Engine for simulation game such as SIM CITY etc.

I would like to make a game like SIM CITY, but don't know which game engine is better for this.
I use Irrlicht for a year and it do good jobs for grahpics, but not enough for games! (It's a Graphics engine though)
And I am considering Torque game engine, I heard that it's full functional and not expensive!
But I still don't know much about Torque. I wonder what kinds of games it could produce and have produced sucessfully. And would it be suitable for making games such as SIM CITY?

If you´re not able to make Sim City with Irrlicht, you will probably not be able to do it with any other engine either. What do you expect from an engine? No engine will do all of the dirty work for you.

Torque may do more dirty work than Irrlicht however - its got a lot more love. Although since Torque started as the engine for a shooter, I doubt it has much that will make sim <whatever> much easier. Check out the Torque forums, search for topics about doing simulations in it, and see what comes up.

Considering that the point most interesting (and most sophisticated) in a simulation are the actually simulated mechanics, I doubt there is a preexisting freeware engine designed for doing this. Think about it, the mechanics of a simulation are actually the reason why people play this kind of game, so they should be kinda unique, and not premade.

What keeps you from getting dirty and writing these all by yourself, using preexisting frameworks for things like user input, audio, and visuals ?

Cheers,
- Wernaeh

My distro of Linux came with a clone of SimCity called LinCity. You might want to check that out. It's probably open-source.