I hope they get perf down. The first game runs great on my M1 until we get to around 100K residents or so. That's not a huge number of people for a real world city, but I guess simulating traffic + pathfinding for 100K+ actors is a dicey proposition CPU-wise.

IIRC, SimCity 4 didn't have this issue but it sort of cheats by chopping the map up into multiple tiles in a region and only simulating a subset of your population. Which honestly seems acceptable to me.