What bothers me about Cities Skylines is that it initially was much better than existing city builders, and then it just... banked off that success, instead of continuing to improve.

The zoning system was slightly better than that of SimCity and the like. And then it never improved, and just always *stayed* slightly-better-but-still-pretty-terrible. And it's still there in the sequel, and still can't deal properly with non-grid city designs.

Same deal with traffic planning; the whole thing *continues* to be car-centric, as far as I can tell. Even in the sequel, a car-free city apparently completely breaks the internal game logic. Building roads is made trivial, but every other type of transport requires much more work (even though that doesn't match the reality of infrastructure construction!).

And like, a lot of the new stuff in the sequel basically just seems to be stuff that mods already fixed in the first one?

To me, Cities Skylines feels like a great example of something that stopped innovating as soon as it saw success.