Standards have certainly changed over the years. This takes me straight back to 2003 when SimCity 4 came out, turned out to be an absolute resource hog, and I'd have been overjoyed with 20fps.
As the late Henry Petroski said: "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."
The 2013 version of SimCity was a disaster for all sorts of reasons, not least of which that they took game devs and just mysteriously expected them to know how to build and run online services, run databases etc. A friend of mine was working for another EA subsidiary and ended up being parachuted in to try to help save the day. One of his first contributions made a phenomenal difference: He enabled connection pooling to the database servers. They'd done the entirely understandable, naive, thing of just going with the client defaults.
Seeing what folks in the demoscene can do nowadays with such limited hardware makes modern software feel all the more puzzling. I mean, yes demoscene stuff isn't concerned about ease of development, security or integration. But it does leave you yearning, think about the possibilities of modern hardware if treated with care.
This is the precise reason I prefer embedded development. The challenge of fitting my entire application into a handful of kilobytes with just a KB or two of RAM is a lot of fun. I get to build a program that runs really fast on a very slow system.
It's a point of personal pride for me to really understand what the machine is and what it's doing. Programming this way is working with the machine rather than trying to beat it into submission like you do with high level languages.
It seems a lot of programmers just see the CPU as a black box, if they even think about it at all. I don't expect more than a couple percent of programmers would truly grok the modern x86 architecture, but if you stop to consider how the CPU actually executes your code, you might make better decisions.
In the same vein, very high level languages are a big part of the problem. It's so far abstracted from the hardware that you can't reason about how it will actually behave on any real machine. And then you also have an invisible iceberg of layer upon layer upon layer of abstraction and indirection and unknowable, unreadable code that there's no reasonable way to know that your line of code does what you think and nothing else.
Modern software practices are bad and we should all throw away our computers and go back to the 8086. Just throw away the entire field of programming and start again.
That's sort of the opposite of treating the hardware with care. It's all done with no allowances for varying hardware at all. This is like pining for a 70s text editor, while refusing to admit the world has moved beyond 7bit ASCII, and that stuff like unicode support isn't "optional".
Treated with care and 1000x the development time, budget etc.
Things are slow because we prefer ease of development for these extraordinarily large and complex projects we call video games.
I think the smart thing really is to work it all out at a high level and then target the slow, considered and expensive fixes to where they're really needed.
I'm not excusing obviously lazy development though, but I do think we need to remember how crazy the scope of newer games can be. Imagine showing MSFS2020 to someone from 10-15 years ago; much of the earth scanned in and available for you to fly over, of course there are perf hiccups.
I will fully concede that the trend of game makers releasing half-baked, poorly optimized games that are buggy and unplayable at launch is totally a thing and it is frustrating and we should demand better (though we keep buying so why would they stop?).
BUT.... the online game community is so insufferable and this Cities Skylines II launch is a great example of it. The game is not about 4k 120 fps gameplay. It is a simulation game that runs fairly well even on last gen's hardware if you drop SOME of the fidelity settings. But that's not the predominant discourse. If people can't play it at 4k out of the box on their overpriced 4090 then they take straight to the internet to complain (and mind you they have tried fiddling with exactly 0 knobs to make it runnable).
I am by no means making excuses for game makers who certainly share much of the blame for creating an environment of distrust among game fans. But the online discourse is just rage baiting and looking for anything to hate with minimal evidence or sometimes even outright lies. Makes me want to go into a cave and play my games without seeing any content or discussion about it.
> If people can't play it at 4k out of the box on their overpriced 4090 then they take straight to the internet to complain (and mind you they have tried fiddling with exactly 0 knobs to make it runnable).
The top comment contains this extract from an IGN review:
> I have a 13900k, 64GB of RAM, and a RTX 4090, playing on a 1440p ultrawide monitor. I got 35fps at the main menu and in game on a brand new map w/o building a single thing. Turning off motion blur and depth field increased this from 35 to 50fps. Not a single other graphics setting changed the performance at all. I turned off every single setting I could or set it to the lowest possible, and still only got 50fps.
Yes, I was addressing the broader discourse more generally, specifically Reddit. But you're right that the article did directly address this though I would say the tone and title of the article are incongruous with the simple fact that they were able to get the game to run well with minor tweaks.
