I was planning on buying the New Sim City for a while now, I've never played a city building sim, but I really wanted to try it. 

Now that problems have plagued it's launch I'm not so sure. 

So what city building sim alternitives would you recommend? Should I go for an alternative? Or just wait til the servers are fixed.

I'm a beginner, so I don't want a super complex sim to start off with. 

I don't know of any building sim other than sim city

would be nice to know though

SimCity 4.

If you're a beginner, I recommend SimCity Creator. It's easy enough for Kindergartners to play it.

The Pharaoh or Zeus thematic city-building games are excellent. You can check them out on GOG.com. They were made by Impression Games, who don't exist any longer, unfortunately.

Not compatible with Windows 7, which he probably has.

Tropico is really good. 3 will be dirt cheap, 4 is more an expansion but probably still worth the extra £.

Another decent alternative is the latest Cities XL, but it won't hold a candle to SC so just buy that when they sort the servers out.

edit: Cities is complex and not noob friendly unless you want to spend hours on tutorials. Tropico has some complexity to it, but by comparison it's very simple and you should be able to learn the ins and outs of it in a playthrough.

Tropico 4 is 7. 49 right now on steam. Seems like a good deal. Go or no go?

NintendoPie, lol I don't need a super dumbed down version, I just don't want a super complex sim.

 it works for me

definitely go for it, even if you were getting SC right now anyway. I'd recommend going for the collectors bundle since it's only a little more expensive and the DLC is great. Base Tropico 4 lacks is a wide variety of buildings/services, but the DLC provides that (I admit it's mostly aesthetic though).

how about Anno 1404 ? it's quite a bit more centered around goods and building efficent manufacturing cycles, but in the end you do build up one or more cities (medieval/renaissance)

and it's a really fantastic game imo