Cities: Skylines 2 is an ambitious city builder aiming to inject its virtual worlds with a sense of modern realism. In the original game, various systems worked behind the scenes to make created cities feel lived-in, as players controlled waste management, council operation, water, and electricity. The upcoming sequel is stretching the bounds of these systems, with fresh new operations that require careful monitoring.
As detailed in a new blog post, developers at Colossal Order have bulked out the requirements and regulations for city systems, making services management more essential for keeping cities running, and citizens happy.
‘The basic gameplay of city service remains the same in Cities: Skylines 2: Your task is to provide the citizens with various services that increase their quality of life, bring them happiness and keep them safe,’ Samantha Woods, Community Manager Colossal Order detailed in the latest game update.
‘However, unlike in the previous game where you wanted to cover the city evenly with all the different service types, the road to the perfect city in Cities: Skylines 2 lies in understanding the needs of the citizens and fulfilling them by providing suitable services as well as other activities such as places to go shopping.’
Read: Cities: Skylines 2 announced by Paradox Interactive
Citizens will have a variety of needs, at all ages. For example, senior citizens will have more free time and need to be entertained with new facilities – and eventually, they’ll need access to both healthcare, and deathcare. In Cities: Skylines 2, you’ll need to pre-prepare deathcare services including cemeteries and crematoriums to ensure everyone is looked after, even in the event of an untimely death.
It’s not just older citizens that will need access to these unique services, either. As detailed in the latest Colossal blog, a range of natural and unnatural disasters can also befall citizens – including building collapses and traffic accidents. You’ll need to be prepared for this eventuality.
As in prior games, you’ll also need to manage the scope and spread of these essential services by ensuring adequate access to electricity, water, and waste management. You can even fork out for more expensive Nuclear Power to ensure your city is thriving – but this has its own downsides, too.
To keep everything running smoothly, a multi-skilled populace is essential. That means making space for schools and higher education, on top of everything else. In neighbourhoods where jobs and education opportunities are reduced, crime may fester – and it’s here that another of Cities: Skylines 2‘s systems comes into play.
Where your citizens commit crimes, they may be sent to jail by roaming cops. When this occurs, they’ll need to serve a sentence – and as Colossal puts it ‘prisons function also as production facilities, producing resources used by manufacturing companies in the city’. As a prisoner, your citizen will be required to perform manual labour, giving back to their city for the duration of their sentence.
Based on the details included in Colossal’s latest blog, it appears Cities: Skylines 2 will be an ambitious and fast-moving city-building simulator with a number of surprising, interlocking mechanics. Players will certainly have their work cut out for them if they want a thriving cityscape where citizens remain happy, productive, and free.
Cities: Skylines 2 launches for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows PC on 24 October 2023.
