Skip Navigation
Gaming @beehaw.org Rentlar @beehaw.org

How has Cities:Skylines II been for you?

Just looking to gather opinions and thoughts from this community that were thinking of trying C:S II now that the game is out publicly.

Did you like it? Did you return it? Are you waiting until reports say it's better? Does it meet your bar of playable on your system as it is right now? Are there improvements over the original you were happy to see? Are there parts you miss? Are there still things you wish for?

37
37 comments

  • I'll start, having grown a city to 40k, it's low-medium quality and hovering at 20fps but at least it's consistent. I don't get huge amounts of stuttering unless I swap tabs from the game which I have to change my resolution up and down to fix. I've been having fun with it despite that and I'm looking forward to a smoother prettier experience later.

    Traffic AI is way better, the Industries are much better integrated and freight rail being managed by the player makes it way easier to deal with because external trains aren't clogging your lines and trucks aren't in a long queue waiting to enter the station. I like that some citizens like to jaywalk more than others.

    I still can't figure out how to flip one way street directions. I'd like the destination path view of a person or vehicle again. I'd like to be able to assign a stop sign to only two of the four directions of an intersection.

    I wish for a way to capture 30-60 seconds of a simulation to go forward and backwards in Photo mode.

    • I still can't figure out how to flip one way street directions.

      It took me a while too. With the Replace tool selected, click and drag along the length of the street segment in the direction you want the traffic to go.

      • Thank you!!!

      • Words cannot express my gratitude. My solution up until this point has been just relaying them, but that’s obviously kinda annoying. Thank you so much.

    • What kind of pc are you running it on?

      • Laptop with 1660ti Gpu and Ryzen 7 4800H Cpu. I have most of the visual effects off but high LoD

    • I wish for a way to capture 30-60 seconds of a simulation to go forward and backwards in Photo mode.

      Pretty sure both Nvidia and the Windows Game Bar (Win+G I think?) have recording functionality. Not exactly what you're looking for, but an easy way to capture a short vid and then scrub through later for screenshots.

      • I know I could stream/video edit, but more I'm thinking about setting up a short video within the game. For example, following a train pulling into a station but you want to get the angle and position just right or from multiple angles. Currently the simulation can be slowed or stopped but every time you play the thing the simulation only moves forward rather than returning to the previous state.

  • 7600X + 6700 XT combo here.

    Performance is surprisingly bearable, but the lack of optimization is really obvious. For example when you want to place a cemetery, it lags like a LOT., when terraforiming often times the height gets messed up, because of stutters. Using CPP's 100k population, I get an 30-33 FPS while zoomed in the downtown.

    Gameplay features are hit or miss. Road tools are literally amazing, but has it's drawbacks. Somehow sometimes 90 degree intersections don't actually turn out as 90, can't edit lines like TM:PE, traffic sign options are a literal joke. For example you can apply stop signs onto an intersection and it just applies a FOUR WAY stop signs. No other options. Also no bike paths (will come in the future freely), no zoning like in the Industries, University, Parks DLC, lack of props (like parks for example), etc.

    Buildings looks pretty cool, but these european buildings doesn't seem that european to me (Although haven't checked highrise yet), scaling is weird for schools, like elementary and HS is absolutely HUGE.

    TLDR: It's really really underbaked, should've delayed it like 6 months. I have refunded the game and returned back to C:S 1 with DLC unlocker.

    • TLDR: It's really really underbaked, should've delayed it like 6 months. I have refunded the game and returned back to C:S 1 with DLC unlocker.

      You could also just put it on a list to keep an eye on and look at it in six months or a year later.

      I think that a number of times, publishers put out a half-baked release but do ultimately see the issues at release fixed. Fallout 76 was horrendous at release, and while it's still not Fallout 5, I think that the updates have made it a decent game. Cyberpunk 2077 also wasn't ready at release, and while I haven't looked at it recently, my understanding is that with updates and DLC, it's also pretty decent. Paradox does have a history of titles that see a lot of post-release work.

      I think that in many cases, the patientgamers crowd -- wait at minimum a year after release before looking at a game -- has the right idea. They may not get the absolute latest, blingiest stuff. But:

      • Many bugs are often fixed by then. You aren't the guinea pig.

      • The hardware it runs on is cheaper and/or performance is better.

      • People will have done up wikis to refer to.

      • The game itself may cost less.

      • DLC is out. For many games -- Paradox games in particular -- a lot of the content is in the DLC, and the base game is kind of dwarfed by the DLC. For a number of these, a new title in a series isn't going to be as good as the last before a lot of DLC has come out.

      • Mods are out. For some games, particularly on the PC, mods make the game vastly better.

      I'm not saying that everyone should do that. But in this case, we knew going into the release -- and the developer announced -- that the performance wasn't where they wanted it to be at release. So I think that this is a good candidate to wait on. Either they improve performance post-release or they won't. Either way, you'll know prior to purchase. Plus, hardware keeps getting faster, so to a certain degree, performance problems solve themselves.

