Jump to content
Badfish301

A Year In, Cities Skylines 2 Is Still Just Bad - What I Don't Like

13 posts in this topic Last Reply

Highlighted Posts

Posted:
Last Online:  
 

Hi Everybody,

 

Sorry to have a "downer" thread here, but I think it's important to identify what has gone wrong with Cities Skylines 2, so the same mistakes aren't made 10 years down the road when we get our next new city builder game.

 

I am kind of upset at CO for making this game, as they have again dominated a small niche market, so nobody else is going to try to make a similar game anytime soon in the city builder market.

 

Cities Skylines 2 started off its run a bit more than a year ago with a trailer showing the game. The trailer was a total lie as we know now.  Everyone was pretty excited, but people were upset about small detail things like the airplane's reflection in the window not being correct etc (turns out that's not even a thing and there are no reflections in windows etc..).

 

So, CO pulled a huge bait-and-switch, showing us a game created in Unreal Engine 5, when they knew full well the game was going to be built in Unity and look essentially the same as its predecessor.  Why did they do that? I mean, isn't that a bit deceptive?

The trailer showed puddles in the streets with reflections, beautiful skyscraper designs, great building designs and a nice "city center effect" to the cities. The trailer also showed incremental skyscrapers growing floor by floor to completion with scaffolding and a tower crane..
 

In fact, the images of the skyscrapers growing incrementally were almost the showcase feature of the trailer, to the point of flying through a skyscraper under construction as it is growing floor by floor.

Why  feature something in a trailer that literally does not exist in the game?  Instead, we get a game built in Unity, where a tower crane shows up, and a building just appears magically. Low effort.  Tower cranes are also used to build small houses, instead of a framing animation or something.. come on guys.

 

So, they lied, got everybody excited about a promo shown in Unreal Engine 5, then we got a game made in Unity that looks like trash.

 

That wasn't the end of it.  The game is Unity was so poorly created that a year later 1. There is no way to import custom buildings 2. The map editor is basically broken 3. It was so poorly coded it hardly could run on anybody's computer because of things like literal teeth being modeled and grinds to a halt over 100k residents.  Maps aren't huge either. There are no regions to create larger maps.

 

Graphically, while attempting to be a bit more realistic than the original, which was horrible as well, the style is quite ugly, and kind of dark/grey feeling, but still graphically not good.

At certain zoom levels (zoomed out where the game is usually played) the graphics look kind of jagged/rigid and don't appear clear or smooth.  The graphics in SimCity 2013 were better in my opinion. The graphics are D+.

 

The road laying is the best feature of CS2, and mostly good (however the UI is bad and weird it is kind of hard to just make a simple grid even with the grid tool) but they stuck with the very bad "boxes" next to a road mechanic for zoning.  I hate the boxes.

We all know the next City Building game shouldn't have these small boxes, and should instead use vectors like SimCity 2013 and Manor Lords did.

 

Which brings me on to vectors- Why did they stick with such a rigid zone placement mechanic, when they knew there would be curved roads and other shapes like corner lots and triangular lots where the square zone mechanic simply does not work?   Was it too hard to figure out how to implement vector based zones?  Manor Lords was able to do it, with a very small team. 

Instead of zones that were 4 squares deep, we got zones that were now 6 deep, but that really didn't help things much, as a much larger number of building models were then needed to be used in order for things to not look "repetitive" when zoning- forcing players to zone some tiles deeper than other in order to force variety.

 

The city growth mechanic is very poor. There doesn't seem to be a "city center effect" like games even such as "New City" were able to achieve. There doesn't seem to really be a challenge to growing a city, as very tall high-rises just kind of pop up right at the beginning of the game.

The buildings that do grow appear to have very strange datasets attached to them, where huge tall residential skyscrapers have very few people in them and industries and office buildings as well.

 

The scale of the game is also bad.  There doesn't appear to be any real standard block sizes to build in, as many of the civic buildings and parks are way too huge to fit into a regular sized block (oops). 

In order to get your city to "level up" signature buildings must be placed, and they are again way too large and out of scale, and when everyone has to place them in every city they build- every city just kind of starts looking like every other city with the same exact tallest skyscrapers (not fun).