I take issue with "only got 50fps". This is not Counter Strike or a game that demands 300fps. 50fps (if your 1% lows are within reason) is completely playable.
this take is not fair to the community. almost all games auto set graphics settings as per your hardware since many years now.
any good developer would test these configurations on common hardware combinations (at least on the popular GPUs) before shipping. other than maybe the graphics preset, why are we expected to change all the dials just to start the game from the menu?
in the crossplatform era, PC has been treated as second class citizen with optimization. forza motorsport is also another example where even having above their minimum requirements give a slideshow on launch, despite lowering all settings.
expecting every gamer on PC to be tinkerers is just a myopic take that does not help with development priorities.
It's predominantly people with strong opionions who actively partake in online communities (instead of just lurking), so the vitriol is to be expected.
Seems like this was likely from before the hotfix that was released this morning which has improvements for some of the more egregious issues mentioned like DOF, LOD, and global illumination: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/949230/view/37093367...
Still far from ideal but glad to see movement so quickly from the dev team and as has been mentioned the game is certainly playable albeit with some setting tweaks.
This is the week before go-live with a large customer. They've been doing lots of testing on their end (refreshing), and in the final stretch they found two glaring issues.
These two issues were glaringly, obviously wrong in core modules, and 100% reproducible.
Both were bad queries (static but parameterized). One resulted in an error from the DB server, and the other was a full join rather than filter by parameter (x=x vs x=:x), so spectacularly wrong results. Both were triggered by doing typical operations in our application.
Both issues had been in our code for many, many months, yet somehow the thousands of users we have across our several hundred customers somehow didn't report or experience these issues.
I fixed both issues in less than 15 minutes.
This isn't the first time. Sometimes I'm amazed how long such glaring issues manages to survive out in the wild amongst our customers.
Not saying they didn't know. Just saying that sometimes these things just happen.
I think they released it without having a discussion about how bad an impression poor default settings could make. With a few adjustments it looks great and is very playable on my 3080 at 4K even before the patch. Really big blunder for sure.
They announced in advance of launch that it would have these issues so not unexpected, guess they knew the issue but no time to add it into the final release yet.
I feel like this is not only a massive technical mess-up but also belies a deep misunderstanding of their customers. Most C:S fans were more excited for a more realistic traffic AI and mixed use zoning. Yet this experience was made unplayable by an attempt to make it look prettier.
As a C:S fan, I want realistic traffic, mixed zoning, and expect it to be prettier. I don't find it unplayable at all even when it is turning my PC into a space heater. Optimizations will come, and I'd rather be waiting for optimizations than features.
For me - not at all. I don't have a computer that meets their minimum system requirements. I really feel like the cycle of newer games requiring more hardware is pointless and wasteful. I wish publishers would focus on good game design and make their games accessible to people without high-powered gaming hardware.
> belies a deep misunderstanding of their customers. Most C:S fans were more excited for a more realistic traffic AI and mixed use zoning. Yet this experience was made unplayable by an attempt to make it look prettier.
That's not fair. This is a new engine that they probably expect to support for maybe as long as 10 or 15 years. As a AAA publisher, Paradox doesn't get to stylize behind indie-style aesthetics and needs to keep up with where their peers are headed. It's not aiming to be prettier just for the heck of it, but because it needs to maintain a certain mark to keep the franchise relevant.
Knowing Paradox, more rich gameplay enhancements probably are on the update and DLC agenda, and we can assume that their designers really care about that kind of stuff. But for AAA publishers like them, there are also other factor that matter and that may need to take priority.
I don't think that's true at all. Nothing else Paradox publishes has AAA graphics, and that's not the target audience for their games. The first Cities Skylines didn't beat Sim City because it had better graphics. It was because of gameplay. Since EA gave up on city sims, they don't even have peers, they're only competing with themselves.
I believe that lots of the pushback on the game are due to poor defaults. Lots of unnecessary graphics settings are enabled, leading to bad first time experiences. After disabling elements that most users won't care about (motion blur, volumetric clouds, global illumination) and following some tips from people online, I find no issue enjoying the game >60fps without my GPU fans screaming. (to be fair, using 7900x / 3090)
Yes the graphics need optimization, but they could have rolled out the release with good defaults and just admitted that high end graphics needed more time... but you can enjoy the game in the meantime! Instead, their steam reviews will remain marred.
Yay, finally a comment that is similar to my experience and isn't speculation or kneejerk reaction. I'm enjoying the game at 4k and it looks better than CS now that I've adjusted things.
