Not sure if it’d quite qualify as “city builder”. I’d call it “base builder”. But since others mention them:

• Dwarf Fortress
• Rimworld
• Oxygen Not Included

The above games focus on the interactions of various things you build. They have a very high degree of replayability. Dwarf Fortress has a very high bar to entry, but for all of them, you’re going to be reading wikis and spending a lot of time understanding mechanics. I think that they all give very good value for money.

• Cities: Skylines (the original). It’s not bad. It’s quite expensive, if you’re going to buy a lot of the DLC – it’s a typical Paradox game, where the cost of the base game isn’t a large chunk of the overall price, where there is a lot of not-cheap DLC that really adds up. It currently has a lot of its content on sale on Steam, and even on sale, a purchase of all of it is $250. But…there’s a lot of neat stuff there. It’s one of the few relatively-modern citybuilders. It has curved roads. I don’t care that much about this – and I think that the focus on graphics was a major contributing factor to Cities: Skylines II doing poorly – but it is relatively-pretty.

• Sim City 4. It’s not new, but it should still be perfectly-playable. I still don’t feel that there’s a game series that has really replaced the Sim City series.

• The Tropico series. This really hasn’t changed all that much (other than Tropico 2). I don’t think I’ve played Tropico 6, but I’d probably recommend that as just being the latest in the series. It looks like they pulled the campaign from the latest, which is basically fine from my standpoint. More focus on individuals. A lot of the city-builder genre feels like of Star-Trek-y, kind of a focus on creating a utopian society, so this focus on running a banana republic can be a refreshing change thematically.

• Lincity-NG. Not technically the best, but it’s free and open-source, which may appeal. Focus mostly on dealing with freight congestion and achieving sustainability, which is a significant shift from most of the genre in terms of goals.

I have been playing Manor Lords recently. It is a medieval city builder like Banished, but with fighting battles for land, etc. The game is still in early development though. Its a one man indie developer, or as so I’ve heard.

Currently surviving mars

I agree with most of the suggestions here, and I’ll also throw out Tropico 6. It’s one of the few coty builders outside of Frostpunk where the soundtrack actively pulls me into the experience. It’s also fun building up an island balancing between investing in economic growth, citizen happiness to get reelected, or military/oppression methods so you don’t have to get elected.

Timberborn! It’s a city builder about beavers, the primary conceit is that there are periodic droughts that can and will kill all your beavers if you haven’t saved enough water.

Anno 1800, love working with the supply chain.

I play a lot of random city builders and enjoyed most of what’s already listed by others here.

Haven’t seen these ones mentioned yet (I think), but you could check out these to see if any tickle your fancy:

Modern:

• Haven Dock

Prehistoric:

• Dawn of Man

Casual:

• ISLANDERS
• Microtown

Fantasy:

• Founders’ Fortune
• Airborne Kingdom
• The Wandering Village
• Fabledom
• Noble Fates

Medieval:

• dotAGE
• Foundation
• Going Medieval
• Farthest Frontier
• Kingdoms Reborn
• Settlement Survival
• Clanfolk

Sci-fi:

• Cliff Empire
• Space Haven
• IXION
• Stranded: Alien Dawn

• Ostriv
• Banished
• Surving the Aftermath
• Frostpunk
• Planetbase

Smaller scale than Cities Skylines and also have other gameplay mechanics but that’s how I like it.

Simutrans is quite interesting, although it’s probably closer to a Transport Tycoon than a SimCity. Otherwise I tend to go for SimCity 3000.

I still play SimCity sometimes. The SNES version. There’s something beautiful on slowly building your city, solving problems that arrive, and when you’re don… oh wait you’re never done! (Not even with the Mario statue.)

More into colony sim territory: Oxygen not Included, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld. In special I’ve been playing the later quite a bit (1.4 version, up to Biotech), selectively breeding colonists to get superpawns.

Farthest Frontier.

Its got crop rotation!

songs of syx deserves a mention. You get people to watch too. It seems quite fun, but I’ve only played it for 10h so far.

Factorio without a doubt, but I’m not sure it’s really a city I built more of a satellite factory vibe.

Ostriv, it is made by a single Ukrainian developer. Been working on it since before the war. Nothing brings about as much of a sense of tranquility and peace. Just you and your slowly growing and living XVIII c. village.

I’m really very much not a City builder guy so grain of salt here: I really enjoyed Banished.

I dislike the scale of other games- in stuff like Cities Skylines I tend to get overwhelmed by how much is going on and everything I need to make work together. So I guess it makes sense that I prefer a village builder over a city builder lol

I really love Caesar III, nostalgia plays a role, but I just like it overall.

Nebuchadnezzar (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1157220/Nebuchadnezzar/) seems to be a nice recent game in the same style. It seems promising, but not “there yet” compared to C3 and Pharaoh.