In SimCity 4, at least there was some excitement about growing your tallest buildings and seeing what they would end up being, but not in CS2 - Instead the tallest buildings that grow are ugly generic buildings with hardly any design time put into them, and the only buildings that are slightly attractive you have to plop. 

 

I was complaining about the reliance on this plop mechanic for the tallest skyscrapers before the game was even released and everyone told me to shut up about it, it would be fine, but it isn't fine, it's very annoying, and takes most of the fun out of this game.  The tallest buildings should grow, not be placed.

 

There is an obsession with death, deathcare and minutia etc. in CS2- at least they got rid of emptying landfills and cemeteries, but still..  You have to build an enormous cemetery (shouldn't a cemetery be zoned?)  that is way of scale with everything else you build and is enormous. This cemetery only gets larger as you add strange wings to it.  again, it's way out of scale, and absolutely has to be built or your city just fills up with the dead.

You need a huge number of elementary schools and other buildings for a small city to function..

There is an obsession with cremating people in this game as well, which I find bizarre to say the least, as cremation is a private business, is a weird part of deathcare I have no interest in and find depressing which cities' mayors really have nothing to do with. (cemeteries are also private, so wouldn't mind if they would just grow under the right conditions, and would like them to be zoned personally.).

 

More things should be zoned than be plopped: for example, in the original SimCity hospitals would just grow.  I think hospitals should grow in a city builder as well, but I get that people want to place them.. Again, hospitals are private, not run by the public- I would personally prefer to zone  "healthcare" and hospitals can grow there. This isn't my hill to die on though.

 

I would also like to see Seaport areas grow- like they did in SimCity 2000, and perhaps better division of Industrial zoning into light, heavy, and warehouse.  Agricultural zoning should be separate.

There is little "shipping" or logistics in this game, and boats are kind of an afterthought and lifeless. There are no ferries.  Ships do not have a disturbed water trail following them in the water (anno 1800 was able to do this, and a lot of other games do it, but CO couldn't figure that detail out).. which would have been fun.   The water looks bad and waves are too large base game.

 

When a city is small, not all lots should develop until the economic conditions are met and demand is there.  A few people have posted images of their cities that look very nice, but it's only because they manually didn't zone some lots, mixed up the density and intentionally zoned at different depths to achieve the look.  Realistic city growth patterns shouldn't have to be forced, they should just grow realistically and achieving density should be hard to do, and only under the right conditions- again in a "city center effect."

 

Things like airports could have been handled much better - laying a runway and terminal buildings etc, but instead we have a generic airport. That's not fun.

Universities- also not handled well, there should be more flexibility in building placement, smaller buildings, more variety, better building design, and better scale to the buildings.

 

There are no large stadiums - not even one generic baseball, covered arena (which could cover basketball/hockey etc.), or large soccer stadium for your citizens.  No arenas/stadiums seems like a pretty huge oversight to me, and appears to just leave room for a paid DLC.

Stadiums should have been base game.. (a players should get to chose one type of pro sports stadium to build once a city grows to a certain size, and then get another pro sports team after the city grows more like in the original SimCity, but there are no pro stadiums in CS2 of course)   I don't count the chirper football arena as a stadium really, also I find the Chirper in the endzone very annoying personally- CO is like obsessed with themselves and the unoriginal Chirper for whatever reason, and it just isn't that cute.

 

There aren't really very good "government" buildings and there are no options for building say a State Capitol building, or upgrading your government buildings from say a City hall--->State Capital---->National Capital type of things. Government buildings are almost absent from this game, and if they could have been manually added onto with wings and change their colors and add rotunda and stuff, that would have been great, but nope.

 

The building design is horrible to say the least, and in the day of Google Maps and street view, how they couldn't just copy architecture from existing buildings and put it into the game is mind blowing. Instead, really generic looking high-rises and buildings were modeled, many of them using huge amount of Tris in order to create a bland building and the textures are terrible.  I cannot understand how they couldn't just look at google Earth and base the models off of that, but they did not.

 

Even basic stuff like the ground textures and water don't look decent in this game unless modded.  The park sizes are wonky as well, and don't fit most anything very well.

The "Paradox Mods" platform is also horrible, and sometimes just crashes and doesn't work.  The load times for the game are poor and general feel of the load screen and user interface are horrible.

