I'm picturing a game where you take the role of an arcology planner and are given a certain number of ingame years to prove the viability of the concept as fully as possible. Game takes place on an isometric grid, where you build your arcology out of predefined modules such as living quarters, industries, power plants, greenhouses, etc. You have to manage things like the flow of resources between districts, transit, waste management. You can connect your arcology to the wider world to do things like import resources and export waste, and you will need to do so especially in the early game, but you also gain a growing ability to handle these things within your arcology as you expand its capabilities. Maybe also have the player have to deal with structural soundness and making sure the arcology doesn't collapse. Scoring would probably be based on population, land footprint (smaller is better), and self-sufficiency.
Hmm. Maybe after Guardian Cry.
This isn't what you're looking for, but your post reminded me of an old Minecraft modpack called Agrarian Skies 2. It was a skyblock modpack - the short version is that in Minecraft, "skyblock" is a game style where you have a few basic supplies and a tiny platform in the sky, with nothing but void below. The challenge is in creating and expanding a self-sustaining automated base. AG2 combined that with some mods that overhauled the hunger system. You can't just farm a field of potatoes and live off them like in vanilla. You need to grow a variety of crops to create a variety of meals. And your hunger drains a lot faster than in the vanilla game. The first hour or so of the game, you are constantly on the brink of stavation while you try to build up your farms without expending much energy.
AG2 involves making lots of tradeoff decisions. At the start do you use precious limited wood and stone and dirt to expand your farms to make sure you don't starve? Or do you build a mob grinder darkroom to gather rare but highly useful mob drops (enhanced by the Lootbags mod) and risk being on the brink of starvation for longer? Do you put your first precious and rare diamonds into a magic Builder's Wand that - when used properly - drastically increases the rate at which one manually gathers new resources? Or do you put them into Autonomous Activators that gather resources much more slowly but automatically, which frees you to work on other things while resources passively accumulate?
And it persists into the later game. You can breed bees to automatically create various resources and will have you swimming in even the rarest resources by end-game, but this path means putting enormous amounts of time and resources into the breeding and housing of the bees. You could build a nuclear reactor that basically solves your power problems and isn't actually complicated to build itself, but it does take a lot of resources to build it, and you'll need a renewable source of fissible fuel to power it. You can build an automated item storage and sorting system - but again it takes a ton of resources to do, and it also takes a lot of power to run. Do you build infinite-durability powered tools so that you no longer need to keep making iron or diamond tools? Or do you put those resources into automating your farms instead?