I havent played such a game before.
Care to shed some light to a newbie?
Not played this but I've been playing another city builder, Cities XXL this week.
So you plan and build a city with different zones like residential, commercial & industrial. You manage the zones to be like high density (skyscrapers) or low density (small houses). They key to this is demand, I mean you can't go on building high density residential zones without first creating sufficient job zones like agricultural, industrial, manufacturing, retail. You got to balance it out.
To support the population you need to provide services like education/health/firestation/police which all costs money. And yeah the basic facilities like water, electricity, waste management.
Then to help the population go around, need to make transportation available by planning different kinds of roads (one way, highway, etc), bus , harbours, airports.
Also you can build many cities and trade between them, may be one of the city is good at office services, one of it is for agriculture and one for industries & providing water/electricity.
There is a lot more to it but one of the best things about Sim City 4 was awesome mod support, which Cites skylines also seems to have. I easily have over 200 hours on Sim City, If you are interested the game gets very addictive.