Cities: Skylines II (PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5) (October 24, 2023)

[Obreh Winfrey]

Last look at the road layout before zoning

I still need to figure out industry because that's where all my demand is now. I need a big enough spot for that demand, and I might as well put in a power plant at the same time. The in game radio low key calling the player a dumbass for importing resources due to how much it'll cost the cims

 

[El Bombi]

I think this is a solid review.

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

I got my population up to about 3k, on milestone 5 now. Things really hit their stride around milestone 3. The game economy is way different to CS1 in that when I played CS1, money was scarce and balancing the budget was a requirement for a good while. In this you almost can't fail from the start. Milestones give you buckets of cash, road maintenance isn't a fukking killer anymore, and unless you just plop down a ton of city services, your deficit should never go past 2 or 3 grand. Now I'm trending towards the black, I can barely keep up with RCI demand, and I have to think about where to expand next. Still haven't played with transportation.

I think on the whole, it's much more of a city painter than a city management game. Any real management looks like. A min max exercise.

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

I got a second city brewing on a different map with a more logical layout. With how much money you're given at the start and the changes to the progression system, there's almost no reason to do anything other than road layout and planning until you hit milestone 1 and get everything placed. I'm just about to zone with roads and services placed (power, water, sewage, health, death, trash), and I have almost 400k still left in the bank, and you start with 500k

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

Second city. View from one of my signature medium density buildings that looks over a large part of town. Milestone 6, population nearing 7k, budget fluctuates from deficit to surplus. I took a chance on installing a coal power plant and the excess power I sell basically offset the costs of the plant itself. I experimented and learned that selling power caps to 400MW, which is 1 mil/month. I can only assume it's the same for water and sewage. I'm fukking cims on parking by charging 50 bucks at each parking lot, and disallowing parking in like 90% of the city . My next major infrastructure project is to set up a train station near my farms and maybe near my industry if I can fit the station. I got too much low density residential demand and not enough medium. It's still not easy to figure out how to manipulate it even though it tries to explain why each meter is where it's at. I also don't know if I'm expanding too fast because I'm firmly in the first year of the simulation. I still got cims from day 1 that haven't aged from children to teen, let alone adult. So maybe I let things run on 3x for a while and see how it settles.

 

[CopiousX]

I got a second city brewing on a different map with a more logical layout. With how much money you're given at the start and the changes to the progression system, there's almost no reason to do anything other than road layout and planning until you hit milestone 1 and get everything placed. I'm just about to zone with roads and services placed (power, water, sewage, health, death, trash), and I have almost 400k still left in the bank, and you start with 500k

My biggest issue with the game is how you cannot bankrupt at all anymore. In CS1 you had to carefully plan and throttle you early game growth or else you’d be bankrupt.




in the current game, they basically just give you free money for milestones. you wont ever Need a loan either. I mean how is your first prize amillion dollars when you basically haveless than 10,000 people?\





The sims probably think their mayor is money laundering if they check the balance sheet.

 

[CopiousX]

I got my population up to about 3k, on milestone 5 now. Things really hit their stride around milestone 3. The game economy is way different to CS1 in that when I played CS1, money was scarce and balancing the budget was a requirement for a good while. In this you almost can't fail from the start. Milestones give you buckets of cash, road maintenance isn't a fukking killer anymore, and unless you just plop down a ton of city services, your deficit should never go past 2 or 3 grand. Now I'm trending towards the black, I can barely keep up with RCI demand, and I have to think about where to expand next. Still haven't played with transportation.

I think on the whole, it's much more of a city painter than a city management game. Any real management looks like. A min max exercise.

From what ive seen so far, it becomes mgmt later in the game.


