Recommend me a beginner city builder

I have and tried Townscaper. It was nice for like 10 minutes, but then it lacked any kind of objective for me to keep me hooked. Clicking together houses for the sake of clicking is not what I consider entertaining.

Islanders has little to no story and is mostly a puzzle game, yes. I do like it, but if you want a game where you start small and end up building a sprawling city, this is not it. You're always on small islands and the challenge becomes fitting the most profitable buildings into the small space you're given.

No story at all, and it's true you can see it as having a puzzle side to it, but certainly not in the same way as a pure puzzler like Viking Islands. It's not like you're ever looking for "the solution" - definitely more like strategic decision making, rather than puzzle solving. And it's by no means just an abstract puzzle game that happens to be presented with the visuals of a citybuilder - it keeps the most fundamental aspects of city builder games, but just reframes them.

In a city builder, you have to be careful where you place homes or businesses which will interact. Things like woodcutters being near trees, foresters being there to replenish the trees, fishers being close to water and also markets, markets being close to homes and also storage buildings - all that kind of thing. In a city builder, if your placement is off, it usually means that accomplishing anything becomes harder and will take longer. In Islanders, if your placement is off, it means you get fewer points as a reward for the placement, and you may have thrown away potential points in future turns. In the early game it is very forgiving, but as things go on, if you don't get enough points, you can't unlock any more buildings to place, you can't progress to any further islands, and you have to start afresh.

But - you never have to wait for anyone to do anything. You never have to sit back and watch people slowly walking, one to cut the tree, then another to come and carry the log, then another to cut it into a plank, then another to carry it to the building site, where you wait for the builders to arrive (hopefully you have enough people assigned to be builders. And they haven't all gone to bed. Or retired. Or died.) before you can finally finish building something. You don't have to manage or keep an eye on dozens of statistics or resources. You never have to wait while your population takes an eternity to increase, or worse, helplessly watch your community slowly but inevitably die. For some (myself included), all that can be half the fun of city builders - but I really appreciate this refined-down version too, it's so well done.

It is enormously chill, and hugely charming and aesthetically pleasing - and at the same time, you can apply some deeply satisfying strategic thinking, to whatever depth suits you.

I have quite some experience with city builders, so it's difficult for me to judge if a game will be beginner friendly.
But I am glad there was at least 1 of my suggestions that looked interesting to you.

I hope you find a game that fits your criteria and perhaps when you get more experienced, you can have a look at my other suggestions again :)

it might be slow at the beginning because you have less workers and resources but in tropico at least if i remember well you can just pay (in game money of course) to speed up or complete buildings, so if you play wisely and make enough money there is no waiting.

yeah, i played Endzone myself, was bored after some hours, plus your city is getting massive huge and you're looking all the time, where to build your stuff next, like in Anno, like a puzzle where you're looking for the best spot to place your buildings

I also own https://store.steampowered.com/app/684450/Surviving_the_Aftermath/ flying around on my backlog, never had the time to test it, but i've seen streams with it and i think it's the better post-apocalyptic citybuilder and it's from Paradox, who is known for deep mechanics, so maybe not what you're looking for

Cloud Gardens can be a 0th step - its almost entirely about positions. What kind of plant you want (different energy costs, different growing patter) and how you place items so their zone of effect affects and grows the most possible plants. Not much of a challenge and your main goal is to grow/harvest a set amount of energy on every level. But if you want to scratch the itch of placing stuff and look at things change, it can work :P

ive personally played pocket city and can assure you its not overwhelming at all. its mobile so it cant be complex

its just plopping down zoning making sure you have power and emergency services and balancing 3 meters for your zoning. it looks more complex than it actually is

Yeah I'm waiting for the final release as well. Good thing you can get it cheaper if you have Grim Dawn.

There is Kingdoms Reborn which is also an EA title and it also looks promising. :)

Thanks for the suggestions, but I've thought about buying TF2 several times, and I keep thinking I haven't played the first one enough :(
I haven't tried OpenTTD, and if I'm not mistaken the Railway Empire has been given at some point by Epic. But I'd like to play TF again before trying another one that has trains.

About the signals, I had seen some gameplay, and almost everyone was struggling to understand them, so I made all the tracks one direction only or one train only. Fewer stops, more money. :)