      • Eh, I wouldn't disparage the parent commentor for giving the release-day version an earnest try. Some people will be okay with the game in the state it's in right now, some won't, and that's fine.

        I think they also would agree they expect it to get better with another 6 months of active development, especially preparing for console release.

      • Yes that can be a wise solution, can't argue with that but I don't want to normalise the idea of releasing games in a heavily underbaked condition, which unfortunately became the norm in the recent years (although releasing too early was common in the 2000's as well).

        EDIT: I know your comment wasn't about normalizing underbaked games at release, but I just wanted to rant a little bit.

    • I agree with the majority of your points. It does feel a little bit early access and the stop sign thing was a pain point.

      I'll just offer a counterpoint to your comment of Industry, Park, University district. Although the latter two don't have much besides individual buildings to place, Industries feel way better integrated in 2 than 1. In C:S1 you had generic and specialized industry zoning which was entirely separate from the Industry district. This sort of zoning made things brought by DLC feel tacked on. We might see DLC for C:S2 work the same way but there's an opportunity to integrate it more fully with base Cities Skylines systems, like satellite campuses and sports arenas being an "upgrade" for a college for example.

      • Oh yeah I have completely forgot about the specialized industries. Yes you're absolutely right, that system works way way better than the Industries DLC version.

    • What resolution were you playing at?

    • It’s funny how you can build out a grid and find out it’s all off slightly. They’re doing some rounding somewhere and it gets clearer the further out from the start of a 90 degree you get

  • I haven’t had time to build up a big city, but so far I’ve enjoyed it. I’m running on Linux with a 5600X + 6600XT, and 1080p at medium gets me 30-40 fps.

    I LOVE that roads transmit power and water. Money is way more available early game than in 1. The only annoyance for me so far has been the terrain overlay that comes up when you select a zoning tool (similar to how selecting water pipes switches to underground. You can make it go back to normal by hitting i after selecting the tool. It’s minor, but its an annoying difference from 1.

    • Definitely easier to manage new/remote developments in this game. Government subsidies are also a nice hand-hold but I have no idea how it's calculated. Trains in C:S1 are super unprofitable, government investment makes it work well. (I've gotten subways can be profitable in C:S1 after lots of work).

      I wouldn't mind the terrain overlays if it looked clearer with it selected, for some reason it was hard to use, especially at night.

    • That overlay has such bad contrast it’s hard to see what’s going on. Big accessibility issue.

  • I'm enjoying it. I've remembered that I'm terrible at building cities, but I'm having fun while coming to that realization again! Performance is mid 50fps with about 5000 people at 1080p with a 2080 super and a ryzen 3600x.

  • I'm having a lot of fun,. The performance stuff is a non-issue for me, I haven't spent much time looking at my fps but it hoveslrs at 45 or so (6800xt+3800xt, at 5120x1440, all setting on high except i disabled volumetic fog, tilt shift and motion blur), the sim speed seems fine. I only played vanilla cs1 and this seems to have added a lot, but not sure how that compares to the dlcs. I like how much more complex the demand for different zones are and the car systems seem greatly improved. Natural disasters was something I definitely missed in cs1 so it's nice to see that. The graphics are a huge step up.overall just about every system seems to have been improved in some way. There seem to be legit incentive to make a dirty city, I felt making a polution free city was a littke too easy in cs1, now there are much more significant tradeoffs. A general theme seems to be that the city changes and grows over time, whereas in cs1 I often felt I could setup some districts for life right away. It feels like the city grows much more realistically and organically now.

    On the negative side of things, a lot of the Twitter posts don't seem to make sense, someone will complain about crime and then I'll zoom in and they are super happy in a 0 crime area, I'm also pretty sure my commercial districts are bugged to always report not enough customers despite showing signs of success otherwise, and a lot of my busses seem to run all their buses at once rather than being spaced out. Every now and again a hearse/ambulance/firetruck gets stuck and won't ever get to its destination despite a clear path. Its really finicky to attach pipes/power to something that consumes it. The radio is repetitive and often plays conflicting stories one after another. These are minor gripes but certainly annoying.

    I have about 10hrs and I reckon I'll put at least a 100 more. If the game never got another patch it would be fine and enjoyable, knowing it will have long term support makes me quite excited for it.

  • When did the game come out? I just went to check it out on my Xbox and it's no longer showing as "coming soon" on Gamepass, but it's also not on "Recently Added to Gamepass". In store there's no release date. Did something happen to the Xbox release?

  • Loads of fun until bugs became obvious. Now going to wait for them to fix it. Confident that it will get fixed but flailing around trying to find another game to play.

    • Yeah, it's definitely not perfect at release... I tell myself that Cities Skylines wasn't either in 2013 especially before Mass transit and other DLCs. I'm hoping the incremental performance improvements will keep coming.

      My city is at 90k now and it's harder to play, sitting at about 10fps... Might be time to start a new city at 100k.

You've viewed 37 comments.