Transport Fever 2

[City_Borders 19]

Transport Fever 2 is a tycoon game that plays similarly to OTTd - you transport passengers and cargo and get money for it. On the process, cities slowly grow.

However, it also offers the tools to make it a visually appealing city builder as well. No, no management tools like health, education, hydro, etc. If you want this then this game is not for you. The only thing from SC4/CS that you have control over is transport - roads and public transport, where it is better than the latter, especially SC4. If you do not mind that - i.e. just want to focus on building and looking at your city, or just want to focus on the traffic aspect, then it is a considerable alternative to SC4/CS.

Like CS, TpF2 is a full 3D game. It is newer and has better graphics, better road and rail building tools, no ingame limits like segment/building limits, and much better public transport management tools. It is also less "blocky" than CS or SC4 as the minimum blocking square sizes are very small - i.e. a vanilla 1x1 house occupies over a dozen of these square blocks, unlike SC4/CS where they occupy the whole square. As result of this, downloadable buildings and roads come in all sorts of sizes.

The big improvement over its predecessor TpF 1, as a city builder, is that it now the game allows you to plop new towns in the game. This enables you to very quickly build sprawling cities - faster than CS will ever be. Ploppable buildings and other assets allow you to complement them.

No direct control over zoning - like its predecessor, by default all cities are built with a similar amout of RCI to each other. However, a mod allows you to change these values to any of your liking, so you can quickly plop new residential, commercial, and/or industrial neighborhoods, or a mixture of them. Mods also allow you to decrease the maximum cap of RCI per building, which is good if you want to buld big - this is an agent-based game like CS so performance is a big consideration.

The main disadvantage over SC4 or CS is that its mod base is much smaller, especially non-transportation methods. There are good options here and there though, enough to add variety and detail to your cities.

I made a guide for this if anyone is interested:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2538066706

Some images from one of my cities: