
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. 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.

Public services and pollution, in particular, are basically skeletons without any real depth to them, and they have considerably less depth than SC4. Unfortunately, traffic management is the only part of the game that really holds up as a simulator. Part of the fun of Skylines is just how cool your city looks. Despite the name, Skylines is really a traffic management game more than anything else.
