The Cities Skylines 2 economy is fickle, complex, and capricious at the best of times. You perfectly zone everything. You levy taxes at just the right levels. You meticulously adjust budgets for the police, fire service, healthcare, and education. And then you unpause the simulation and all your office buildings are suddenly abandoned and everyone is complaining because nobody is collecting the garbage. While performance problems are lessening in CS2, the city building sequel needs a big financial rework. Now, Colossal Order says it is rebuilding the economy “from scratch,” and will introduce a big, separate update with new service buildings and vehicles.
Products and materials don’t seem to earn you enough money. Demand for building types remains high, even when you’ve built miles and miles of new zones. Rents and rates enter a late-game death spiral, where the land value on industrial areas bleeds into residential and office blocks. The Cities Skylines 2 economy has its problems – if it’s not catching you out with these sudden, inexplicable downturns, it’s treating you too nicely, and robbing the city building game of all challenge. So far, if you wanted to improve the systems underlying money and taxes, your best bet was Cities Skylines 2 mods. But Colossal Order has heard the criticisms and is now responding with a gigantic new patch.
“The economy has been reworked from scratch and will be delivered along with a lot of other fixes,” the developer says. “The initial implementation of the economy rework is done, and the patch is currently being polished. Our internal team, along with feedback from our beta group, indicates we are heading in the right direction, and we are excited to share it with you soon.
“This patch will not address everything, but to ensure it meets the expectations of our wider community, we want to give it a few more weeks so we can take action on more of the feedback we have received from the beta group. The goal of the patch is to address the community feedback we have received in regards to the economy, increase the importance of managing the economy, increase the challenge, and make it clearer to the player how the economy is affected by your choices.”
As well as the economy, the upcoming Cities Skylines 2 patch will address other concerns and implement other improvements as requested by players. After that, a subsequent patch will introduce new service buildings and more.
“The patch, scheduled for release soon, primarily focuses on the economy,” Colossal Order says. “However, there are some other requested improvements included such as an update to the building upgrade system. This means you will be able to place building upgrades more freely around the main buildings and also delete and move specific upgrades. We will provide detailed patch notes in connection to the patch as usual.
“The next patch, expected after summer, will introduce some free content and other frequent requests, such as new service buildings and vehicles, as well as the addition of a surface tool to allow more freedom to paint the areas around buildings. We are also making progress with the technical difficulties that are blocking the release of the asset editor. We cannot confirm if it will be ready for the first patch after summer, so no promises just yet, but we are doing everything we can to make it so.”
In order to fully test and refine the economy patch in Cities Skylines 2 itself, Colossal Order is delaying the launch of the upcoming creator packs until after summer 2024. “We want to make sure the upcoming economy patch has the intended result,” the developer says, “and that we have time to also evaluate your feedback before we release any new paid content.”
As for the rework itself, the Cities Skylines 2 economy patch will be released sometime between Monday June 3 and Wednesday June 19.
In the meantime, you can complement Cities Skylines 2 with some of the best strategy games, or maybe try the best 4X games in the world.
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