

I hate to have to point this out to you, but time limits in real life are also based on developer whims, and nobody here had a say in that. Giving yourself time to complete a task doesn’t change the end limit, it just changes when you start… which is also equally applicable in games. Your logic doesn’t really pan out when you think it through.
I think that’s probably a fairly uncontroversial opinion. In the city-builder genre, Lethis: Path of Progress aimed to be the definitive city-building game of its time, hoping to match the peaks of Caesar and Pharaoh in the city-builder heyday. Instead, Lethis ended up being a huge flop, precisely because it slavishly copied the mechanics of Caesar without understanding that games as a whole have evolved since then.
Lethis lacked certain quality of life features that now feel obvious and baseline. What’s sad is that these features had already evolved towards the tail end of the city-builder heyday, in games such as Children of the Nile, and now feel glaringly obvious by their omission. Other city-builders that haven’t been so tied to the classics have seen more success (although there’s been no true breakout hits, sadly, no great renaissance in the genre).