 

There should be some procedural generation for buildings going on- not just using vectors for the lots, but also procedural generation for building heights and wealth levels.

There aren't any very large yards for very rich people (like we saw in SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4) with large mansions with large yards, pools,  and hedgerows.  Instead it's just all kind of bland houses, same sized lots mostly no real wealthy areas that take up more space.

 

It just feels lifeless, and the building models are kind of depressing. There doesn't seem to be a purpose to this game. It feels like it was made by very depressed overworked Finnish people or something who just mailed this game in as a cash grab bait-and switch who don't really have a passion for city building games.

 

SimCity 2013's building designs at least had some character to them- the lights would illuminate from inside, the industry felt very dirty, unless it was high-tech etc. The houses had some character, CS2 just feels bland and dull. The sound effects and atmosphere were better also.

 

This game is just so bad on so many levels.  I sometimes will look at a city map and get inspired to try and build something similar in CS2 - load it up, start building, placing some roads and then just get bored and it and just a few minutes later just quite because it's just so lifeless and dull.

 

My main complaint is the city simulation though, or lake thereof. There really isn't a city simulation, stuff just kind of grows. There is no real challenge. This is a city painter and city detailer game, and building plopper game, but it just isn't fun and I would give it a D overall (was thinking F, but the road layout saves it from that).

 

I will remember some more stuff I don't like about this game a bit later, but that's a decent start, just need to talk out why I hate this game so much. 

 

Thanks for reading, and feel free to disagree of course.

  • Like 2
  • Yes 1
  • Thanks 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Posted:
Last Online:  
 

finally someone with real interest in city building giving an honest opinion 

i couldn't have said better myself 

you are right in every single word about this game 

coming from great city building games to play this is a downgrade 

i waited for this game for so long and once it dropped i was so disappointed
first by the performance issue even on the main menu said a lot about the state of the game then when i loaded my first map greeted with the dull greeny graphics of the game overall so dull and lifeless as you mentioned every thing is green water and land 
the graphics was a huge put off for me like eating food without salt 
CS1 looked much better  SC2013 graphics felt so alive as you mentioned yet a game developed a decade later failed to meet this basic aspect of city building 
till today I'm still playing CS1 and happy with it 
i still remember the developer of CS1 doing interviews how she was so passionate about the game and we could see the results manifests in the game 
but for CS2 as you mentioned its a money grab using the name of the great game built with passion before to grab even more money of people who loved the first one 
same goes for movies now days a remake here and a remaster there milking the last cent of successful titles 

thanks for sharing 

  • Like 2
  • Yes 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Posted:
Last Online:  
 

I agree with most of this but im guessing youve tried none of the amazing free Region packs? They genuinely make the game look sooo much better. The French, UK. German and Eastern European ones are just top tier

Also Healthcare is a public service in most of the world, and Deathcare is public in a lot of Nordic countries.

  • Like 1

"Nobody will be playing SimCity 4 in 2014 anymore!"

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
  • Original Poster
  • Posted:
    Last Online:  
     

    I have downloaded most of the regional packs (the ones that would actually download).  I have to say I am under impressed compared to what I was expecting from them.

    I guess the first thing that shocked me was how large the downloads were for a modest amount of buildings.  The Gigabyte large downloads seemed bigger than what I was expecting (not sure what I was expecting) but I said fine, and started to download the France pack (one of the better packs in retrospect)..


    It took multiple days to download the France pack  (why?) I can generally download 3 or 4 gigabytes in a few minutes for most anything else no problem, but not these regional packs from the Paradox Plaza..  appears the Paradox platform no worky so goood..

    The packs then started to create issues with load times and crashes in the game, which made the regional packs very hard to use (at least for me) and I ended up removing a few of them just so the game wouldn't crash..   I can have maybe 2 regional packs installed at a time at most or the game seems to break.

    The implementation of the regional packs was also strange.. you have to zone them all individually (no option to just kind of paint regions with the style).. and some zoning types simply don't exist for certain packs like office zones etc.. the packs seem incomplete.
     

    Was really looking forward to the "Northeast USA" pack, but it turned out to be a complete dud with very poor building designs that was huge again, was very hard to get downloaded and  that didn't add much once again and greatly increased crashes and load times with not very inspired building designs.