Because money is kinda infinite now, my personal challenge is having a perfectly clean map. one without traffic allerts, or missing hearses, or abandoned buildings Or sims complaining about polution. And this is where running the sim gets challenging. Even after adding a subway, you still get traffic.


i even reached an odd point at around 60,000 people where the map (twin mountains) is mostly clean, but absolutely no one wants to move to the city and there is no demandfor housing or comercial or industry. The game makes you wait for kids to be born and graduate as a natural population boom internally, which requires more city mgmt.

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

My biggest issue with the game is how you cannot bankrupt at all anymore. In CS1 you had to carefully plan and throttle you early game growth or else you’d be bankrupt.

I remember that early struggle of trying not to build too many roads but still having enough tiles to done and hit the next milestone . But yeah now you have to really try to fail. They should nix the government subsidies after a couple milestones. Plus after the last update they changed production but didn't adjust money so you make even fukking more.

From what ive seen so far, it becomes mgmt later in the game.


Because money is kinda infinite now, my personal challenge is having a perfectly clean map. one without traffic allerts, or missing hearses, or abandoned buildings Or sims complaining about polution. And this is where running the sim gets challenging. Even after adding a subway, you still get traffic.


i even reached an odd point at around 60,000 people where the map (twin mountains) is mostly clean, but absolutely no one wants to move to the city and there is no demandfor housing or comercial or industry. The game makes you wait for kids to be born and graduate as a natural population boom internally, which requires more city mgmt.

Yeah I'm starting to see the management aspect at around 13k population (I only play for like 30 minutes at a time ) and just pushing into the second in game year. I experienced some electricity bottlenecks I had to fix. For a while I had traffic under control, but now I have a major bottleneck on the main highway into the city so I need a major redesign.

 

[CopiousX]

i even reached an odd point at around 60,000 people where the map (twin mountains) is mostly clean, but absolutely no one wants to move to the city and there is no demandfor housing or comercial or industry. The game makes you wait for kids to be born and graduate as a natural population boom internally, which requires more city mgmt.

I feel like a republican senator.


I had to bribe the highdensity developers with negative taxes to get them to build apartment buildings. After 5 long in-game years im finally in the red

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

I swear I woke up to a random traffic nightmare . shyt was just fine when I saved other than 1 spot. Then I pan around and every major road is backed up. I'm about to start levelling entire blocks to fix this shyt.

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

I sat down with a fresh set of eyes and worked out my traffic problems - at least I think. I had some alley/4 lane road connections making traffic lights that I didn't notice. Bus stops too close to intersections causing buses to stack around the corner. Not enough ways into downtown. I built a new interchange that I'm going to have to revisit down the line, moved some stops, and moved around some intersections while managing to avoid tearing down the city.

As I was wrapping up my session in downtown, I witnessed some pure unadulterated fukkery . I see the accident icon pop up and orbit over to take a look. I see a brown van trying to take a 90° turn and botching it. It hits another can, flips over it, takes out a third van, sweeps the sidewalk, and takes out a dog walking by

. Then the original van catches fire. CS2 not content to end things here decided to dispatch the furthest fire truck and road services truck it can find. By the time the fire truck made it to the edge of downtown, the van had burned to the ground . That shyt made it all worthwhile.

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

That Economy 2.0 patch will fukk up your finances if you were out there building with reckless abandon . I went from making like 170k/h to losing 51k/h. It takes a while for the simulation to fully catch up. A whole lotta terrible city planners are about to get a wakeup call.

 

[duckbutta]

These youtubers melting down cause the economy patch destroyed they cities

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

These youtubers melting down cause the economy patch destroyed they cities

MFs getting exposed, acting like they wanted to have a deep city simulation . Two dollars twenty acting like he wanted to balance the budget but ran up the deficit even more. Biffa showing all the money management skills of a wet brick, just trying to move sliders without thinking about the effects. The funny shyt with his city is that his tile upkeep isn't even that much, so when he got most of the services taken care of, shyt should have been light work. I can't tell if that's just fake YouTube drama or legit ineptitude

 

[Hopeofmypeople]

Part 1 is on sale, is this any good?