The real time agent simulation is easy for something like Banished, Foundation, Tropico, or Timberborn where your population isn’t going to get out of the low thousands if you even play it long enough to get there, and there’s no choice between walking/driving/any form of transit or any combination of them, and the network that path-finding is performed on is substantially simpler. There’s a lot of simulation going on behind the scenes in Skylines (which IMO is worth the performance hit), and the graphics are technically superior to most games in the city building genre. The main thing, though is just that Skylines is doing things that basically no other game does, or doing them at a scale that no other game does.
The real time agent simulation is easy for something like Banished, Foundation, Tropico, or Timberborn where your population isn’t going to get out of the low thousands if you even play it long enough to get there, and there’s no choice between walking/driving/any form of transit or any combination of them, and the network that path-finding is performed on is substantially simpler. There’s a lot of simulation going on behind the scenes in Skylines (which IMO is worth the performance hit), and the graphics are technically superior to most games in the city building genre. The main thing, though is just that Skylines is doing things that basically no other game does, or doing them at a scale that no other game does.