And yes, I did sketch a version that is even more procedurally generated, but itβs taking longer to get right than I thought
To the parent post: I have actually seen public interest groups bring petitions to a small city council with more signatures than there are residents of the city... but hopefully there's some countervailing force in this game too where local residents reject petitions that are driven by outside parties. In other words, not every signatory to a petition is a resident, and there's local resistance to regional causes. I guess this happens quite a bit more in the exurbs of major metropolitan areas.
That said, after playing it for a while something just felt "off". I like the idea of being involved in individual proposals, but there are too many immersion-breaking dialogs that come up (some of which just seem too irrelevant). And the text in them is sometimes "off" in a fashion that feels like it was written by AI (though I'm not sure if it was). The news articles and such in SimCity felt more hand-curated, concise and clever - thus more entertaining.
This is how real life works when when your proposed development doesn't fit the vision some random unaccountable bureaucrats and/or institutions you have to go through have for the vibe of the community.