OpenTTD is not a city builder.

OpenTTD graphics are just not even remotely comparable. It looked so ugly when I tried it that I couldn't bother to continue for more than 2 minutes. If graphics don't matter then maybe even drop openttd and play a text based graphic game. It will run smooth even on a raspberry pi.

I'm not a huge gamer, but I did spend 14 hours a day for a week playing this game once. Never been sucked in to a game like this. And even better if you can find the original music and graphics. The music is excellent, and will play in your dreams.

First time I played Transport Tycoon was on my 486, I got a demo of the original game on a floppy disk out of some PC game magazine. Looking back, it's amazing how much game play fit onto a 1.44MB floppy disk. I ended up purchasing the Deluxe version on a CDROM. I ripped the CD and have kept an image of it ever since, which came in handy when I found OpenTTD and wanted to use the original graphics and content. Chris Sawyer and the OpenTTD devs are legendary in my mind.

I was there when Transport Tycoon was new. Think I've had enough of it for now.

I run Stellaris on an aging i5-3750K and a somewhat newer Geforce GTX 1070Ti at 1080p and also think that the complaints about performace are overblown. I even leave the planet generation settings turned up fairly high (I know a lot of people online reduce them to like 0.25 for performance reasons). That's not to say I never have slowdowns, enormous doomstack on doomstack fleet battles in the endgame hurt the FPS, but they are fairly uncommon. Fighting the 4x strength crisis fleets are the one other time that the game tends to chug, but those tend to be fairly late as well.

That said, I don't have a ton of expansions installed and no mods. I have a strong suspicion that some mods are harder on performance than others, especially the over-the-top ones like Gigastructural Engineering.

And if you set them to low they'll last a 3-4 hour flight on a laptop? I strongly doubt it.

Ignoring all of the scientific evidence otherwise, there is not a chance you're actually parroting this nonsense without actually noticing a rather substantial difference when viewing something (say a movie) at 30fps versus 60+fps. It's literally night and day. Me and a few coworkers noticed the difference between 60 and 120 when upgrading phones recently, and that difference is much more nuanced than the difference between 30 and 60.

There is a HUGE difference between 30fps and 60fps games. Very noticable. I got used to 60fps so much, that I don't even touch 30fps anymore.

It's true that your eyes(or brain?) can get used to the 30fps after some time. But if you compare them side by side...

Assuming you can generate 24fps of "movie quality perfect images", but you can't.

Let's take motion blur as an example: It's a very expensive to do it as a real-time VFX - so we cheat and approximate it - that doesn't that look good most of the time - because we often have to cut too many corners and end up with a poor approximation.

You're generating very slow images that a computer believes is a facsimile of reality that, unfortunately, don't represent motion blur very well, so they might be "24fps", but they look wrong compared to reality, and you probably can't conscientiously tell what is wrong, just that something seems to be sightly off.

So it's easier instead to attack the problem from the other side, and generate (or frame generate, that's a thing now) and show 480fps "crisp images" and make human persistence of vision do actual motion blur for you.

Even when viewing a movie instead of playing a game there is a huge difference between the blurry mess that fills the screen every time there is motion at 24 FPS vs. the sharper details of higher framerates.

The crazy thing is people are actually trained to hate it. When you see smooth motion your brain goes "oh no, this is some cheaply shot camcorder shit, not a quality movie" even though what is really happening is the picture looks better than you expect.