Cities Skylines 2 has been going through a gradual recovery process since the introduction of new developer Iceflake Studios, and it seems to be bearing fruit. Recent Steam reviews are notably more positive-leaning than those across its past, as the team gradually overhauls fundamental improvements to core systems like traffic and visuals. For its next update, Iceflake has “put a lot of focus on improving the behaviour and logic” of the city builder, and it should result in a happier population.
To give one easy example of this work in action, Iceflake describes how its next patch is changing the way Cities Skylines 2 handles garbage disposal. Trash building up around town is a quick trip to frustrated inhabitants, and the developer explains that the garbage truck logic was at fault here. “Trucks now reserve enough capacity for the waste they are expected to collect at their intended destination. Previously, garbage trucks sometimes collected small amounts of garbage from buildings along their route, causing them to fill up before reaching their intended destinations.”
With the upcoming update, trucks will skip collecting from buildings with minor garbage build-up to focus on more urgent collections. “This change applies to all buildings,” Iceflake notes, “which means you should see fewer notifications about garbage piling up, especially if you have an efficient amount of garbage processing facilities.” It adds that this will naturally benefit citizen happiness, “with clean homes providing a greater happiness bonus.” I love hearing about these tiny nuances that have had an unintended knock-on effect, and this is certainly a good one to catch and correct.
Also being adjusted is residential demand. This wasn’t taking the size of settlements into account correctly, “which caused the demand to plummet in very large cities.” That’s now been fixed, and the calculator has been tweaked to consider the number of empty residential properties in the region as well.
Your citizens’ financial behaviour is changing too, and income will now be the key factor impacting their happiness, shopping, and leisure choices (rather than wealth). “Because wealth naturally fluctuates as citizens earn and spend money, it was not always a reliable indicator of their financial situation.” The knock-on effect of this is that your happiness stats should now better reflect “how well off citizens actually are.” Sometimes CS2 reminds you that it’s a contemplative mirror held up to our real society.
Renting priorities for companies will now be determined based on who is able to produce the resources the city needs most. Those that fall lower on the list will have to wait until more essential ones have secured a location before they can move in. This means zoning areas will be “more likely to spawn companies whose resources are actually needed,” and should also increase the variety of company types in proximity to one another, while also bringing down demand bars appropriately. Iceflake says this change “will also act as a foundation for future improvements on how the resource economy works.”
Alongside the technical stuff, the development team has continued its push to improve the look of Cities Skylines 2. Two more maps have been overhauled with freshly painted terrain textures – Waterway Pass and Lakeland. LOD (level of detail) improvements for trees will stop them from appearing to be missing branches or floating when viewed at certain distances, while improved surface rendering will make lighting and shadow fall more naturally across bumps, hills, and slopes.
Last but not least, Iceflake has been working on a new set of windows for buildings, including support for both frosted and opaque windows. This should enable more visual variety moving forward, and the team adds that it expects “some small performance gains when rendering large numbers of building windows at once” as a result of the changes.
“As always, our work continues as we keep bringing new updates, improvements, and additions to Cities Skylines 2,” the studio concludes. It promises “plenty more” in the coming months, with plans in the works for “upcoming updates, new content, and of course, the DLC.” Could we one day see that lifetime ‘mixed’ Steam rating climb back up into the blue? I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but every little upgrade helps.