I'll definitely be keeping my eye on this, I just hope it turns out at least as good as SC4.
I don't remember specialized cities being that difficult really, you just had to be a bit careful with how you played them. If you wanted a small 'city' that was just some power plants to supply power to neighboring cities, you could just build a few and connect them to the neighbors, and then play the neighboring cities to purchase the power from them. Then you would only have to go back if you needed to build more plants there, and even collect the income for a bit, assuming you were bringing in enough income in order to cover any maintenance costs.
you could actually do specialized cities in simcity 4.. problem was you'd end up going bankrupt really fast in the cities that didn't produce anything.. but i use to use the money cheat so i could create them correctly.. have one block as all windmill power in the mountains. then the giant sections would be huge cities while the smaller ones were fields and industrial area's along the water. it was pretty cool but i lost my save file a while ago.
I don't remember specialized cities being that difficult really, you just had to be a bit careful with how you played them. If you wanted a small 'city' that was just some power plants to supply power to neighboring cities, you could just build a few and connect them to the neighbors, and then play the neighboring cities to purchase the power from them. Then you would only have to go back if you needed to build more plants there, and even collect the income for a bit, assuming you were bringing in enough income in order to cover any maintenance costs.