are in Cities: Skylines.

Education, too, is way too easy. In SimCity 4, developing an educated workforce that can support high-tech industry takes several generations of cultivating your citizenry. No such problem in Cities: Skylines, just throw down enough elementary schools, high schools, and universities, and you've got an educated workforce in no time! And you really want your workforce to be educated, too, because having an uneducated population means you're stuck with dirty industry, which sucks. The pollution is awful, and the jobs don't pay well, so your sims stay poor and live in slums.

Oh yeah, and there's basically no class stratification in Cities: Skylines. SC4 divides properties into low-wealth, medium-wealth, and high-wealth, which is determined by property values, with visually-distinct buildings at each position. This is a completely separate axis from building level, which mostly has to do with the size of your buildings, bounded by the density of your zoning (low density is levels 1-3, medium is 4-6, high is 7+). So slums look like slums, nice parts of town look nice, etc. Cities: Skylines just has building level. So in CS, your buildings will become bigger and nicer as you grow, but there's no such thing as "a poor neighborhood", "a middle-class neighborhood", or "a rich neighborhood", unlike in SC4.

Before I get to pollution, let's talk garbage. There are a number of garbage facilities in Cities: Skylines, including a recycling center introduced with the Green Cities expansion. The recycling center is just a strictly-better landfill. It does everything a landfill does, only more so. There is no reason to build landfills if you own Green Cities. In SimCity 4, on the other hand, they serve different purposes. In SC4, landfill zoning provides a place for your sims' trash to go, and a recycling center reduces the amount of trash your sims produce in the first place. Thus, you can't deal with garbage on just recycling centers alone. You still need landfills, but a recycling center will let you get away with zoning less landfill than you'd normally need. So you really want both recycling centers and landfills, just like in real life. But Colossal Order wanted people to buy Green Cities, so they made everything in that expansion completely overpowered and strictly better than what's in vanilla.

Pollution is easily-avoidable in Cities: Skylines to the point where it might as well not exist unless you screw up dramatically. Air pollution isn't even a thing at all. You can have all the dirty, smoggy factories you want, and your citizens won't care. Let's just say that, in SimCity 4, air pollution is a huge thing, and you'll be spending a good chunk of your game trying to mitigate it. What you do have in Cities: Skylines, though, is ground pollution. Dirty buildings pollute the ground, and if people live on polluted ground, they get sick and die. But ground pollution has a teeny-tiny radius, so it might as well not exist. Just don't build right next door to dirty industry or coal plants, and certainly don't bulldoze your dirty industry and coal plants and build residential where they used to be, and you're fine. I wish pollution was that simple in real life.

Water pollution is even more avoidable. You only have water pollution at all if you have a water pump downstream from a sewage outlet. This is trivially avoidable. It's one of the first things the tutorial hammers into you. Unless you're going out of your way to screw up, you won't have water pollution. But what if you do screw up? Well, if even the slightest bit of sewage gets in your water supply, your whole city undergoes a massive die-off. That's right, if you ever have nonzero water pollution, you might as well start a new city. Is there a way to mitigate it? Sure, build a water treatment plant! But the water treatment plant just lowers your water pollution, it doesn't take it all the way down to zero. And any nonzero amount of water pollution will kill your city, so you might as well just save your money. Oh, and this is literally the only thing a water treatment plant does, so unless you've screwed the pooch and killed your city, you will never have any reason to build one.