They totally screwed up the default settings, not sure why as it seems like an unforced error.
It actually picked a resolution with a 24Hz refresh rate when it first loaded for me. I think their "virtual texturing" optimization also kicks off on first run, making the initial menu experience stuttery and slow.
They even wrote about it beforehand. They knew that there a few single settings that kill performance, which they wanted to address with a guide. Instead of changing the default settings accordingly, it seems! Madness, a completely self-inflicted launch disaster.
I'm getting ~60fps on my 4090 at 1440p. Haven't had any framerate issues. My GPU has been pinned at 100% and my temps are sky high, but the game is smooth. They definitely need to fix this, but it's not as dire for everyone as it's being made out to be.
The entire history of video cards has been "games that were hard on graphics cards"... leading to... a new generation of graphics cards that run the game with ease... leading to... a new generation of games. It's an ongoing battle.
I don't think that's accurate. There's tons of complaints and legit issues with performance for sure, but I don't think making up numbers (likely grossly exaggerated) is helpful.
I could have worded it better. Basically, we've been inundated with a bunch of pre-release players saying the game was basically unplayable on any GPU.
Post-launch, it's perfectly playable for a lot of people. Even on older cards. Performance is by no means good, but it's not a slideshow like everyone was worried it would be pre-release.
(fwiw I also tested this on a 2070. It wasn't great at 1440p but was performing just as well as my 4090 on 1080p)
It's strange to think about Consoles, PCs, and Ports. Consoles were nothing like PCs for a long time, so ports took actual effort and reduced cross-platform releases a bit. Then consoles started to look and act more like PCs and porting was relatively easier until the hardware started to diverge into the powerful, combined SoC systems we have now compared to the sturdy-but-separated PCs that haven't had a major form-factor change in 20 years.
So PC ports are less efficient because they don't have such continuous, low latency access to memory and the best solution (cheapest?) is usually to just dump everything into VRAM and require more memory. It's frustrating when you can buy a game on a PS5 and it plays great but the PC port needs at least double the specs to run well.
I guess PC gaming was kind of always expensive on the high end but the low end is just disappearing entirely when devs aren't allowed to spend time optimizing at all.
There have been so many Unity games which do not manage to throttle GPU usage. Battletech was another one where at the menu it would keep the GPU at 100%.
Not sure why devs allow this, but with Battletech it was a known issue that was never fully resolved.
You'll have to enable v-sync to limit framerate. I enable it always (or fps limit) because I don't like blasting my GPU at 100% which makes it hot and loud.
It's a Unity game. Why are people genuinely surprised that performance is absolute garbage? Both CS2 and KSP2 (kerbal) REQUIRE incredibly specific tuning that unity simply does not offer. The latter being rigid bodies at scale (which is semi impossible with a dedicated engine) and the former being "almost-factorio-level" low level cell processing. The graphics of both are second tier to that.
This is a tangent, but I think using the acronym CS2 is really confusing because now there's Counter Strike 2, which is a lot more popular than Cities Skyline 2.
Do you have any credibility to make this claim? I'm an actual game dev who has shipped lots of stuff in unity. Ive never worked on a AAA game but I'm pretty sure I could improve the performance in this game if given the time.
>Ive never worked on a AAA game but I'm pretty sure I could improve the performance in this game if given the time.
That's the neat part, I'm an actual game dev and I know you're never "given the time". I'm sure the talent here could and will fix many of these issues, but at the end of the day publishers want to ship something (especially in this economy).
Plenty of Unity games exist with acceptable performance. Hell, City Skylines 1 also used Unity and the performance only got bad with big cities, not new cities.
It's also odd to call out Unity as the issue when talking about CS:2 and KSP2, when both of their predecessors also used Unity and run better.
Humankind the Civ rip-off game made with Unity is unplayable. I bought it hoping it would be kinda like Cities Skylines 1 was to Civ IV, but I've never been able to finish a campaign. I either get frustrated with the performance and quit or the game runs out of memory and crashes. Steam won't give me a refund because I played too many hours. But it is a freaking simulation game, 2 hours is absolutely nothing on a decent sim. This is also how I learned about the 2 hour limit for refunds.
Unfortunately, I keep installing it every so often to see if anything has been fixed and nothing has been fixed. I've complete given up now. It was a waste of money and an even bigger waste of time.
That's probably because the game is made with a Unity Personal license, for small or cheap studios only. With other licenses the splash can be disabled.
