Honestly, just try Simcity 3000 or Simcity 4 (some community mods are mandatory). Simcity 3000 is easier to start imo.
Just remember to watch spending and make sure to always have new zones (primarily industrial and residential) until you hit 1950 or so.
Start at the edge of the map with an industrial district that goes parallel to the edge of the map.
Plan ahead with your transport structures (leave a compact corridor for a railway line) and zone locations.
Initially focus on surplus budget and growth (i.e. surplus budget mostly spent on expansion), but try and invest into education so that by 1950 you have a more educated populace.
I played a lot of Simcity 2000 (it was the first game I played), so for me the visual, size and quality of life upgrades in Simcity 3000 were always impressive.
Surprised it’s your GPU fans that are the loudest, I barely hear my 3080 and I regularly heard the CPU cooling fans, but then again I most play strategy games that heavily bottlenecked by CPU.
GPU fan noise is not something that’s easily fixable, unlike CPU cooling.
It’s a portable gaming device. It is in the same market.
You can play complex strategy games that require strong CPUs like Project Highrise, The Final Earth 2, Mega Mall Story 2 on mobile.
You won’t be able to run The Final Earth 2 even with the standard mobile population limit on a Switch because it uses an ancient CPU and it’s a quad core.
Don’t limit yourself by Nintendo PR and marketing. The gaming world (portable or otherwise) is not limited to Nintendo.
Portable devices using ARM CPU cores, even ones for ~$350, like the Xiaomi F1 released in 2018. It came with a new Snapdragon 845 SoC that included an Adreno 630 GPU.
It didn’t have the form factor of the Switch, I will give you that. My point is that the Switch had a very weak CPU when compared to similar devices even in the same price band for its time.
OP claimed the Steam Deck’s CPU was definitely worse than the Switch 2 (this was an explicit, categorical statement).
Considering the Switch’s history (Cortex A57 used in the OG Switch being three generation behind in 2017), it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the Switch 2 CPU is likely to be extremely weak from a gaming perspective (I never brought up compute or synthetic benchmarks).