    Paradox Mods is horrible, and they won't stop using it because it is a way to control the content I think.. Control-freak Colossal Order likely wanted to be the only ones to upload building models for their future DLC plans - That's the reality. It's greed, not incompetence imo.


    There is no building upload tool (again a year after released) .. Not because CO can't figure out how to upload custom buildings of course, but because it isn't supposed to work. . That's the reality.  They want total control over all in-game content, and that's why instead of a free building upload tool they instead went for the free regional packs to placate the player base and create excitement post launch (hence the staggered release dates), but all the while making sure regular people can't upload free content, only their vetted people to control the flow of building models.

    "Can't fix the building upload tool.".. sure, whatever you say Colossal Order.. it worked form day 1 in Cities Skylines 1...
     

    This Fiasco of a launch for CS2 Reminds me of SimCity 2013 when they completely lied and claimed: "The game can't be played offline" which turned out to be fraudulent when someone created a mod that proved the game could be played offline just fine, only they didn't want you to do it so they could suck every single penny out of everyone thinking it would be pirated.. and likely to sell DLC later and wanted everyone playing online to push things on them.  Long story short: Maxis lied to everybody, said they were crazy for thinking the game didn't need to be always online.. they knew they were lying, but they did it anyway, just like CO is doing with the Building Upload Tool that "They can't figure out how to fix."

    Paradox Mods is used to control user content, not to somehow help us because the Steam Workshop wasn't working just fine..  Paradox mods was just created as a way to potentially suck more money out of the players by not allowing free content.

    This game is a total disaster.. It could have been good, but unfortunately CO thought they could make more money through controlling all content than they could.. This was pure greed.. and they shouldn't be supported for what they are doing. 

    Showing a trailer made in Unreal engine and then releasing a game in Unity is also a disingenuous greed-based thing to do as they knew the game looked better in Unreal, and they just care about money and fooling people to sell more, not making a quality game like SimCity everything but 2013.    They don't realize if they just made a good game they would have done a lot better, and made more money but they instead got greedy and took the short-cut of basically creating Cities Skylines 1.5, which would be fine if we were living in 2019, but more is expected now with Unreal Engine etc.

    The city simulation just isn't there as I have said before as well. Too many high rise buildings for small towns.

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites
    Posted:
    Last Online:  
     
    On 23.4.2025 at 8:53 PM, Badfish301 said:


    The city simulation just isn't there as I have said before as well. Too many high rise buildings for small towns.

    Im guessing you zone only 6x6 zones? The 2x2 and 2x3 are much smaller and better looking, which just makes me think is this also a feature they forgot to implement? You can only grow 2x2 at the start of the game and as the city gets larger to unlock the bigger building squares? Ohh Colossal Order...


    "Nobody will be playing SimCity 4 in 2014 anymore!"

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites
  • Original Poster
  • Posted:
    Last Online:  
     

    I was trying to take some screen shots of my cities.. but the game keeps crashing lol..

    I will try and upload some as we go along.. Will keep loading the game and take a screenshot or 2 of my cities.. I am not talking out of my rear here.. I have some experience with city building games, and no, I don't zone just 6x6 - the problem I have is the zone depth shouldn't even be created by the mayor, and the concept of boxes and zone depth is destroying this game.. I have a solution to it that involves procedural generation off roads that I can get into some other time.

     

    city1.jpg.d45a0e4eb4e8903e0dfec52fca6e401b.jpgcity3.jpg.c318f2f208e95ab443bf09494fd5338d.jpg
    city4.jpg.7ec0826e7a5b1b6b114bb24a6e46f0ef.jpg

    These are some of my cities.. Game cashed 3 times trying to get these images.. and had to uninstall French pack.

    I love city building games, but this one just has issues.  The graphics are poor, the city simulation doesn't exist really, the zoning mechanism is weird, and it crashes a lot. There is a lot not to like.

    • Like 2

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites
    Posted:
    Last Online:  
     

    I have gotta say, I have given CS2 a go and I have not been pleased. It's not really fun to play and there are way too many small details to ge a city up and running. Trying to get city services to work correctly is a full-time job in itself. Electricity and water won't get to zones with or without wires and pipes. How can a town of 10K have traffic jams on a 10 lane highway?! Why on earth would it take me to an underground view when I am trying to build a road?! I can't even see where it is going! Too much work and not enough fun. And it crashes a lot. It's been a disappointment. SC4 is still the gold standard for city building...

