In Sim City you only have a limited area on which to build your city. This leads to the player having to prioritize what to build. Also buildings cost money. In c2c cities do not have any kind of restrictions. You can (and should, I think) build (nearly) every building in every city.
How about making buildings take up space in the city? Let me explain.
Every city gets a "Building space" (BS) attribute, according to the following example (most likely needs serious thought and adjustments accordingly):
- Base: 10
- By population: +2 per city size increase (cumulative) (So city size 1: BS 12 size 2: BS 14 (+2) size 3: BS 18 (+4) size 4: BS 24 (+6) and so on)
- By technology: Certain techs could unlock more land to build, either by making more areas accessible, or by allowing more buildings on the same space, or by building vertically. Such techs should either add a fixed amount of extra space, or multiply the current BS by a fixed number.
The current building space number could be visible right under the numbers for how many wonders your city could build.
Now, every building in the game gets a size number attached to it. This number gets larger the more space the building takes up. Some examples to follow.
- Building size 0: Buildings not taking up city space (berry bushes, fishing boats, and such "buildings" that more represents represents other things/ideas, such as the Walkabout, Knowledge Inheritance and so on, or buildings built outside the city core, like farms, or all other things that are not buildings, like Road signs, Trail path and so on).
- Building size 1: The smallest type of building, like huts.
- Building size 2: Buildings that need more space to operate, like most early manufacturing facilities, like Stone Tools Workshop and Forge.
- Building size 3: This is where buildings need lots of room to operate, like Markets, Barracks.
- Building size 4-10: Really large constructions, like wonders, factories...
Some buildings could also scale in size depending on the size of the city (or possibly the total of all your empires city sizes). You need more factories to satisfy demand in larger cities, for example.
With this system in place, you need to really prioritize your cities. Not every city can produce everything anymore.
But why stop there? In addition to size, buildings of size 1 or above can also have an attribute that determines its use, like in Sim City: Residential, Commercial or Industrial. In this system, you could designate a percentage of the city BS to be allowed to build R/C/I buildings on. In a system like this, you could calculate total R building size divided by total C and I building size to get a number for the employed/unemployed. More jobs than population: some C/I buildings may stop operating, but the people are happy. More population than jobs: as more citizens are unemployed, the city gets a penalty to wealth (payments in social security) and an increase in crime and unhappiness and unhealthiness and possibly even riots. To reduce unemployment, build more C/I buildings, or raze some R buildings, forcing people to either move to another city, or to become Barbarian units, or possibly even by making them into Settlers.
If you want to get really advanced, you can define how many Sims live/operate in each building according to its size, at which point homes vs population is easy to calculate. You could also hard-code a priority number to buildings, so that if not all buildings can operate, the once with lowest priority gets shut down first.
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