what is the best way to make a city live?

so far I got a city and what I call nodes distributed around the city.With the idea being that these would be each run by either the government , corporations , shops , blocks so far.

I'm leaning towards having each node a set number of agents(we'll call them agents for now).That go on missions against each other and the player if he gets involved.the player can go on missions for nodes to.hopefully missions would be naturally created by the aggregation.

The idea being that the city runs without the player.but the player can influence any of these.maybe even special people who act as little mobile nodes working for them selves.

now I could do this with random targets our with diplomatic numbers maybe even products and deals between nodes.

setting is kind of shadowrun like.

should I not worry about making the background workings to complicated?
any other ideas on how to do this?
suggestions?

Re: Level of interaction

Quote:

should I not worry about making the background workings to complicated?

Do you mean that the background workings are currently enough?

What is the goal of the player?
What is the intended challenge?
What role does the city have with respect to the goal and the challenges?