    • Like 1
    • Yes 2

    Schulmania: Purr-suing purr-fection since 2006...

    Schulmania [ Volume 1 ] [ Volume 2 ] [ Volume 3 ] [ Website ] [ Blog ]

    Harar, a Schulmania presentation

    Evean Vansop, a Schulmania presentation

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites
  • Original Poster
  • Posted:
    Last Online:  
     
    On 5/4/2025 at 5:31 PM, Schulmanator said:

    I have gotta say, I have given CS2 a go and I have not been pleased. It's not really fun to play and there are way too many small details to ge a city up and running. Trying to get city services to work correctly is a full-time job in itself. Electricity and water won't get to zones with or without wires and pipes. How can a town of 10K have traffic jams on a 10 lane highway?! Why on earth would it take me to an underground view when I am trying to build a road?! I can't even see where it is going! Too much work and not enough fun. And it crashes a lot. It's been a disappointment. SC4 is still the gold standard for city building...

    Not only does it crash a lot and take a very long time to download regional packs and then constantly re-download things every time you re-start a game (why do it this way?)

    The main problems I have with it are the zoning, lack of procedural generation, lack of city simulation, and the graphics are just awful. Its hard to make the cities look nice with the strange eyesore graphics that have jagged angles and just look weird at most of the more zoomed out play distances.

    I really wish Maxis would come back for another one now that we have better game engines etc. (but they can't try and pull the online-always thing again, which is ironically now another reason CS2 to be a big failure) files need to be downloaded 1 time, stored locally on the hard drive.. no more of this "mods are downloading" thing every time the game loads.

    Whoever makes the next City Building game also needs to employ a few city planners/ geographers and urbanists who understand how cities grow.. CS2 completely missed the mark.

    • Like 1
    • Yes 1

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites
    Posted:
    Last Online:  
     

    I myself have a hard time trying to see what exactly they were going for with CS2. I gave it a chance and was disappointed, and I dare say CS2 is a long way from the great game its predecessor has become (albeit much to the credit of the modding community - but SC4 was no different in that respect).

    What bugs me the most is that a bunch of weird design decisions (that would likely have gotten axed had there been a more focused development process, imo) made it into the game. What I'm talking about is things that hardly add to the experience yet obviously were regarded as being worth spending valuable development time on. The worst culprit in my opinion is the simulation in general, which apparently simulates weird-ass details like every single citizen's exact wage and prices for vegetables... like, come on. This is something neither I nor the developers should have to deal with in a city building game. Worst thing about it is that they obviously made it so convoluted that they still need to balance and patch strange variables like these, trying to fix unnecessary details such as parks overflowing with homeless people. It feels to me like they got into a rabbithole trying to perfect the simulation but got to a point where they lost focus and it got out of hand.

    Graphically, the game can look really good under very specific conditions and the vanilla assets look much more realistic than those in CS1. However most of the time the presentation is oddly plain and sterile - CS1 just had way more life and pop to it despite having less refined graphics (it can look especially stunning at night time). Grass and concrete look utterly drab and boring in CS2 and there's hardly any structure to be seen. Everything looks like it's made of construction paper and feels devoid of detail. Seasonal changes are too abrupt - 1st of December comes around and suddenly the game feels like someone flicked a switch labeled "Turn everything blue". The snow effect is weird. Add to that graphical glitches that haven't been fixed since day one, like weird artifacts outside city boundaries and broken emissive vehicle LODs, and you've got yourself a sour tasting pixel soup.

    What is beyond me is how they've not even used their full potential in some cases even though it would have hardly meant any extra work. To me, the maps are the worst aspect in that regard. I only recently learned from browsing user-created maps that the map sections you get to purchase don't need to be rectangular - they can actually be any shape under the sun. Yet all the vanilla maps I know use stupid squares that don't comform to the landscape. Why? No clue. Another big oof to me is that it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have someone make some beautiful vanilla maps. The tools were all there apparently. Yet what we got were the same amateurishly created vanilla maps as we got in CS1 - a height map likely created in MS paint with some sad trees aimlessly sprinkled across it, done. Couldn't they have hired someone to do it right, as they did with their region packs?

