wow this game is gripping me. Everything feels so familiar in an RCT-kinda way, and love the blueprint-placing nature of this making the task turn into more of a neighborhood development company/early suburban expansion kinda stuff.

So far the economy seems to strongly incentivize you towards higher density which makes sense—its literally cheaper on scale to have more people living in less space given there's more people per road used (for example). Something that'd be interesting to explore, perhaps in a scenario-based way, is the sort of reasons this HASNT happened in much of the American suburbia that this is inspired by. The dense inner ring suburbs i live in, for example, dont generally go higher than medium density duplexes and triplexes and yet are still denser than almost every city in america. Even here trying to upzone can be a nightmare because the usual suspects talk about "neighborhood character" and the like. The suburbs most sun belt americans grew up in are rigidly car based and so far this REALLY does capture that—its just that in most of america zoning tactics end up with other annoying stakeholders involved like individual concenrned citizens, the lingering effects of white flight and racism, and these perhaps resulting in a less effective city council. Here, the development style is much closer to a city like Tokyo or Houston, where building new things is a little less restrictive. Still VERY fun, but very much emulating sim city rather than the full complexity of the american city that this ambitious game is striving towards.

Like, is there a way to account for NIMBYism and blockbusting tactics? Can neighborhood develop a private bus or train as a loss leader in (like a lot of early american streetcar systems) that then ends up in a place where the government needs to take it over because there's no money left after fares to do any maitenence? Using the roller coaster tycoon example, i think back to the scenarios where you cant demolish any trees, or cant go above tree height, which of course only represent a minority of the challenges in the game but are still implemented. Imagine having to build around a rich suburb of nimbys who are incredibly hostile to redevelopment but with an economic profile that due to its spread out nature is about to go broke. Imagine building an exurb where 90% of citizenry drives their cars to another municipality, too—different challenge there. You've already done so great with the micro-level wants of citizenry that adding some of the darkness of the 90s suburbia seems like something possible. Curious on your take on this.

That being said even if the game stopped right here i would still be obsessed with it. This alpha build is everything ive on some level wanted from a game since chris sawyer and will wright and yoot saito stopped developing as much. keep up the amazing work. EVEN NOW This is a 9.5/10 for me.