Maybe you are reading too much into it, maybe you aren't

But in any case, I don't think I ever played on into the arco age. The game simply loses all appeal at that point in my view. The greatest thing about it for me is building a working infrastructure while carving out small microcosms, individualistic niches hidden in the city. With arcos, everything becomes the faceless same.

Agreed! I guess the reason for this is mostly that just having lots of money simply is not as fun (or at least as satisfying) as having an actually working and thriving city. Just take a look at the usual candidate for a million dollar ripp-off megalopolis and compare it to a carefully planed village with a future. Yes, the latter might be scraping by but simply seeing all those nice buildings and looking at the good health, education and wealth ratings feels a whole lot better and more motivating on the long run.

Maybe there is a lesson to be learned from this for real life too, maybe I am reading too much into it.

Actually, I think this is one of the few games where bugs and rule misuse don't matter all that much to me. In most games, I actually cannot resist taking shortcuts, abusing strange behaviour etc. But since optimization has never been a big goal when playing Sim City, it just never crosses my mind here.

Ah, I must have spent countless hours on creating the perfect city. How I tried to please everyone by putting up everything my citizens asked for. But it was always just a matter of years (sometimes months) until St. Bankrotti (how I almost always used to call my cities back then) lived up to its name and went broke.

Now the strange truth about this game is that the less you care about what people are saying and the more you just pull up taxable buildings, the more you will be swimming in money. A couple of years ago I almost broke the game by just making areas as large as I could afford, putting up a coal power plant and play the min-max-tax game. Things get even uglier when you get arcos. To fill them up forever just raise the taxes to 20% and for some strange reason everyone and his cats will flee into the arco.

Great game nevertheless, but like with so many things in life: Once everything is just about money (like when you have too few or too much) things are not just fun anymore.

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That screenshot shows a historically grown city. I usually follow the approach to leave some room between the power plants etc. And the first residential areas. Later, I will fill this space with industrial zones. To get started, I need some long pipes, though. That is what you see - and you also see there is nothing like that anymore in other directions, of course.

Water isn't necessary to start a city, and this is mentioned in the various help files and manuals multiple times throughout. From what I understand, it is absolutely required for high density zones and seems to boost low density ones via increased land value. The implication is that lower densities use wells.

...I think you may have too many pipes. Pipes actually affect a lot of squares around them, so it's generally considered a good idea to put them under the roads.

Feel free to share anything about Sim City 2000 (1994) here!