The key thing to remember with CiM is it's not about giving you an wide open, empty map so you can start from scratch and build whatever you want. It's about starting with an existing city (flaws and limitations and all) and solving public transport problems with various types of transport: trams, busses, rail, subway, even ferries. And your focus is people. You aren't transporting goods or anything like that. The atmosphere is really charming: music, animations, art. The funny thing is the devs created a sequel that took it from a largely limited top down view to more of your standard 3D city builder view and just ruined it for me. Meanwhile, that would end up being the basis for the Cities series and the rest would be history. If there's a flaw, I think it's the fact that there is no easy way to get an at a glance view of people and trends. You can click on an individual person and find out about where they live, work, and some other traits which can help you figure out where you need to put stops or stations and what type of transportation they would favor (as well as figure out roughly what price to charge for someone like them). It would've been helpful to have a way to filter the view like the SimCity/Cities games to see more of that info. Because of that it can be a bit of a challenge to win scenarios but it's worth trying again to try your hand at another solution while enjoying the environments. The additional DLC packs give you more maps to work with so you can get more playtime out of the game. If you're looking for something open ended like SimCity or Cities, you might struggle with the limitations of this one. But if you're looking for a nice little public transport sim, with little people running around (rather than abstracts of people) and some really nice historical inspired maps, it's worth the pickup.
I don't know about you but for me, most of the games I play tend to be one-offs. You play it when it comes out, you beat the hell out of it then you eventually get bored and move on. Patrician 3 was one of those games that I came across (found it on the shelves of a GameStop by chance) and gave it a shot. I've been installing it and reinstalling it every time I upgrade my computer. There's no real story beyond you starting out in the mid 14th-century as a lowly trader in Northern Europe with a small ship and some money. The easiest way to start making money is to trade. You'll ply the waters of the North Sea bouncing around between cities doing the usual buy-low, sell-high strategy. But, before you think that'll become routine, keep in mind that the devs added some features that make it easier to automate the more monotonous parts of the game. You can hire a captain for any of your ships and once you do, you can set up trade routes where you have the ship hit specific cities and trade in whatever goods you want. This combined with a map view that makes it easy to quickly view the town's goods and prices if you have a ship or a trading office in the town (which you want to build as soon as you can afford to). You can set up those trading offices (you get one in your home port at the start of the game) to automatically buy up stock in whatever goods you want at certain prices. That way you can weather the price fluctuations that come from yours and the various AI traders doing business in those ports. Once the money is rolling in (set up a skins run from Reval or Riga back to Lubeck, Rostock and Gdansk with a backhaul of iron goods from Lubeck and you'll be making money in no time), you can think about building your own industries up. All of the goods have some building that manufactures it though not all towns support all goods. Still, you can build up certain industries to the point where you can supply yourself with goods you need to become a supplier of something, like iron goods or skins. Lastly, you can build up housing to help grow the town's population which increases the labor pool and production in the town (as well as demand for products that aren't made in town). And all this is just touching the surface. You can join a trader's guild and start exploring the Mediterranean region (not directly, you send missions with your ships). You can bribe, donate and party your way into the Mayor's seat (or even head of the Hanse which essentially governs the region) and deal with sieges and expanding the town. You can become a pirate and plunder and pillage ships or even towns. Or you can do what I like to do and hunt down the pirates out there. There's a whole mini-game to handle ship combat which takes some getting used to but can be very engaging and fun. It's also a slightly faster and cheaper way to build up your fleet as you can capture the ships and their cargo. Tip: load up on cutlasses for your crew, have a captain on your ship and make sure that captain's got a high fighting/combat ability...as long as you've got a few more sailors than the enemy, you'll capture every time. The simulation is very deep and can be very rewarding. You can get married and have kids though that has little effect on the game beyond maybe your reputation in town. You'll be able to piece together treasure maps from tips and get some loot. You can act as a lender and make money off other trader's loans. There's just so much in this game that you'd never expect to see. So, all in all, if you're a fan of tycoon games but really like deep simulations (none of this casual games crap), this is definitely worth a try. It still plays well on XP (for me), doesn't require a ton of graphics hardware, and will keep you on that "just a few minutes more" cycle that keeps me up late into the night.
