After a period of silence, Cities Skylines 2 maker Colossal Order revealed last week a big anniversary celebration for its flagship series, including new material for both Cities games, and a substantial patch for CS2 itself. That big Cities Skylines 2 update is now here – and if you’ve avoided the sequel so far, or put it down after being disappointed, there are a lot of reasons to give it another shot. New difficulty settings, vital fixes for the traffic systems, and tweaks to other key parts of the simulation – CS2 is another step closer to becoming the city-building game you’ve always wanted.
Some 18 months since it was first released, and Cities Skylines 2 is still in the wilderness. User reviews on Steam remain officially ‘mixed’. Compared to its predecessor, now ten years old, it feels less accessible and harder to love. But Colossal Order isn’t resting. As the city-building game series hits double figures, and a giant anniversary celebration begins, the new Cities Skylines 2 update starts with one major overhaul.
If subsidies, starting cash, and big milestone rewards make Cities Skylines 2 too easy for you, you can now start a new game on ‘Normal’ mode, which cuts your initial funding, disables support from the government, and grants you significantly less money each time your town grows. On Normal mode, refund and relocation costs are as standard and you need to pay for the upkeep of each map tile. However, if you’ve struggled with CS2 until now, you can pick the new ‘Easy’ mode. You get subsidies, more starting money, and six times the amount of capital every time your city expands. Refunding buildings gives you more cash back, map tiles are free to maintain, and the pollution level is lower.
It’s a smart way of catering to both types of players and styles of play. If you want a more casual experience where you just build your city as you like it, pick Easy. If you want the full pressures of management and strategizing, go with Normal. Either way, the new Cities 2 update also fixes some of the most significant problems with the in-game simulation so far. Garbage service buildings now have increased transport capacity, to combat the issue of trash piling up.
Citizen pathfinding has been improved so that they can walk through parks that are connected to multiple roads, and, thankfully, if there’s a car blocking traffic on one of your intersections, it now has priority to exit the intersection, hopefully preventing those enormous quagmires caused by one errant motorist. On a similar note, buses won’t make strange, unexpected u-turns after leaving a stop now, and the boarding time for taxis has been improved, hopefully causing fewer delays on main roads.
Primarily, the new Cities Skylines 2 update changes and improves systems relating to in-game homelessness. In the past, when your city had a high population of people without homes, it may have felt like all your efforts to mitigate the issue had little effect – no matter how many new, low-cost houses you built, or other remedies you implemented, the number of people who did not have homes remained the same.
In the new update, you have an additional section in the Population View panel which allows you to see how many people in your city are currently homeless. This will allow you to see whether your homeless citizens are employed or not, and tailor your response. If there are a lot of employed people who are without homes, the priority is to build new housing. If there are homeless people who don’t have jobs, creating more work may be more essential.
There was also a wrinkle in the simulation whereby when young citizens first reached adult age, they would immediately move out of their parents’ houses, and if no low-rent housing was available, would instantly become homeless. Thanks to the new update, these citizens will remain at their parents’ homes until they have a job. They will contribute to their households financially until the household has raised enough ‘starting money’ to allow them to leave. But even then, these citizens will check if there are enough affordable houses in the city before they move out – if there aren’t, they may move out of your city and become commuters.
And finally, to mark the tenth anniversary of the series, there are ten new parks to build in Cities Skylines 2. The full patch notes outline a number of smaller, technical fixes, but essentially, this feels like a meaningful step forward for CS2. Of course, if you’ve never tried Cities Skylines before, the first game is free to play from Thursday March 20 until Monday March 24.
Check out all the best Cities Skylines 2 mods, to help make the game even better. You might also want to try the best strategy games available on PC.
You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We’ve also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.