    Not to mention other half-assed features like traffic accidents that regularly send cars flying across half the map, "forest fires" that consist of a single burning pine tree on an uninhabited end of the map and strangely out of place radio announcements that will term said flaming plant a natural disaster. Well... I'll give the game some more time, but I find myself having so much more fun playing CS1, I doubt the day will ever come that I'll switch over to its sequel.

    • Like 1
    • Yes 1
    • Haha 1

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites
    Posted:
    Last Online:  
     

    Hey. I was looking for people who share the same opinion to validate my feelings, hahaha. But jokes aside, yes, I agree with you in like 99% of what you said. THE GAME LOOKS LIKE A 3D ARCHITECTURE SOFTWARE FROM THE 2000s in certain angles. Like, what is up with the tornado? It looked so much better in cs1. The sewage dump station that has lots of 2d images to MIMIC water. Bro, for real, how did someone think this game could be launched like this?

    The textures are TOO PERFECT, it feels unrealistic. "Oh, but you can add details later" so, at least, give us the option to detail it. Or maybe put a mechanic where things get wear and tear over time. 

    It's lifeless and dull. You described it all. There are no people using parks or buildings.

    They could make some built in LUT's or "looks" like if you want a realistic look, you can toggle this preset, or if you want a vibrant look, like a game, you could toggle that preset. We have the camera mode, but, do I know how to use it? No. and it's not intuitive or easy to achieve the look you want. Maybe you could change the ground, or water textures to better suit your map theme.

    The sound effects. Dude, it's MILES better in SimCity 2013. The small camera shake when you place a building, or being able to plop buildings within those little blue dots and how you could hover the cursor over them, and they would all make a sound was cool too. The sound effects of demolishing a road or a building or placing them down like something really heavy just fell from the sky was so satisfying.

    ALSO, the menus and how the song would change if you enter editor mode and softly transition to the regular soundtrack when you exit it. That was pure art. And, of course, the soundtrack itself, was so iconic that it's used nowadays on the background of cities skylines gameplays. They could make similar music, that style was so awesome. Maybe get in touch with the creator of SimCity's soundtrack. "Oh but we want our own style" Then make something remarkable or satisfying to listen to. The ads on the radio are fun, but after hearing the same ones for the 300th time it gets boring; we already have annoying adds on everything we use for free nowadays, I don't want ads on my game either, even if they're not real.

    The cranes. What the actual ... is that? SimCity 2013 showed the animation of the building slowly rising from the ground. That was so cool and made a lot of sense. In cs2, just a crane shows up and the building appears. Like, bro... Also, the details, there are no props like an under construction building would have like wood, bricks etc. it's just an empty lot with a crane in the very center. 

    It feels like a beta version. In fact, it feels so beta it shouldn’t even be shown — more like an alpha stage. Like, the game is 10% completed. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating, but that's what I feel. 

    The jagged edges on buildings are SO annoying. The trees look they were made of cardboard or for a scale model and don't have any dirt under them or the ruined texture. Maybe having an option or a brush to remove it if you don't want it would be nice. GIVE US THE CHOICE.

    I NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE DEFAULT MAPS. WHAT ARE THOSE? They look like they were made by an unexperienced player. The community can make maps 100x better. Just hire someone from the community or make a partnership or pay them to make the maps if you can't.

    At certain angles, it looks very good. I don't know if it's the lighting or something else. But in others, it just looks crappy. They had the guts to say the community was being toxic. Yes, some people were definitely not giving constructive criticism, but, what else would you expect?

    I thought we would see a SimCity 2013 2024 version. They had so much potential. In fact, if EA was to make another city builder to compete with it, they would DESTROY CS. I bet.

    I'm not even going to talk about performance. Likewise, I know you can't expect a heavy game like cities to run smooth as butter, but man, It's almost unplayable if you have an intermediary PC.

    I just wouldn't say they should make all the hospitals private. Like, I think in the US most of them are, but here, in Brazil, there are lots of public ones too. Maybe they could add a new mechanic where you invest in healthcare and private hospitals or clinics could spawn like growable buildings and help in the healthcare demand, for example. Maybe limiting the amount of them, too, so the game gets the job done for you or something like that. Or maybe having private healthcare buildings could give you a discount on maintenance costs.

