Startegy games in general are really lacking in terms of law as gameplay. One thing I'd really like to see is for a city builder to actually have zoning laws available, for stuff like minimum setbacks for properties, max building height, volume to surface ratio for skyscrappers, minimum parking space per property, there's tons of urban zoning laws that would really make a city unique but instead we're stuck with traffic sims having green-blue-yellow zoning.
As for GSG or other games, Frostpunk 2 showed how either the law system/parliament either removes player agency or can be easily bypassed. It's a tougher balance for larger scale strategy games.
I had a post long ago about the missing niche of political city-builders. The closest it comes is Tropico, which that isn't exactly balanced well to be hard (largely because it doesn't have CK2-like design!).* I had just read
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and was real interested in the story of Jim Williams' feud with the Jew he lived across from. Feud over the proper approach to historic preservation (in Savannah, GA), how Savannah and Charleston both came to be extremely well-preserved for almost opposite reasons. and the larger politics (muh Black folks) at stake in it.
And what I said was that there's a real missing hole for city-builders that have an element of history in them. Urban Empire kind of tried, it just wasn't any good from what the reviews say. Some other games are trying. But they all have this in that you're building from nothing at the start and end of whatever historical era the game is themed after. EVERY city is a planned city from the get-go, so it's very unnatural and boring unless you intentionally go out of your way to - very likely costing you efficiency - garden your city, phony it up like it has a past.
But preservation presents a great opportunity for strategic gameplay. Give the player some absolute hellhole, tell them to fix it, and then
put political constraints on what they can do that can be
played around by playing the political game. You can't just do whatever you want as a city executive/mayor! Charleston was a rich city that had a self-absorbed elite that was the last bastion of the traditional planter culture (over a century after they were destroyed as an economic class), with a very distinctive culture (more Caribbean than American) that had the kind of unity of purpose and social capital necessary to ram through the largest historic preservation district in the world. Savannah was a battlegrounds because the Jew wanted a broader campaign of preservation to rejuvenate the ghettos, which Williams believed would actually be a burden on them due to giving them homes they couldn't feasibly maintain. Williams went narrow and high quality, the Jew (Adler?) went broad and low quality. When Williams was charged with the murder of his gay lover (he was innocent IRL, and it went on to be a massive scandalous trial of the century thing for Georgia) Adler leveraged his friendship with the DA to persecute Williams as revenge for that and the time Williams flew a big ass swastika flag across from Adler's synagogue.
Well, I've thought about it as preservation, but it can be themed around anything that has a whiff of social issues. Campaign scenarios include (limiting this to the 20th and 21st Centuries):
Los Angeles in the lead up to the LA Riots
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans
Detroit as it collapses into abandoned homes
The Manhattan Project (Secret City) in Oak Ridge
Edit: The whole story of the TVA could be, on a large rural map, a scenario. I said Secret City because I was thinking of the "town where none of the locals know what's going on" deal, but it could as well be the story of the resistance to dam construction locally
The artificial Mob and Mormon origins of Las Vegas
The Summer of Love mass migration to San Francisco and drug epidemic
The contemporary economic inequality and sanitation and drug crisis of San Francisco
Giuliani's campaign to clean up New York City
Smedley Butler's bloody all-out war on bootleggers in Philadelphia
The utopian dreams (did not come to be) of Epcot or of Hershey
The Battle of Athens, TN
Dayton, OH's experiment with being one of the earliest cities to use city executives instead of mayors
Something themed after the horrific industrial nightmare worlds that are Northern cities (Cuyahoga River Fire, Centralia fire, inspiration from overseas like Bhopal and Chernobyl)
Aforementioned Charleston and Savannah
Edit: New York City's use of the Italian Mob in a campaign against German spies in the harbors
The fucked up story of the Cabrini-Green in Chicago
Red Summer and the First Red Scare
I actually had an idea for a Tropico clone (Tropico is better for simulating this than it is dictatorships), but West Virginia Mine Wars company towns
Death of towns in the High Plains in the Dust Bowl
*CK2 is sort of an unintentional implementation of selectorate theory:
CK2 is all about "keys to power" management. Tropico kind of cocks it up in that it mostly just uses the politics as flavoring, so you get this situation where factions mostly just want specific things done that you also want done... there's no meaningful fault lines for conflicts, no gameplay of having to constantly balance (as if your capabilities increase, so will the expectations of the factions) and prune with terror a coalition of insiders.
