The Cities Skylines 2 electricity and water systems have been detailed, as Colossal Order continues to dive into the city-building game’s mechanics ahead of a Cities Skylines 2 release date later this year. If you can’t wait for Cities Skylines 2 and love a deep dive into the minute details so your city can be perfect, this is for you.
From traffic AI to services and public transport, Cities Skylines 2 developer Colossal Order has been doing an astounding job of giving us in-depth highlights of the management game’s new and returning systems – and today we’ve got something special.
That’s right, we’ve now got focus on the Cities Skylines 2 electricity and water systems, as Colossal Order has shared both a development video and dev diary article for us to sink our teeth into.
When installing roads you be laying electrical lines that will connect to high voltage lines and power stations, creating a power grid for your city. You’ll need to evenly spread electricity around your city to make sure everything functions properly though, so keep that in mind.
Your city no longer relies on “electrical zones” to function, but instead on a robust power grid. You’ll automatically have buildings on roads connected to the grid, but buildings that aren’t on roads will need manual lines to get power. You’ll also want to be aware of electricity bottlenecks, which occur when an area of your city requires more electricity than can be supplied to it. To get around this you can build more roads, lower voltage connections, or use transformer stations and power lines to get around the problem full stop.
There’s also a new electrical control UI which you can see below, joining the many other Ui improvements for specific systems across Cities Skylines 2. This will help you easily and accurately track the entire electrical output and distribution of your city.
You’ll also need to build some power plants to create electricity in the first place, and any extra power you’ve got can actually be sent off to your neighbors, just like with cargo transport, for profit. These coal power plants do require more resources to function and have a high pollution output, but they give you the most power. By comparison, wind turbines are much more eco-friendly but have a lower output. You can even use gas power plants, which are slightly less cost-efficient but produce less pollution than coal as a trade-off.
There are even geothermal, nuclear, solar, and hydroelectric power plants too, each with their own prerequisites and trade-offs.
Electricity wasn’t the only thing we learned about in this Cities Skylines 2 teaser, as the water was also at the core of the conversation. You’ll have both surface and groundwater to deal with in the game, with the latter being an entirely new feature in CS2.
Surface water consists of lakes, rivers, and oceans, and you’ll need to be careful of where you put certain facilities to ensure you don’t pollute this water right before seconding it to your people.
Groundwater is new, and you’ll need a new pumping station to get to them. These deposits can also be impacted by ground pollution, which can spoil the whole supply. So while groundwater areas are great solutions to a lack of surface water near your city, you’ll still want to keep an eye on potential pollution problems.
There is also a slew of buildings and upgrades related to sewage, and you’ll need to heavily consider where you dump sewage, and upgrades to lessen its impact, to make sure that all your drinking water and power functions aren’t negatively impacted by it.
While you wait for the release day we’ve got the Cities Skylines 2 system requirements so you can make sure your rig is up to speed, alongside a breakdown of all the Cities Skylines 2 maps so you can start planning out your first CS2 metropolis.
