Cities Skylines 2.

it runs fine on my 1080ti, though i haven't reached a super large city yet. there are good things, road tools are much better, buildings are much better scaled, better graphics with higher textures, more city management stuff (taxes for each sector of the city and by education).

there are gameplay bugs. some aspects are horribly balanced such as city services, its near impossible to obtain a surplus budget, buildings while more scaled dont have much diversity, to do zoning on correct side of the road you have to place down paths.

there are dlc features from first game missing, custom industries, custom parks. landscaping is much more limited there are no props and fences and shit. no bikes (ikr) though pedestrian streets do exist there are no pedestrian areas.

i also miss the mods from the first game like road anarchy, move it and network multitool. such bangers.

i think the game has a good 'base', it needs more time and more love from modders. they increased the price on release, right before release it was going for like $10 in Argentina region, now its $25. wait for discounts.

Rocz did a review of it on donoteat with mcmansion hell where they tear apart the architecture for 2 hours

I also have a 3080 and the performance has been ok, it's not like a city builder needs to run at 60 fps.

I think the traffic management is a lot more fun in CS2, you still need to think about it but it's not like in CS1 where a highway would get clogged and in an hour society has collapsed because dump trucks can't make it to a suburb anymore. The solutions to traffic problems also feel a lot more varied, it's not just "build your city around an even bigger system of roundabouts".

My biggest complaint so far is that building on uneven terrain is a huge pain and the results often look terrible.

OK. Thanks for all the input. Game looks like I could enjoy it but after some thinking im gonna wait and probably check it out somewhere in 2024 after some more patches. Plus lets not fool ourselves I still got a ton of other games to play 😅

I'm having a grand time with it. It added things that I desperately wanted in the first game: mixed use zoning, row houses, low income housing (although I desperately want to expand this aspect of the game), properly scaled facilities, and far better integrated mass transit. I also really like how easy it is to mix the base game styles, and I hope this means that using all the available architecture options will be more consistent than it was in CS1, where some were "specializations", and some were themes, and wish could be used with which wasn't explained anywhere, and custom themes were a nightmare.

I am a bike hater, so I don't care that there aren't any yet. Catch my disabled ass on the bus.

Spent about 20 minutes in it and just wasn't vibing with it. Gonna wait a while and try it again, maybe some time next year.

seems pretty cool I bought and had to refund it because my Rx 570 was a potato for this game

Traffic management seems to be easier in 2. I'm making more or less the same kind of grid layout, the only difference being stock instead of modded assets, and the traffic jams aren't as brutal. However now there are dynamic car accidents so roads can be shut down at random until multiple services respond to it.

I like it as a foundation. It's yet to crash, the framerate is decent, there's less micromanagement of water/electricity. I don't like that the gameplay loop encourages suburb sprawl and pedestrian/bike alternatives aren't yet in the game. There's never enough low-density housing to meet demand. Parks are such a major part of the first game for me as a garden city nerd that the sequel feels empty without them. I'd wait to buy it until mod support and stability patches come online since I'll probably just end up going back to the first game after the novelty wears off.

I'm waiting a year for them to fix all the bugs, address the major complaints and for the modders to inevitably step in and fix it for them.

From what I've read so far the game basically forces you into building a suburban hellscape with single detacted homes, and that's like the exact opposite of what I like building in CS:1.

I'm having a nice time with my second city, Funkingrad.

The game's definitely a little fiddly, but I'm enjoying taking my time to get the city just how I want it, even if that means doing a lot of zoning in pieces so the buildings I want come in. It's definitely possible to get a nice density gradient if you're careful about forcing the smaller footprint medium density stuff. I've also been going very slowly, trying to have a naturalistic progression. I'm not stoked on how very large some of the ploppables are, especially since a lot just have extensive landscaping padding their footprint.

One nice touch is I think the day/night cycle might be latitude based, the lakes map I'm playing on, presumably based on a location in Finland, has really extreme variation between summer and winter daylight hours. Also for some reason the rain seems to blow sideways on this map like all of the time. I think that might be because it has strong winds.

It's alright, performance is bad on high end, I play it fine on an old RX580, just lowered some settings and runs decent (there are occasional stutters however, there's definitely something going awry). Sad that the trains are automatic I guess, these were also automatic in CS1 but oh well.