https://store.steampowered.com/app/3334580/Steam_Revolution_The_Age_of_Rail/

It's more of a transport tycoon like game, but it's free, so if that's your cup of tea you could try it.

Shanty town just came out, sounds like you could like it.

https://www.gog.com/de/game/shantytown

If you’re not adverse to old games, try The Settlers 2. Both the gold edition and the 10 year anniversary edition are good (and despite being called “edition” are rather different).

The Settlers is a slow game, there’s no Zerg rush. It’s also cute and cosy - but with a surprising depth in economics and supply chains.

The campaigns have levels ranging from tiny to elaborate. Challenges range from simply exploring the map, over defending against an enemy, to managing limited supplies.

You may want to give an Anno game a try. Best recent one is Anno 1800, but Anno 2070, 1404 and 2205 are great as well. In these you manage population levels, needs and logistical chains instead of traffic.

Or maybe look into more survivaly city builders like Kingdoms&Castles, Nova Roma, Farthest Frontier or Banished.

If you want more puzzle than city builder then there's Terrascape or Dorfromantik.

Finally, you may enjoy Railgrade or Train Valley 2 - these are not city builders, but tycoon games with a mission structure, strict confines and puzzle mechanics.

Edit: Oh and forgot Ixion. Absolutely superb story based scifi space station builder. Really really nails the vibe.

Caesar 3 has different "levels" where you have different cities and have to meet different demands from Rome with them. If you play this game I highly, highly, highly recommend using the Augustus mod from the get-go to have modern quality of life features. Also look up some tutorial videos as there are some counter intuitive mechanics.

Its funny how City Skylines 2 completely destroyed my interest in that kind of a game... I used to like them. But even the meny was lagging in that game. Just completely unpolished turd of a game.

Against the storm sounds like a perfect fit. It's in a fantasy setting though, so it's quite different from Cities Skylines.

The idea is that you build a village, collect resources, and try to survive until you complete objectives. Once you're done, you earn some permanent progression and move on to the next area to build. Each zone has its own challenges and randomly generated resources.

Not as good as Against the Storm, but I like how Tropico games are more about building through challenges than just building.

Others have mentioned Tropico, but I like talking about Tropico so I recommend Tropico 6. Campaign missions have unique goals and conditions that can lead to interesting decisions, like the one where you can’t build houses, everyone lives in shacks, and I ended up going a dictator direction just to keep the populace in line.

Traffic is easy to manage, just don’t make four-way intersections (seriously, that’s it). Building choice and location are important because citizens have to travel from one place to another, so even if your clinic isn’t overwhelmed it may be good to build another far away so citizens don’t have to travel across the entire island to get there.

I could go on for a while, but it’s good, and Tropico 7 is coming out later this year so Tropico 6 will likely be pretty cheap next time it goes on sale.

banished is real good. it's a medieval village sim. it's also 6.50€ right now.

i see everyone recommending against the storm, banished is basically "what if that game was colorless, depressing and brutally realistic".

You're looking for Against the Storm.

It's a rogue-like city-builder with goals that you meet and complete in order to move on to the next set of unique challenges. You'll be faced with unique sets of challenges per biome, unique race-based sets of needs, and times events that need to be dealt with or their consequences will have to be mitigated.

Oxygen not included, timberborn, anno.

Another +1 for Against the Storm. Timberborn also released recently and I lost a good bit of time to it. Timberborn has the sandbox build with multiple layers, and problem solving since you have to control water flow during three seasons (Wet, drought, tainted water) and manage resources.

You might like Frostpunk

Terra Nil might be up your alley- You start in a barren landscape, you build structures to restore life to the earth. Once the land is healthy, you pack up all of your buildings, and fly them up to your spaceship, to try the same thing with the next area. It's more of a "puzzle" game than a sim, but it's fun, relaxed, and moves through different levels as they introduce new tech for different restoration projects.

I’ve been enjoying The Crust quite a bit. Timberborn. Frostpunk etc

Not sure if they fit your needs though

If you are OK with historical city-builders, the campaigns for Caesar III, Pharaoh and Zeus/Poseidon, are largely level-focused. They are available on GOG and there is a really nice modern engine for Caesar III.

Based on feedback and discussion that I've seen (I haven't tried it yet), Microlandia seems to mostly fit your request in a modern city-builder:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4094120/Microlandia/

Might also be worth checking out Urbek City Builder (also modern).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1411740/Urbek_City_Builder/

I have played UCB and it does have a bigger focus on neighbourhoods and types of commercial/industrial areas. I felt that the tutorial makes it seem like it's not a city-builder, it very much is and with it's own game design approach.

You can play it as a Metropolis city-builder too, but there can be some annoyances with this approach (I had to design blocks for certain things for space efficiency, some blocks are available in the guide section on steam).

