Yes similar, but not entirely. SimCity is more macro-economics, I was thinking more about micro-economics, like the demand and supply within the city, similar to Factorio where one factory needs resources from another to work, but in this case prices would fluctuate depending on the supply and demand of certain resources within the city, then you could use these differences to make money for your sims, or create a business to fill an unsaturated market, for example producing sweaters in the winter to fill the clothing demand while having to repay a loan you took to begin the business without going bankrupt. This has always been what I wished I could do in the sims, Sims 3 came close with shop ownership, but it didn’t really simulate the accompanying economies.
Yes, this is something I’ve been wanting for a really long time, I’ve been playing around with different magic system implementations especially because of playing Arx Fatalis, trying to get a dynamic magic system that feels natural, it’s just really hard to get right and from experience, gesture based systems might seem fun, but they fall apart under certain circumstances and are limited to specific actions, so I’ve actually been considering different types of input systems and effects, for example graph based systems with multiple layers for construction and then for execution using key combos or hotkeys to combine sub graphs or just execute a single graph to perform actions or initialize causality based systems.