I liked watching the civilians in the old Caesar games.
So it *can* be done well.
Oh, me too! I thought that was fun in Pharaoh, too. And I like watching engineers and so on in AI War. And I like the idea of being able to watch specific sims in the new SimCity even if their implementation was... [self edit].
The key difference, of course, being that these systems are all realtime and optional. So you can watch them when you want, watch many at once, and ignore them most of the time.
With SimCity 4 as my example, I was more trying to express that seeing human units actually isn't needed to do a robust citybuilding simulation.
(Not saying they should be back in this game.)
Whew.