Workers and Resources Soviet Republic is an automation simulator masquerading as a city builder.

The most played game right now on my Steam account is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, an automation game disguised as a city builder, with obscenely detailed mechanics. You don't buy buildings, you have to have functional construction industries to set them up. You don't magically draw colored lines to set up bus routes like in SimCity, you have to buy buses at the border one by one and then set up a maintenance schedule. You don't highlight a dark patch on the map and suddenly have a metallurgy industry like in Cities: Skylines, the fuck you don't, you need to set up a coal industry and rail transport over the course of thirty odd hours before you start cranking out steel. And that's without even considering food production, alcoholism management, pollution from the necessary chemicals industry, storage and handling of fresh meat, and of course, citizen loyalty to the Party. It's a fucking insane game by and for people who probably have to be insane themselves.

I wrote that in a post about my strange relationship with games and media in general in my blog a few weeks ago.

Definitely one of the most distinctly engrossing games I’ve ever played. Seriously. Your cities will be ugly as fuck because it’s genuinely difficult to progress.

Reading your post over again maybe it’s a bit on the extreme side and not what you’re asking for. This is the most extreme city management I’ve ever played. Your sewers have to flow downhill, citizens driving in personal cars is something that happens after like 300 hours, if you sell too much oil too fast you can make oil cheaper on the global market and lose money. I hate it, I’ve wasted my life on it. It’s great I want to play more.

Pharaoh and Cleopatra are great

If you are ok with factory ish games, I really liked the level based nature of "mindustry". Factorio is more "you have any space you need, nature bends to your will". And mindustry does some stuff where it's similar production chain puzzling, but you are hard restricted by space. Which improves the puzzling, because not all solutions will fit everywhere.

Otherwise I would also recommend against the storm.

I am not sure if it fits your bill, but when I am overwhelmed by my factorio mega base or tired of traffic in cities skyline I now switch to the recently released Sintopia. It scratches the build-optimising itch, but does so in rounds with a clear goal and a defined end. You can go endless and sandbox if you wish but I find it at the moment relaxing to know that after maximal 10 ish hours of avoiding the goal I can finish the run anytime and do a new one. And don’t actually have to fix everything.

It's not strictly a city-builder, but the PS2's Dark Cloud involved building cities to accommodate all of the inhabitants' requirements. Each city was like a puzzle, where you had to arrange things in a particular way (with some degree of freedom) to avoid conflicts.

Then there's action-RPG combat and dungeons that might not be your style. But it's a really great game. One of these days I really ought to play the sequel.

Trópico is sorta like this. I like it. You don't have to play evil, you can be benevolent.

Maybe try Transport Fever 2. You're not building a singular city. You're building a logistics chain. You gather resources from their nodes. Transport them to processors. Then transport them to cities. The cities grow when they get more goods. Then you transport people across cities to help them grow. That's the simplified version of it.

The cities grow themselves but you can influence the way they grow. You can lay the roads, trains, planes, and boats out to help cities go a certain way. On the surface that may sound like what you don't want, but that part of the game is so small compared to what you'll be doing most of the time, which is connecting lines to gather resources. That's the real puzzle of the game. Even on the big maps you'll feel like there's a limited amount of space. Then all of a sudden you have this spaghetti layout. You'll want to optimize it. You'll tinker with line options and layouts to maximize profits. Then you have to manage the whole fleet. Aging trucks and trains start losing money. Vehicles literally expire so you have to update them to newer models as time passes. Resource nodes and factories will go away and shift throughout a map. There's an always changing nature to the map and it keeps you on your toes.

It's a deep game. It's a modernized version of Transport Tycoon. If you want to try the retro version there's OpenTTD. I've sunk a good chunk of time into Transport Fever 2 and it's a much better game than Cities Skylines ever was.

Against the Storm?

Edit: lol, seems like everyone has suggested this one

Appreciate you asking this question. I've been on the hunt for something like this. I was thinking back to how much fun warcraft three was, which while it was a base builder, it's basically the same principle. But different levels, an actual story, etc..

A city builder or village builder following that track would be killer.

Mini Metro is a small, fun goal-based building game. You are given subway stations and must build lines between them, optimizing for different destination types, high passenger rate, etc.

Ixion is a bit more roguelike/RPG side of citybuilder sim but fits the bill

No ones mentioned Steamworld Build yet

Laysara: Summit Kingdom has a few unique twists on city building that sound similar to what you're looking for.

building within certain (spatial?) limitations

Cliff Empire might interest you but I don't remember if it had livability mechanic

solving problems or something

First Frostpunk

within certain (spatial?) limitations (...) a bit more focus on individual buildings and livability

Surviving Mars?

Not a city builder, but maybe Oxygen not Included would be your match?