Cities: Skylines

Electricity and Water is next:

Streets now carry low voltage electricity cables. These connect to transformer stations, which in turn are connected to power stations with high voltage power lines.

You also have to think a bit more about evenly distributing power to where it is needed to avoid bottlenecks.

And now you can also import and export electricity with neighbouring cities.

Another new feature is battery stations, which store excess energy.

Water is now divided in two sources: surface and ground water.

Next video is on the maps.

You can build much bigger cities now, and you can build tiles not connected to your current play area, enabling you to build distant exclaves.

Terrain is much more vertical, which allows for much more varied enviroments.

Not only are we getting dynamic seasons, but we are also getting a dynamic day/night cycle. All of which is influenced by the latitude of the city, so warmer latitudes will have less extreme seasonal cycles.

Also disasters will be in the base game.

Cool.

Next up is the economy:

It promises quite a bit of depth finetuning the economy, if you want to go into that, but you don't need to.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 14th 2023 at 7:01:20 PM

I'm unreasonablely happy that we'll be able to get farms that actually look like farms. For whatever reason, that's something city builders often struggle with.

Me too, it would be cool to build up an actual countryside.

Edit: Huh, posts came back. That was odd.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 14th 2023 at 8:00:16 PM

Next is milestones, XP, and upgrading services:

It is basically an extension of the old milestone system, with a much more flexible and extensive system of earning XP, so no more arbitrary population gates.

Also, public services now have their own little tech trees you can spend XP on.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 22nd 2023 at 3:11:59 PM

Next up is citizen simulation, which seems to be pretty sophisticated. Each sim will have their own life that you can check in on to see how your citizens are doing. They will also post on Chirper, which will be a handy tool to track problems in your city: your sims will tell you what's going on.

Next up: sound and music:

Looks like we're getting a pretty complex soundscape.

More realistic sounds are always nice.

A problem I had with the plazas and promenades DLC was that if you zoomed into a district with no traffic, you'd hear a bunch of phantom traffic noises. This shouldn't be a problem in CS:2 if the traffic sound is based more directly on the actual flow of traffic.

From the looks of it, every object and building now produces its own distinct sound, and the game distils the resulting din down into something that sounds more coherent. It is an interesting way to build a soundscape, one that seems rather complex for a game like this, but this is the series that gave us water physics in a game that arguably didn't really need them.

Welp, it's that time again. A Paradox game is about to come out, so it's time for the Spiffing Brit to absolutely destroy it.

For context, Spiffing Brit is a Youtuber whose whole thing is playing simulation or strategy games, finding exploits that totally unbalance said game and stretching those exploits and oversights until he can completely wreck or cheat a standard playthrough using just things readily available in the game (stuff like winning Civ VI without ever building a city, abusing divorces to become a billionaire in Crusader Kings, etc).

He and Paradox have a pretty good relationship, and they often reach out to and sponsor to him to publicly playtest and/or run roughshod over their games for exploits close to release.

Yeah, it's a pretty brilliant way to playtest your games and create publicity at the same time.

This one reminded me a lot of the "beat Civilization without building a city" challenge he did, too. He basically asked "how far will the game allow me to get without doing any of the intended city stuff whatsoever and just building one house for one person?"

Turns out, pretty darn far.

I don't know if they're going to adjust the thing with the maintenance costs on wind turbines (it's definitely an easy way of earning money that the developers didn't seem to catch, but at the same time it requires dedicating so much of your building space and playtime to it that it's not necessarily affecting a standard playthrough), but it might give them something to think about in terms of city rank progression, and the bit where he's able to stop a fire by bulldozing the stuff that's on fire is almost certainly getting patched out.

Also the "build stuff outside of city limits, but still get benefits from them" thing, holy shit.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 8th 2023 at 12:22:41 PM

My favourite bug so far: someone dying of old age before they could even properly move into the city. This was, note, the third person moving in.

The weird wind shenanigans going on at the border of the player area are probably going to be patched too.

Edited by Redmess on Sep 8th 2023 at 9:39:02 PM

Lots of the regular city builder youtube people have gotten access to a test build and permission to post a half hour video on everything through the first 4 milestones.

Here's one I found

Road management definitely goes a lot further then I expected even from the previews. For example instead of choosing between a "road with trees", "road with grass and trees" each side of the road can be individually set to have trees, grass or both.

Also there are parking decks for places where you need a lot of extra parking. Which I don't think was shown in the previews, I certainly didn't see it anyways.

Yes it was, it was mentioned in one of the early videos.

Parking lots were definitely discussed, but I don't remember parking decks being mentioned.

It also looks like there will be both above and below ground options, which will make it much easier to work more parking space into an area that has outgrown the initial setup.

You mean the building, right? I think I spotted one at some point, and another update did mention that you could expand buildings with parking as well, I think.

But yeah, that really changes the equation a lot, right?

Spiff is just scratching the surface, though. Here is a video from someone who really went above and beyond stretching this game to its limits:

This is a beta build, by the way, so very much not finished yet.

This video (which manages to be pretty informative besides all the comedy) shows someone building a massive metropolis housing 300,000 sims, who are all being simulated individually.

This is pretty amazing.

I got to wonder how much is actually being simulated individually and how much is abstracted away when you aren't looking at it.

Individually simulating hundreds of thousands of moving parts that all interact with each other should turn most CPU's into molten slag, so if it can actually run well on the optimization is impressive to say the least.

I'm sure someone will run the simulation through its paces and see what it actually can and cannot do once the game is released.