The big difference between any Sim City game and Cities Skylines is Cities Skylines has an extremely in-depth traffic simulation that actually punishes bad road design and encourages non-car modes of transit. Meanwhile Sim City always made nods to traffic, it never bothered with actual per person routing where you can focus on tweaking a single intersection for hours trying to get it to flow nicely
The big difference between any Sim City game and Cities Skylines is Cities Skylines has an extremely in-depth traffic simulation that actually punishes bad road design and encourages non-car modes of transit. Meanwhile Sim City always made nods to traffic, it never bothered with actual per person routing where you can focus on tweaking a single intersection for hours trying to get it to flow nicely
One thing SimCity (except 2013) has is much better city management system. In C:S it feels almost trivial compared to SimCity.