Themistokles

grains of steel

icterus

orwellian

Adamant

America

Ishtar's gate

The strange paradox of being among the most hit by climate change and being among the ones doing the least to curb it. Yokohama, Japan

Wonderfully detailed and seamless!

As for the second one, it could easily be the subject of an entire dissertation and probably more. Buildings: there are A LOT of European buildings on the exchanges. Just search for 'European' and you will find pages of them. And then comes down to what you mean by European. You can search for things like "Hamburg", "Paris", "German", "Italian", "Scandinavian" etc. Another way is to go to the more local exchanges, which tend to have more local content. For instance, you will find lots of high-quality Polish-/Eastern Europe-style content at SimcityPolska, French content at ToutSimcities and German content at SimcityKurier. Regarding grids, I kind of disagree with you: There are a lot of grids in Europe, too, but only in certain areas. Contrary to American cities, which are all fairly contemporary, when building European cities you must think which age each neighbourhood would have been built, and what was already there, and what might have been added afterwards. Medieval neighbourhoods tend to be the most difficult because of the narrow streets and irregular angles (which are both a pain and to be good often have to be individually lotted), whereas 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century neighbourhoods are often different kinds of grids, which lend themselves well to SC4 building. Post-war neighbourhoods are often built in tree structures, however, with long, snaking arteries (can be built with wide curves and far sections) with neighbourhoods branching off them. For inspiration on European city building you could take a look at kbienu7's epic MD (over at SC4D) feyss' MD (link goes to SC4D but I think it is also available here at Simtropolis) and <shamelessselfpromotionmode: on>my own, (also over at SC4D)<shamelessselfpromotionmode: off>.

Life. The only thing we know about this game is its endpoint. Can we know anything?

The Egyptian Museum Baku, Azerbaijan

the transsiberian railway yokohama, japan

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie Bergen, Norway

End of the Trans-Siberian Railway Curitiba

Carthage Singapore