The queue works for many use cases, but being able to queue away from yet-unbuilt districts would be great. In a scenario where you grab up some new territory (New World especially) and the cities aren't going to be relevant in the short term, it would be nice to just draw a district map that doesn't force you to come back and pick up your train of thought every 20 minutes, for each city. Having to do this is an understated reason for lategame feeling like End Turn Simulator, and since HK did a good job cutting down managerial overhead it may as well go all the way. Here are the mechanics:
1) This is a simple alternate mode in the UI, clicked into from the build pane.
2) In this Planning Mode, a sequence of districts can be set up so that a new city could be entirely planned from conception and then left to run.
3) All currently available districts can be placed, as well as a "?" placeholder district. Upon reaching the placeholder, the city will require the player to replace it with a different district in the plan (this is for future EQ placement). An EQ that isn't available due to era change gets replaced by the "?" as well.
4) Once the plan is set up, it sits in the main queue as a single item, "Expansion", so that it doesn't clog up the queue and lets you move it relative to other constructions easily. Single districts can also be queued, updating the plan automatically if needed.
5) UI-wise, Planning Mode is mostly the same as the regular UI except for the obvious placement restriction changes, and the yet-unplaced districts appear normally (and with their colored hexagons if you have that turned on) for readability.
I would love a "district planning" mode where I could hypothetically place down as many districts as I wanted to see how their adjacency bonuses work and the effects on city yields. Would be could if you could tick various infrastructures/technologies to see what effect that would have on current and future districts.
Sounds like the problem you want to solve is to not have to remember or draw on a napkin the city plan.
While I am against building out a city sim manager, I wonder why it's not possible to just queue up districts and their placement based on what is already in the queue.
Say I want to build out a layout of research districts, why not let me add those to the queue. When it's time to build the district is validated if it can be built and if not then building is blocked and the user is notified.
From the city management screen the districts that are added to the queue are displayed with some visual queues such as coloring or transparency to indicate they are planned for building but don't exist yet.
Removing districts from the queue could be solved by removing the last into the queue dequeued first, or adding logic to check all queue dependency and removing every other district that violates the placement rules.
It is a nice idea indeed, not sure how difficult could be to implement this
Ignoring all the bells and whistles I mentioned in OP, having it treat queued districts as anchors is simple enough. I did something similar in a mod (though that failed because of how the AI interacted with it). Dealing with the "incorrect" use-cases would be a pain, but most of those would be the user intentionally breaking it anyway (or stuff that already happens with the regular queue, ie a prereq district gets razed) so throwing the "invalid construction" and letting the player figure out how to fix it (worst comes to worst nuke the queue) would be acceptable. Maybe have the whole thing disabled by default and hide it in settings so new players don't misunderstand it.
The only problem I could see is that if you use a unfinished district as a anchor and then cancel the anchor the other district in the que could end up being bugged; either still set in your que and when it comes time make it, the game will jaut not build it like low stability and not tell you, if you automatically cancel it there is a chance it would still get stuck on the map and the area would be unbuild able, or the graphic would jaut be stuck on the map. Which is why you sometimes get glowing spots on the map when a battle is fought and the glowing spot is the encampment you need to take.
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