There is (or was, I suppose) a vibrant and diverse community of SC4 modders. Really cool stuff to be found there.
[1] https://sc4devotion.com/namdoc/feature-guides/traffic-sim/tr...
I mean, just look into the level of detail he puts into his writeup on the pathfinding algos [1]. SC4 is a whole region simulator with multi-city economics in play. Runs in Linux on Wine. Best damned $20 I ever spent.
It's fairly early on, but it's a multiplayer SimCity like game. One of the express goals is to simulate individual people/families on up to markets and such. I think the project's ideals will resonate with you; the developer wanted a game where people could cooperate to manage a complex system, and learn about system dynamics through play, which is (I presume) the role SimCity played in their life.
https://github.com/citybound/citybound
Demo video: https://youtu.be/rJpTulYwAZc
It's architecture is also pretty interesting. tl;dr they use an actor architecture to seamless transitions between single and multiplayer.
Its like part of my brain lives in an alternate universe where some entire field of dynamic programming has flourished that we don't (or categorically couldn't) have here.
When I think of the fan spinning in Skylines I am transported to a memory of staring at an empty chunk of ground, watching the trees blow in the wind, and wondering if they really needed to be calculating this just right now.
There are tricks you can do with animation cycles where if all cycles are relatively prime, then the pattern only repeats every few minutes, hours, centuries. It's part of why we have 13 and 17 year cicadas. They align on a frequency of over 2 centuries, and they have near misses (appearing in successive years) around every 50 years (with a conspicuous 118 year respite in the middle that has me wondering about how public policy and cicadas work...)
You didn't explain how this observation fit into the rest of your comment, but if you're saying that putting two things on simple cycles is good enough to look acyclic to players, I don't think that's true. If you have an oak tree and a fir tree next to each other, animated in 13 second and 17 second cycles, and it takes four full minutes for the oak+fir system to repeat itself... people will still notice that the oak tree is on a 13 second cycle, and the fir tree is on a 17-second cycle. There's no rule that says you can only consider things in the context of everything else that might happen to be nearby.