    Again. I feel bad for saying all of this, it sounds like I'm just roasting them or saying that their work is pure crap. No, IT'S NOT what I mean. I recognize their effort. So much so that we are fans of cities skylines and we love the first game. But it's showing its age. And they were on the right track, but missed a huge opportunity. I just want the game we've been waiting for years. Is it that hard to make?

    Anyway. I really, really hope they manage to fix it all (I doubt it, because the game is what it is) OR another game developer creates a "perfect" modern city building game with all we ever wanted.

    Let's debate more. Maybe they could see this.

    • Like 1
    • Sad 1

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites
  • Original Poster
  • Posted:
    Last Online:  
     
    On 8/22/2025 at 7:27 PM, Guga092 said:

    Let's debate more. Maybe they could see this.

    Honestly, there is just no chance this game can be fixed well enough to be good now. 

    This thing is a total write-off.  They haven't allowed custom buildings after this long- there's no way they fix the underlying simulation issues and memory hog problems.   The game is just an unstable piece of trash.

    Like you said- it can be made to look ok at certain angles, but generally looks sharp/weird and not right. 

    The city simulation is horrible- super tall skyscrapers for tiny area cities.. they think that's cool and exciting, but it's not.

    Plopping the largest buildings- I always said this was a bad idea, and it turned out it was.  Building growth- again, a crane shows up and a building just appears.. come on.

    They couldn't care less about how a city actually grows it appears.  Super tall buildings just out of nowhere.. no city center effect.. no really good or bad parts to the city from the growth models.. just generic looking garbage buildings and a ton of body incinerators. 

    The zoning mechanic is horrible.

    The only redeeming qualities are the road and rail layout, and that's literally it.

    Like you said - the base maps are just horrible- it's as if a small child created them.. and not a smart small child, like one that doesn't give a crap.  They had so much time to make this game better than the first one, and besides being slightly graphically better, it is worse in many ways- including the map editor, water, no custom buildings, super huge downloads for the regional packs that seem to break/not download right.

    We need another company to take over, because CO just tried to mail this one in as a cash-grab after showing everyone a trailer made in Unreal Engine 5.  

    I have no respect for this company, and actually don't like them now, because we get so few City Building game releases and they took the market share, discouraging others from making a good city building game akin to something we actually wanted in the first place.

    • Like 1

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites
    Posted:
    Last Online:  
     

    Hi,

    I study Game Design at the HTW Berlin and am also actively interested in local mobility/city planning politics and we have exams coming up. For my English presentation on analyzing/criticising a game I chose C:S2 and I absolutely agree with maybe all of the points you stated here. I think I will use many of them in my presentation. Thank you!

    • Sad 1

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites
    Posted:
    Last Online:  
     

    Automated Notice Message

    All posts after 1 March, 2026 @ 01:37 GMT were lost in the site crash.

    We've added this message thread divider in every topic across all forums for what were then active threads. (We decided active is if the most recent extant post (from the backup) was on or after 1 January, 2026.)

    This divider serves as notice that the conversation was interrupted. Answers and further discussion which used to be here have been lost. Keep this in mind when replying. Our hope is to rebuild what is missing.


    I am Lab Rat.

    Share this post


    Link to post
    Share on other sites

    Sign In or register to comment...

    To comment in reply, you must be a community member

    Sign In  

    Already have an account? Sign in here.

    Sign In Now

    Create an Account  

    Sign up to join our friendly community. It's easy!  

    Register a New Account


    ×

    Thank You for the Continued Support!

    Simtropolis depends on donations to fund site maintenance costs.
    Without your support, we just would not be in our 24th year online!  You really help make this a great community. *:thumb:

    But we still need your support to stay online. If you're able to, please consider a donation to help us stay up and running. This helps sustain a platform where we can share our community creations for years to come.

    Make a Donation, Get a Gift!

    Expand your city with the best from the Simtropolis Exchange.
    Make a Donation and get one or all three discs today!

    STEX Collections

    By way of a "Thank You" gift, we'd like to send you our STEX Collector's DVD. It's some of the best buildings, lots, maps and mods collected for you over the years. Check out the STEX Collections for more info.

    Each donation helps keep Simtropolis online, open and free!

    Thank you for reading and enjoy the site!

    More About STEX Collections