It has been eight years since developer Colossal Order wowed us with the release of Cities: Skylines. Now, they are back again with Cities Skylines 2, which is set to release on October 24th. I’ve been playing with city builders since the first Sim City came out in 1989, so of course, I was happy to jump in and try my hand at growing a city in Skylines 2. Two things became very evident during my short time with Cities: Skylines 2. One, I am still horrible at creating cities. And 2, although many new features and upgrades are packed into Cities: Skylines 2, many hardcore fans of the original Skylines may not be ready to give up all of the DLC and community mods that have arguably made it the best city builder available today.
QoL Updates And Feature Improvements
The first thing many veterans of Cities: Skylines will notice about Skylines 2 is just how bare bones the sequel feels. Several tools and add-ons that have made their way into the original through DLC and community mods aren’t present in the new version. Skylines 2 isn’t just an expansion to the original, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that eight years of extras didn’t make it into the day one version of Skylines 2, but the loss of functionality can still be jarring.
For a more casual player like myself, the downgrade isn’t quite so noticeable, especially when you factor in the new quality-of-life upgrades, starting with the tutorial and help mechanics. With a more learn-as-you-go approach rather than a complete tutorial walkthrough, learning the tools needed to control your budding city is very intuitive. Each time you click on a new tool, a pop-up tutorial explains the basic function of the tool and often gives some extra insight into how it will affect your city’s growth. With so many zones, buildings, and city services at your fingertips, each tutorial is added to the help screen for future reference.
The UI in Skylines 2 is more streamlined, which I verified by spinning up the original Cities: Skylines for a quick comparison. The basic icons are easily identified in both titles, but the sub menus and tabs are better organized and easier to navigate in Skylines 2.
Basic tool functionality is also easier to use. For example, zoning and de-zoning are handled by a single icon instead of switching between the two functions. Furthermore, to make rezoning easier, you can simply overwrite an existing zone with a new one without deleting the old zone first.
The most significant QoL improvement I’ve seen so far is how the water and sewer lines, along with the power grid, are integrated into the road network. There is still a need to place power lines to push electricity from a power plant to a remote area or to connect your city’s grid to a water source. Still, the more mundane aspects of getting power and water to individual buildings have been minimized. Since each building is automatically connected to the grid when located on a road, there won’t be any time spent trying to figure out why a building doesn’t have power, nor will there be an abundance of unsightly power lines running through your city.
The time previously allocated to power and water management is now used to focus on your citizens' other needs, and they have a lot of them. We’re not talking just placing mailboxes, bus stops, and taxi stands. You’ll have to manage other needs like parking, telecommunication, and internet as well.
There are also more zones than before, especially with housing. This not only adds some diversity to the architecture but also adds some depth to keeping citizens happy. For example, mixed housing zones have medium-density apartment buildings with commercial shops on the ground floor. In contrast, low-rent housing creates large buildings with small apartments to accommodate students and other adults wanting cheaper rent.
City Progression
In Cities: Skylines, your only means of progression was to increase your population, with certain thresholds moving your city to the next level. As you built roads and placed zones, citizens would flood in to fill the homes and jobs your handiwork created. As your city grew, you would reach population Milestones. Each Milestone would open up new services and higher-density zones. Your citizens would crave these new services,
In Skylines 2, you must earn Expansion Points (XP) to reach the next Milestone. Population growth and citizen happiness still count towards your progression, but only as a passive measure. 16 times per day, your population and happiness rating are reviewed, and a small amount of XP is awarded. This gives a small yet constant reward for keeping your citizens happy.
Although population size will keep the XP trickling in, the primary way of earning XP in Skylines 2 is by building roads and service buildings. Each section of road you lay down and every service building you construct or upgrade will give you a large chunk of XP. And with a total of 20 Milestones, you will need a lot of XP for your budding city to reach the end goal of Megapolis.
As you reach each Milestone, you will be rewarded with a bundle of cash, Development Points (DP), and Expansion Permits EP). Expansion Permits are your gateway to adding more land to your city. Each permit will open up a new square of land on the map. More than just additional space to place more buildings, each piece of land can add new resources to be gathered through specialized industries or provide additional connections to the outside world. You’ll still have to spend cash to unlock each tract of land, so you’ll almost always have to use your EP as your city expands strategically.
