Cities Skylines 2 is a city builder with tons of potential. Performance issues and some finer problems with the simulation have mired Colossal Order and Paradox’s latest so far, but gradually, it’s becoming the Cities Skylines sequel we’ve always wanted. Official mod and editing tools are on their way, and CS2 has a long, long life ahead of it, but there are still some potentially game-killing bugs that need to be repaired. If your Cities Skylines 2 land values are spiralling out of control, and the game is becoming unmanageable in the later stages, a new CS2 mod has come to the rescue. Your Cities Skylines 2 land troubles are over.
Cities Skylines 2 mods are already repairing some of the bigger issues regarding traffic, buildings, and pedestrians, even while we wait for the official new modding platform which is set to arrive in early 2024. An intensely complex city building game, as it stands, CS2 will occasionally run into a problem where land values in the late, ‘static’ age of your playthrough will increase exponentially, causing dissatisfaction among your populace as they’re forced out of their too-expensive homes. Particularly problematic in mixed zones, where you have residential, industrial, and office areas in close proximity, if you’re encountering the game-spoiling Cities Skylines 2 land values bug, a fix is finally at hand.
In the vanilla game, once you reach the stage where you’re no longer building and instead letting your city run itself, industries and office-based business can become increasingly, exponentially profitable. As they earn more profits, they pay more taxes. And as they pay more taxes, the land that they occupy becomes more valuable – a high-earning, high-tax-paying business naturally puts a premium on its location.
The problem occurs when increased industrial and office land values spread to nearby residential zones. If you have houses near profitable companies, the rent on those houses will jump to match that which is being paid by the neighboring businesses. People will move out. Houses will become abandoned. You can try lowering taxes to counter all of this, but it generally has the adverse effect – since businesses that use this land are also now paying less tax, it means they have higher profit margins, which pushes the land value, once again, ever higher.
‘Land Value Overhaul’ by ‘Jimmyok’ fixes this by adjusting the correlation between profits, taxes, and land value. In short, it adjusts the simulation so that companies that are making large amounts of money, and therefore paying larger rent, won’t push the land value through the ceiling any more.
It also decreases the geographical distance at which land value declines – if you have houses close to a profitable business, the area of land designated as ‘high value’ will be much smaller, so that it doesn’t bleed into those residential areas. It takes time to come into effect, but if you want to stop the Cities Skylines 2 land values bug that slowly chokes your endgame, you can find the essential mod by Jimmyok right here.
Alternatively, check out all the Cities Skylines 2 DLC that we’re expecting to arrive in the near future, or maybe try some of the other best strategy games on PC.
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