That's just it though, SimCity 5's problem is that it insisted on agent-based micro-simulation even though technical limitations would require these agents to be lobotomized.
In previous SimCity games simulation was performed on the macro scale - not on each citizen. Any micro-scale view was just a visualization of the macro simulation. This meant you couldn't follow a sim's car from home to work and back, but it also meant scalability and the freedom to have a proper simulation model rather than a grossly dumbed-down one.
Agent-based simulation is the correct implementation (i.e., closest to reality) technically, but only in a world where we have infinite CPU power. A macro-simulation like previous SimCity games would have meant far fewer corners cut and a much less buggy behavior that are the result of emergent negative agent-agent interactions.
To take your analogy - SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 use billboards and textures for fake smoke. SimCity 5 tries to go all-in and simulate the hydrodynamics of each particle - but has to cut so many corners to run that it doesn't even look like smoke anymore.
IIRC SC4 with expansion packs actually allowed you to run a much better microsimulation of a small handful of individual Sims whose movements and "thoughts" could be tracked in parallel to a macrosimulation that produced a more realistic simulation of commute patterns between buildings.
I don't judge a game by its pre-launch PR. I think it's better to judge a game for what it is, not for what it claims to be. If there is a mismatch between the PR representation of a game and the game itself then you have a problem with the PR, not with the game.
You may be right there's just no way to salvage the current SimCity 5 problems (if that's what you're implying), but I don't think the current issues ruin the game at all. For me the illusion mostly holds up and the pathfinding issues are mostly corner cases. So I don't think it's a fundamental problem with the game design and I think a few AI patches can make a world of difference.
(although, arguably, a macro-level simulation could have resulted in a much better SimCity because that would allow for more depth and larger city areas. And arguably a sim-level simulation is a bit of a gimmick that doesn't add enough to the game to justify the complexity and PR buzz, but that's a different issue)
I disagree heavily that the pathfinding issues are corner cases. You are guaranteed to run into them once your city reaches a large enough size. Looking at /r/simcity it seems like once you reach a level 3 city hall or so (I forget the population required for this) the bottlenecks start getting really bad and the bad agent AI makes them difficult to diagnose and repair.
If the only way you play is to build large, spread out suburbs full of low-density buildings then yeah, you can conceivably play the game without seeing the ill effects of the bad pathfinding.
But as soon as you even see your first high-density high-rise the whole thing starts to fall apart.
I don't think this is necessarily unfixable - but it does require a level of reimplementation that I don't think EA would be willing to make.
Once you hit a population of 50,000, you start to get bad traffic. Density then ramps up pretty quickly from there. Quite soon you'll have a population of 200,000, and the traffic is quite a lot worse, but not terribly bad.
The real horror comes when you start a region's great work. A significant number of people will leave the city in the mornings to work at the great work. If you are making a great work you are probably sending dozens of trucks with resources to it as well. The end result is you get easily 10x more vehicles leaving/entering the city. The queue to get in through the single lane off-ramp from the highway then ends up stretching all the way to the next city, and it takes a good 24 hours for the cars at the end to get in. It then ends up stabilizing, taking maybe 4-6 hours for someone to get into the city.
Also, a large number of cars 'just passing through' will use your city entrance as a 'quick' way to do a U-turn on the highway, blocking traffic even more.
In previous SimCity games simulation was performed on the macro scale - not on each citizen. Any micro-scale view was just a visualization of the macro simulation. This meant you couldn't follow a sim's car from home to work and back, but it also meant scalability and the freedom to have a proper simulation model rather than a grossly dumbed-down one.
Agent-based simulation is the correct implementation (i.e., closest to reality) technically, but only in a world where we have infinite CPU power. A macro-simulation like previous SimCity games would have meant far fewer corners cut and a much less buggy behavior that are the result of emergent negative agent-agent interactions.
To take your analogy - SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 use billboards and textures for fake smoke. SimCity 5 tries to go all-in and simulate the hydrodynamics of each particle - but has to cut so many corners to run that it doesn't even look like smoke anymore.