One of the best games ever made, Outer Wilds, was done in Unity. Dyson Sphere Program is an excellent factorio style game that's very well optimized. I do not share your same trepidation on seeing the logo (doesn't move me in any direction, both some of the best and some truly awful games have been made with it).
Yeah, because it means the devs don't have a few thousand in the budget to support removing the logo, so of course they don't have the money to pay people to performance tune the game.
Simulators, especially ones of this size, are usually much more CPU intensive than GPU intensive. So a lot of reviews are obsessive about how beefy their GPU card is, but I suspect a lot of people have "top-heavy" rigs.
I play a lot of simulator games. Most of them are not paragons of optimization (well, except maybe Factorio). But these are not action games so FPS is not really something I personally optimize for and I don't necessarily understand the importance of benchmarking it against, like, Cyberpunk.
I wouldn't be surprised if Paragon's optimization fix will be just to nerf the depth-of-field.
The issues in question here surface even with an empty city, at higher populations the CPU will almost certainly become the issue but right now most of the complaints are unrelated to sim performance and it even seems like for most people the sim performs quite well even at higher populations.
The speed of your simulation in a game like this should have minimal impact on the framerate of the game. You can paint the screen 144 times a second, but only tick the simulation 10 times a second and get a much better experience than painting the screen and updating the simulation 20 times a second. Maybe your city runs slowly, but you can still look around at the various bits moving slowly.
Not trying to be rude, but this honestly reads like you don’t actually play simulation/4X games.
> Maybe your city runs slowly
If the simulation is running slow that has a much more detrimental on the quality of game play than jumping from 45 fps to 75 fps. Sure, it’s a simulation, but it’s primarily a game, not a weather model. And I say this as an early adopter of high hertz monitors and a frequent fps player. I absolutely need high frames and low input latency in a competitive PvP game, but in a strategy game, it’s much more important that the tick rate is fast enough that it’s interesting. A slow sim is boring, and it’s not just me, people complain about this all the time in (late game) Stellaris(another Paradox title).
If the issue is occuring even on the main menu and a completely new, bare level, that possibility can be safely eliminated. It's also highly doubtful that someone with a 4090 would have a CPU pitiful enough to excuse 20FPS.
They probably should have mentioned the CPU specs at least, but it's very easy to look at utilization while the game is running and see that it's GPU bound even with high-end video cards.
Not to mention that this is on an empty map, so there's very little simulation even happening yet, and the big FPS gains come from turning down GPU effects like DoF and motion blur.
If it has embarrassingly parallel tasks that it can dispatch to a massively parallel subsystem dedicated to solving embarrassingly parallel tasks, is that abuse or smart use of resources?
That being said most simulation games are usually memory-latency and memory-bandwidth limited, not compute limited.
Most people who have the money to invest in a 4090 are also going to invest in a beefy CPU. It's not a secret that CPUs are bottlenecks for games within the gaming community.
> Most of them are not paragons of optimization (well, except maybe Factorio). But these are not action games so FPS is not really something I personally optimize for and I don't necessarily understand the importance of benchmarking it against, like, Cyberpunk.
In many of these games, FPS is correlated with simulation speed. So when the fps starts to chug, the simulations starts going slower too.
if it was cpu bound because of world sim, changing the resolution would not improve the performance. also, there's no reason for the world to be that much more complicated than the first game.
The Tropico games are a perfectly pleasant place to start. They get progressively easier and more casual.
The Anno games are my all around favorite. 1404 is my favorite, but honestly 1800 is probably the best.
Banished spawned an entire genre unto itself even as it hasn't aged gracefully. These survival sims have a lot more "bite" to them. Try Planetbase for a more streamlined experience. Timberborn if you like physics. Also have heard good things about Farthest Frontier.
And then there's Frostpunk which is an all-around amazing experience. The theming and mood rivals any first-person cinematic shooter.
Sure it uses CPU but desktop CPUs that gamers use are beasts. Even if it’s a few years old mid level CPU it’s better than any console or mobile device by a long shot. They have dedicated tower or liquid coolers so they can push a lot of power into the chips
With sim games it's not purely about clock speed or TDP. The previous generation 5800X3D outperformed the newest chips in simulation games for a while thanks to it's very large cache.
Readit News
As the late Henry Petroski said: "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."
(Intel vs Microsoft CEOs)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
Henry Petroski probably said it first though
It's a point of personal pride for me to really understand what the machine is and what it's doing. Programming this way is working with the machine rather than trying to beat it into submission like you do with high level languages.
It seems a lot of programmers just see the CPU as a black box, if they even think about it at all. I don't expect more than a couple percent of programmers would truly grok the modern x86 architecture, but if you stop to consider how the CPU actually executes your code, you might make better decisions.
In the same vein, very high level languages are a big part of the problem. It's so far abstracted from the hardware that you can't reason about how it will actually behave on any real machine. And then you also have an invisible iceberg of layer upon layer upon layer of abstraction and indirection and unknowable, unreadable code that there's no reasonable way to know that your line of code does what you think and nothing else.
Modern software practices are bad and we should all throw away our computers and go back to the 8086. Just throw away the entire field of programming and start again.
Things are slow because we prefer ease of development for these extraordinarily large and complex projects we call video games.
I think the smart thing really is to work it all out at a high level and then target the slow, considered and expensive fixes to where they're really needed.
I'm not excusing obviously lazy development though, but I do think we need to remember how crazy the scope of newer games can be. Imagine showing MSFS2020 to someone from 10-15 years ago; much of the earth scanned in and available for you to fly over, of course there are perf hiccups.
Dead Comment
BUT.... the online game community is so insufferable and this Cities Skylines II launch is a great example of it. The game is not about 4k 120 fps gameplay. It is a simulation game that runs fairly well even on last gen's hardware if you drop SOME of the fidelity settings. But that's not the predominant discourse. If people can't play it at 4k out of the box on their overpriced 4090 then they take straight to the internet to complain (and mind you they have tried fiddling with exactly 0 knobs to make it runnable).
I am by no means making excuses for game makers who certainly share much of the blame for creating an environment of distrust among game fans. But the online discourse is just rage baiting and looking for anything to hate with minimal evidence or sometimes even outright lies. Makes me want to go into a cave and play my games without seeing any content or discussion about it.
The top comment contains this extract from an IGN review:
> I have a 13900k, 64GB of RAM, and a RTX 4090, playing on a 1440p ultrawide monitor. I got 35fps at the main menu and in game on a brand new map w/o building a single thing. Turning off motion blur and depth field increased this from 35 to 50fps. Not a single other graphics setting changed the performance at all. I turned off every single setting I could or set it to the lowest possible, and still only got 50fps.
I take issue with "only got 50fps". This is not Counter Strike or a game that demands 300fps. 50fps (if your 1% lows are within reason) is completely playable.
any good developer would test these configurations on common hardware combinations (at least on the popular GPUs) before shipping. other than maybe the graphics preset, why are we expected to change all the dials just to start the game from the menu?
in the crossplatform era, PC has been treated as second class citizen with optimization. forza motorsport is also another example where even having above their minimum requirements give a slideshow on launch, despite lowering all settings.
expecting every gamer on PC to be tinkerers is just a myopic take that does not help with development priorities.
It’s an interesting thought that, given the perfect software, one might run Fallout 4 on a Radeon HD 5750 or Cities Skylines on a Pentium 4.
Still far from ideal but glad to see movement so quickly from the dev team and as has been mentioned the game is certainly playable albeit with some setting tweaks.
These two issues were glaringly, obviously wrong in core modules, and 100% reproducible.
Both were bad queries (static but parameterized). One resulted in an error from the DB server, and the other was a full join rather than filter by parameter (x=x vs x=:x), so spectacularly wrong results. Both were triggered by doing typical operations in our application.
Both issues had been in our code for many, many months, yet somehow the thousands of users we have across our several hundred customers somehow didn't report or experience these issues.
I fixed both issues in less than 15 minutes.
This isn't the first time. Sometimes I'm amazed how long such glaring issues manages to survive out in the wild amongst our customers.
Not saying they didn't know. Just saying that sometimes these things just happen.
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As someone that has played C:S 8 years ago and last year, I'll tell you, not really, at least, not from people like paradox.
It runs fine but it is ugly. Still enjoying it for now, hoping they fix it before my cities get too big.
That's not fair. This is a new engine that they probably expect to support for maybe as long as 10 or 15 years. As a AAA publisher, Paradox doesn't get to stylize behind indie-style aesthetics and needs to keep up with where their peers are headed. It's not aiming to be prettier just for the heck of it, but because it needs to maintain a certain mark to keep the franchise relevant.
