I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
That depends which of them, and the style you play it. I have played the Sims 2 for twenty years, and do not remember when was the last time I played some boring everyday life with a single family. I do things, like create huge family trees and play the entire neighborhood as one, tangling the relationships, and making drama and whatever I feel like. Murder mysteries, cults, monasteries, a nursing home for the elderly, fill big graveyards with a serial killer, build random stuff like an opera house or an art gallery, and run them as a businesses… Adding mods especially lets you play however you want. I even played a genuine Zombie Apocalypse scenario, with mods, that made the zombified sims npc’s, that would attack everyone on their own, and infect the attacked, who would then soon die and turn into another zombie.
I’m glad that you enjoy playing with it that way, I’ve also started to enjoy role-playing and story writing elements more as I get older.