RimWorld, I say! https://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/RimWorld/

The lead developer has a lot of great behind-the-scenes stuff too: https://youtu.be/VdqhHKjepiE

Cities: Skylines is the obvious answer; I believe the 2nd game is not as good so you might wanna go for the original.

I've been playing a lot of Transport Fever 2; it's more akin to Railroad/Transport Tycoon (or OpenTTD), focused on connecting industries and cities with trucks, trains, ships, trains, etc. It's quite easy to get started with and addictive though you do not build cities.

If you want something more hardcore and with tons of micromanagement I've heard good things of "Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic" it does look much more serious and hard to learn though, been meaning to try it but haven't had the time.

Cities Skylines, the Anno series, Timberborn, Frostpunk, etc. Broadly, they're called city builders. Many are available on Microsoft PC Game Pass, which can be combined with GeForce Now to allow you to play AAA games in a browser, streamed from Nvidia.

I maintain a community list of building and other engineering / building games, if it helps: https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/blo...

How old is the kid? My 7 year old just got into "Kingdoms and Castles" -- nothing special but it was simple enough for him to get started (with plenty of new dynamics to consider as he figured things out).

I recently finished Sid Meier's book and I really do think 90s-2000s were the peak for strategy PC gaming. I'd love to just give my son an airgapped Windows XP desktop with a bunch of games installed from that era.

Later versions of SimCity are available on Good Old Games with adaptations to let them run on recent versions of Windows.

Micropolis should work on modern systems

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/micropolis/

Check for a package for your OS if you don't want to build from source.

> Haven't been able to successfully run SimCity on modern hardware

I’m a bit surprised by this. Have you tried running the DOS version with DOSBox, or the SNES version with an SNES emulator?

https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimCity_1989

Going to assume you're talking about the 1989 game, there's a 2013 game too.

I remember Cities: Skylines being the SimCity successor - I haven't played it though!