I'm having a nice time with my second city, Funkingrad.

The game's definitely a little fiddly, but I'm enjoying taking my time to get the city just how I want it, even if that means doing a lot of zoning in pieces so the buildings I want come in. It's definitely possible to get a nice density gradient if you're careful about forcing the smaller footprint medium density stuff. I've also been going very slowly, trying to have a naturalistic progression. I'm not stoked on how very large some of the ploppables are, especially since a lot just have extensive landscaping padding their footprint.

One nice touch is I think the day/night cycle might be latitude based, the lakes map I'm playing on, presumably based on a location in Finland, has really extreme variation between summer and winter daylight hours. Also for some reason the rain seems to blow sideways on this map like all of the time. I think that might be because it has strong winds.