The Cities Skylines 2 economy makes me feel like an actual accountant now. I set budgets. I carefully zone districts. I try to maintain stability, profitability, and inflation. But despite all my considerate planning, eventually the entire town collapses into a pile of debt and bloated land values. Colossal Order itself admits that the financials in Cities Skylines 2 were not up to standard back at launch – the developer is still trying to turn the in-game economy around with new patches. But if you’ve hit the dreaded Cities Skylines 2 land values death spiral, or you’ve noticed budgets, rents, and other financial factors rocketing out of control, a new CS2 mod has finally arrived to fix the system.
Cities Skylines 2 mods will launch in all their official glory via the new Paradox platform that’s expected in the very near future. Meanwhile, however, the city building game is still being fixed and tweaked by devout CS2 modders who want to improve everything from roads to building, traffic and the economy. Cities Skylines 2 has a lot of potential, but some key problems are still stopping it from being the sequel we always wanted. If rents and land values are going skyward and your economy is inexplicably tanking, it might be a problem within the CS2 simulation itself. A new mod makes the pain go away.
‘Rent Control’ from stalwart Cities Skylines 2 modder ‘Jimmyok’ adds a series of vital new, customizable parameters to the game’s economic simulation. First of all, it lets you set a custom upper threshold for land values. If you’ve had the land value bug, whereby businesses get more and more profitable, and it gradually spreads to nearby residential zones and forces people out of their homes, this is the perfect fix. You put a simple cap on land values and stop the inevitable death loop.
But you can go deeper than that. The mod also allows you to control and customize just how much rent – be it from offices or industrial renters – goes towards building upgrades. In Cities Skylines 2, a percentage of rent contributes towards a building’s upgrade progress, and the more it gets upgraded, the more expensive the land around that building becomes. Likewise, a percentage of the building’s income is converted into ‘upkeep costs,’ which can slow the building’s progress towards being upgraded.
Jimmyok’s mod lets you control how much rent is going towards the upgrade percentage, and also how much income is going towards upkeep, essentially allowing you to pump the gas or hit the brakes on building and land values respectively.
If you want to slow things down, allocate less rent towards upgrades and increase the amount that goes towards upkeep. If you want the opposite effect, put more rent towards upgrades, and drop the level of income that’s committed to upkeep. A comprehensive tool for fixing many of Cities Skylines 2’s worst economical woes (even Colossal Order says the simulation was below standard at launch) you can get Rent Control right now, right here.
Alternatively, take a look at all the Cities Skylines 2 DLC we’re expecting in the near future, or maybe some of the other best strategy games on PC.
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