Knowing Paradox, more rich gameplay enhancements probably are on the update and DLC agenda, and we can assume that their designers really care about that kind of stuff. But for AAA publishers like them, there are also other factor that matter and that may need to take priority.
That said, what a f'd up and premature launch!
Yes the graphics need optimization, but they could have rolled out the release with good defaults and just admitted that high end graphics needed more time... but you can enjoy the game in the meantime! Instead, their steam reviews will remain marred.
You can see why the 99% of customers who have much less powerful hardware might consider the situation dire.
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I don't think that's accurate. There's tons of complaints and legit issues with performance for sure, but I don't think making up numbers (likely grossly exaggerated) is helpful.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17fsdx9/hav...
> it's not as dire for everyone as it's being made out to be
I don't have the game but your first point makes it sound rather dire, especially for a city-building game, does it not?
Post-launch, it's perfectly playable for a lot of people. Even on older cards. Performance is by no means good, but it's not a slideshow like everyone was worried it would be pre-release.
(fwiw I also tested this on a 2070. It wasn't great at 1440p but was performing just as well as my 4090 on 1080p)
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I hate modern AAA PC gaming so much.
So PC ports are less efficient because they don't have such continuous, low latency access to memory and the best solution (cheapest?) is usually to just dump everything into VRAM and require more memory. It's frustrating when you can buy a game on a PS5 and it plays great but the PC port needs at least double the specs to run well.
I guess PC gaming was kind of always expensive on the high end but the low end is just disappearing entirely when devs aren't allowed to spend time optimizing at all.
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Not sure why devs allow this, but with Battletech it was a known issue that was never fully resolved.
But no, lets use Unity...
Edit: I got former and latter mixed up.
I'm pretty sure it's not Unity's fault.
That's the neat part, I'm an actual game dev and I know you're never "given the time". I'm sure the talent here could and will fix many of these issues, but at the end of the day publishers want to ship something (especially in this economy).
It's also odd to call out Unity as the issue when talking about CS:2 and KSP2, when both of their predecessors also used Unity and run better.
If that isn't damning with faint praise, I don't know what is.
Unfortunately, I keep installing it every so often to see if anything has been fixed and nothing has been fixed. I've complete given up now. It was a waste of money and an even bigger waste of time.
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/PlayerSettings.Spla...
This selective limitation has probably had a significant negative effect on Unity's reputation.
That logo was the dumbest idea ever.
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Simulators, especially ones of this size, are usually much more CPU intensive than GPU intensive. So a lot of reviews are obsessive about how beefy their GPU card is, but I suspect a lot of people have "top-heavy" rigs.
I play a lot of simulator games. Most of them are not paragons of optimization (well, except maybe Factorio). But these are not action games so FPS is not really something I personally optimize for and I don't necessarily understand the importance of benchmarking it against, like, Cyberpunk.
I wouldn't be surprised if Paragon's optimization fix will be just to nerf the depth-of-field.
A city sim could be made massively more performant using a data oriented architecture like Unity DOTS or any other ECS style engine
> Maybe your city runs slowly
If the simulation is running slow that has a much more detrimental on the quality of game play than jumping from 45 fps to 75 fps. Sure, it’s a simulation, but it’s primarily a game, not a weather model. And I say this as an early adopter of high hertz monitors and a frequent fps player. I absolutely need high frames and low input latency in a competitive PvP game, but in a strategy game, it’s much more important that the tick rate is fast enough that it’s interesting. A slow sim is boring, and it’s not just me, people complain about this all the time in (late game) Stellaris(another Paradox title).
Not to mention that this is on an empty map, so there's very little simulation even happening yet, and the big FPS gains come from turning down GPU effects like DoF and motion blur.
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That being said most simulation games are usually memory-latency and memory-bandwidth limited, not compute limited.
In many of these games, FPS is correlated with simulation speed. So when the fps starts to chug, the simulations starts going slower too.
The Anno games are my all around favorite. 1404 is my favorite, but honestly 1800 is probably the best.
Banished spawned an entire genre unto itself even as it hasn't aged gracefully. These survival sims have a lot more "bite" to them. Try Planetbase for a more streamlined experience. Timberborn if you like physics. Also have heard good things about Farthest Frontier.
And then there's Frostpunk which is an all-around amazing experience. The theming and mood rivals any first-person cinematic shooter.
Over the last 10 years, my favorite simulation games have been Factorio, Tropico (4 and 6), OpenTTD, and Two-point Hospital.
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