Similar to how Expansion Points open up more land, Development Points are used to unlock new services and buildings. Unlike the linear progression in Cities: Skylines, you can choose your progression path through your earned Development Points.
Each city service, from police and fire protection to healthcare, trash disposal, and power delivery, has a dedicated development tree. Like choosing skills in an MMO or RPG, you get to choose which services to unlock. Some skill trees have a single track, while others have parallel branches, but there’s no need to open nodes that don’t fit into your overall vision for your city.
Life Paths
Another change to the progression of your city is how citizens react to the zones and services you unlock. Previously, as soon as a higher density zone or more advanced service was available, your citizens immediately demanded said upgrades. In Cities: Skylines 2, a citizen’s desires appear to be more individual, and although all of the services that you’ve unlocked will help you meet those needs, they must be more strategically deployed.
Much of a citizen’s needs are now determined by their life path. A citizen’s life path begins in two ways - they are born into the city or move into the city later in life. Educational opportunities, job choices, and leisure activities will all affect a citizen’s life path. Even the ability to find suitable housing can affect a citizen’s life path, and let’s not forget about environmental influences such as pollution and crime.
A citizen’s life path will directly affect their happiness and health. Citizens who can meet all of their needs will be more productive and live longer. They will have a greater chance of attending and completing higher levels of education and, in turn, be able to fill more qualified job roles to become wealthier. Wealthier citizens will consume more goods to support commercial properties and the industry that provides the goods they need.
On the flip side, citizens with a difficult life path - poor education, low-skill jobs, and low well-being- can negatively impact the city. For instance, lower-income residents will complain about high rent prices, ultimately driving down the value of their residential zone. They can even be moved to commit criminal acts. Both of these will negatively affect other citizens in the area.
Performance Gains?
Anyone who has played Cities: Skylines knows that hundreds of thousands of citizens traveling around a giant city can bring a PC to its knees. Cities: Skylines 2 has some pretty steep recommended system requirements as well. The minimum specs don’t seem too bad: an Intel Core i7-6700K or AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or an AMD equivalent. But the recommended specs of an i5-12600K or Ryzen 7 5800X, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia RTX 3080 are pretty scary.
As for the minimum specs, I tested Skylines 2 with a Ryzen 3550H and an Nvidia GTX 1650. At 1080p with low settings, I still had some stuttering shortly after starting a new city. Trying to use graphics settings higher than that resulted in freezes that made controlling the camera almost impossible.
I saw much better performance when I switched to my main rig, which meets or exceeds all recommended specs with a Ryzen 9 7900X, 23GB RAM, and an RTX 3080. But with any city builder, it’s not a question of if but when you will push your hardware to the breaking point. Running Skylines 2 at 3440x1440p with all graphics settings maxed out, I had no framerate issues for a while. Once my city grew to around 45-50K citizens, I noticed some slight stuttering with the camera movement, but mostly when zooming in or out. That still concerns me about performance with much larger cities, which I didn’t have time to test. Paradox Interactive noted that the press copy provided is not the final release candidate and that optimization is still ongoing.
Final Thoughts - A Good Foundation
If you’re expecting Cities: Skylines 2 to be an updated Cities: Skylines, complete with all of the extra DLC and favorite mods already built in, you will be disappointed. While Skylines 2 comes with slightly better graphics and has added some quality-of-life features, it is an entirely new game. Many of the city options have been expanded, like additional zone types and improved industry features. But many of the features added through the DLC and community mods have been reset to a “base game” feel.
Simply put, on the surface, starting anew with Cities: Skylines 2 may feel like a downgrade, but it’s a move that ensures Skylines 2 will ultimately be more than just a texture repack and visually upgrade Cities: Skylines. We are starting with a much more robust foundation with Cities: Skylines 2. There are still a lot of new and expanded features to explore, and there will be plenty of experimenting before the community figures out all of the nuanced changes that are packed into Cities: Skylines 2, and that will only grow once the DLC and community mods start to flow in.
