Cities Skylines II had a rocky launch. It was a better launch than some of Paradox's other published games, like Star Trek: infinite, which had its support cancelled and developers laid off within a few months of release. But it was still a rocky launch. Personally, I thought Skylines II was "fine". It didn't blow me away like the first game did 10 years ago, but I also didn't get the hate that the fanbase was throwing at it. I thought it had a good mix of features and concepts from most of the original game's expansions, I liked a lot of the design philosophies of its new features, and I wasn't experiencing as many of the performance problems that other players were reporting. So I was mostly having a good time playing it.
Though, to be fair to the critics, I didn't have any cities with 100,000 or 200,000 population. My biggest city was only hovering around 75,000 population around the time of the first mini-DLC. So maybe my cities just hadn't gotten big enough to the point that the simulation really started to break down, or performance really started to become a problem.
I was enjoying CSII before the patch, but none of my cities were big enough to start breaking yet.
I did have my own complaints, of course. Most of those complaints had to do with the lack of player expressiveness in this sequel, compared to the first game (and it's Parklife expansion).
Well, developer Colossal Order has been hard at work trying to give the critics, and also myself, almost exactly what we were hoping for. The result is a pair of recent game patches that have addressed many of the biggest complaints with Cities Skylines II, and which very well might have saved the game from an early grave. If only Star Trek: Infinite had received the same loving attention...
Economy 2.0 makes the simulation more challenging
The first of the major patches was the Economy 2.0 patch. This patch sought to fix many of the complaints with the underlying simulation that caused cities to breakdown after reaching populations in the hundreds of thousands. It also completely rebalanced the game's economy so that balancing the city budget is a lot more challenging.
Economy 2.0 changes how zoning demand is calculated, improves the way that citizens balance their budgets so that they can actually pay their rent, increases the upkeep cost of city services, adds a maintenance cost for land tiles, and a few other significant changes to the game. These changes fix a lot of the problems with land value spiraling out of control, citizens complaining about rents being too high, and businesses struggling to make money. It also makes the early game (in particular) a lot harder. The increase in city service costs means the player won't have nearly as much of a buffer of income as you might be used to.
Tile upkeep severely limits the ability to create sprawling, rural communities.
You have to start out by building small, inexpensive service buildings, and then either upgrade them to increase their capacity, or replace them with higher-capacity buildings as your city (and tax revenue) grows. More importantly, tile upkeep can cripple your finances if you buy land tiles that you aren't actually developing. This dramatically discourages rural or low-density sprawl, especially in the early game.
I have mixed feelings about that last point. One of the things that I liked about the launch version of Cities Skylines II was that its tile-purchasing mechanic opened up a lot more variety in how cities can be organized and developed. It disconnected game progress and upgrades from population, and made it possible to create genuinely rural communities, such as farming or mining towns. Those kinds of rural communities aren't really practical in the game anymore because paying for all the tiles would quickly run the city bankrupt. Instead, you now need to develop a much more compact and urban city core. Once that gets large enough, then you can consider starting to create rural satellite towns, which would be supported by the tax revenue of that urban city center. It's possible to build rural communities; it's just a lot harder to create one that is functional and economically viable.
Detailers Patch gives me exactly what I asked for!
The reduction of player expressiveness due to tile upkeep costs is more than made up for by one of the other big changes in the Economy 2.0 patch: a new building upgrade system that allows more freedom of placement for sub-buildings. Basically, Colossal Order implemented the exact same idea that I had proposed in one of my earlier blog posts / YouTube videos. In that video (published in February), I had suggested that service buildings should all have a ring around them (similar to specialized industry main buildings) inside which sub-buildings can be freely placed. Well this is exactly what Colossal Order did!
I had suggested that the user have more freedom to place upgrades and sub-buildings.
That feature suggestion video only has 47 total views (as of the time of this writing), and the accompanying blog post only has 800 views (most of which are probably bots, spammers, and web-crawlers). Neither post went viral, and very few people actually saw them. That means that I highly doubt that anyone at Colossal Order saw my video or blog post and decided to take my idea, unless they have people scouring the internet for anything anyone says about the game. So I'm not going to take credit for this idea being implemented in Cities Skylines II. It's probably more a case of "great minds think alike", in which someone at Colossal Order just so happened to have the exact same idea that I had. But in any case, this was my idea, so you're welcome!
This change adds a tremendous amount of player expressiveness back into the game. When combined with the Developer Tools (that allow free placement of buildings and props), and the subsequent Detailers Patch (that added new service building variants and the ability to paint surfaces without the Dev Tools), players have a similar amount of freedom of expression as what was offered in Parklife. Players can now put sub-buildings across streets from the main building, which means they don't have to break up their road grids to accommodate large sub-buildings. We can also put parks or zones between the main building and its sub-buildings, or (using the Dev Tools or surface-painter) even create our own little courtyards or plazas!
New sub-building placement mechanics are exactly what I wanted!
Paradox has also added support for Paradox Mods and a map editor tool, in order to give players more ways to customize their game. Cities Skylines II feels a lot less like an Early Access work-in-progress, and much more like the robust, retail release that players were expecting. Basically, Cities Skylines II works a lot better now, has far more player expressiveness, is quite a bit more challenging, and is just more fun and interesting to play now.
Is it perfect? Of course not. There's still a lot of conspicuously absent content. There's still very little content for creating waterfronts, there's almost no seasonal outdoor recreation activities, there's no bicycles or bicycle lanes, weather and disasters feel under-developed, and so forth. So there's still a long way to go to bring Cities Skylines II up to the level of the first game with all of its expansions.
If Colossal Order is looking at my ideas for improving the game, then I also want to take this opportunity to remind them that I had a couple more suggestions. In that same video about building upgrades, I also proposed ways to make specialized industry work more like they did in the Industries expansion for the first game, which would make these zones look a lot less ugly, and would give the player yet more freedom to control how our specialized industries look and behave. I also posted a separate video and blog outlining a suggestion for the player to be able to create specialized zoning that would be equivalent to the specialized districts of After Dark and Green Cities. So if anyone at Colossal Order is reading this, please take a look at that other video or blog post as well.
I also have suggestions for adding more specialized zoning.
The future of Cities Skylines II is looking a lot brighter
Colossal Order dedicated a lot of time and effort to trying to address people's complaints with the core game. This forced them to delay the planned DLC that was supposed to release this year. I do wonder how this will impact the release of the Bridges & Ports DLC, in particular. Waterfront infrastructure is something that is sorely lacking, particularly, the ability to create true piers and quays. Right now, quays have to be created by carefully manipulating the terrain and using the cut-and-fill feature of roads and pedestrian paths. This process is time-consuming, cumbersome, and finicky. Piers can only be made with the concrete pedestrian streets and paths, and there is no way to create wooden piers, boardwalks, or walkways.
So I am kind of looking forward to the Bridges & Ports DLC, and hope that it fills these holes in gameplay.
With many of these core complaints addressed, Colossal Order is more free to develop and release these promised DLCs, hopefully without the fanbase rioting. It was a rocky start, but I think Colossal Order has managed to redeem itself and prove that it is making good faith efforts to support the game and give the player community what it wants and deserves.
Surface detailing allows players to create custom parks, plazas, and quads.