Cities Skylines 2 has realistic economy, layoffs and even homelessness

I hope it isn't locked into a liberalism ideology too much. If I want to make food and housing a human right, workers employed by the state, and/or democratically owned workplaces do I have the option for that?
My utopian city has no landlords or bourgeoisie and I hope I can make that happen.
- Why don't you go make a socialist city builder game, then? The means of production are right there for the seizing, my friend, go learn game dev right now.
  
  No learn, only seize
  Edit: guys I was making a joke. If you're going to seize anything, please learn how it works first.
  
  Sounds like Topico.
  
  It’s communist, not socialist, but there is the fantastic Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic game made by slovakians as a criticism of the time under the soviet union.
  Colossal Order is Finnish though, so I have reasonable confidence they know socialism != communism. It’s more of an interesting twist that they let you try the orphan-crushing option.
  
  You mean “workers and resources” ?
- Paradox has been very welcoming of modders in CS1, I see no reason why someone wouldn't be able to make a mod for a socialist-inspired ideology in CS2, although that would be a biggg undertaking
  
  Eh, there's probably some easy workarounds to be "good enough". Subsidized public housing (which I think will be in base game) to ensure zero homelessness, rent control measures, being able to tax the shit out of high income earners and provide subsidies to low income earners, and free/publicly funded public services like healthcare, education, transit (which should be in the base game) and I'll be mostly happy.
  Guillotine for billionaires would certainly be fun, but I'll live without it. Having an economy 100% controlled by the state would be a bit too much micromanagement for me so I'm fine with business creation being driven by market needs.
- Do... do you not understand that city design and political and economic ideology are inextricably linked?

I'm interested, just don't want to eventually spend 2k on dlc. To get the entirety of the first it's 377$ with a 9% discount. Which is a bit insane.
- What if you only bought the expansions that speak to you though? I don't need the content creator pack or the K pop radio station, but I did want Green Cities and Mass Transit, for instance.
  
  I'd rather that basics be part of the game from the start. Mass transit should have been there to begin with. Looking at a lot of these dlc it seems like they should've been there by default.
- I used to be perfectly happy with Paradox's "slew of DLC" business model... until they raised their prices.
  Before that, I would buy everything as soon as it dropped. No biggie. Now I only buy DLC when it eventually gets those deep discount sales. I'm open to their experimental "subscription" & "seasonal bundle" models, though... so long as they include everything and they don't get cute with exclusions.
  
  Please, no more subscriptions. Let me own the content I purchase, as much as anyone ever owns digital content at least.
- Just because the DLC exists doesn't mean you need it. I bought the original Cities Skylines, haven't bought any DLC, but still had a great time. It looks like this time around they'll also include more features from DLC into the base game. Evaluate the game based on what it is. Is it worth the money? Then buy it. Is it not worth the money, then don't.

Seems like it's going to be a pretty difficult game, if we are supposed to solve problems that aren't even being solved in real life.
- But the real-life problems aren't unsolved because there are not solutions. It's just that the meaningful player base is wildly toxic and spends the entire time griefing rather than trying to build or progress.
  
  Yeah, the lack of transparency in the Pay-to-win game mechanics is annoying as heck. It's frustrating to be lectured on F2P deck building strategies by someone who is P2P and pretending to be F2P (And that's ignoring the contradictory advice of "Break out of the meta and do something new" and "Don't spend your resources frivolously and don't do anything too outlandish, stick with the established strategies").
  The P2P playerbase are functionally playing an entirely different game, and whilst I am fairly sure that game is still grindy and difficult in its own ways (I've noticed that P2P players are often so OP that they only engage with the co-op mechanics superficially, if at all. That makes me sad because the only reason I've stuck playing this game is how incredible the co-op multiplayer is and as salty as I am about P2P advantages being OP, I want everyone to experience the parts of this game that I have truly loved).
  This is why solving the real life problems stalls so much, because "progress" literally means something different across different chunks of players. It's why griefers sometimes say "I don't know why you're getting angry, I'm literally just playing the game". That used to make me rage, but I've realised they're not lying, they're just playing a different game. Now I'm just sad that I have to spend so much energy trying to keep them out of my game if I want to make any progress
- Maybe gamifying our social ills will lead to better ways to manage them.
- But the thing is, we know how to fix them. It’s just that our governments refuse to in order to funnel taxpayer money to giant corporations.
- That's a big reason a could never get into City Skylines, I have 0 interest in managing roadways, and I feel like that's 90% of what that game is. Now they're going to throw even more micromanaging on top of that, I don't think I'll be looking to get this one.
  
  And many people feel the precise opposite, the whole point of the game is to micromanage
  To me this new game makes the first one feel like a prototype, i'm so much more interested now that there's actual sensible simulation of things and people don't pull a car out of their ass or merrily walk 30km to work
  
  For me, CS1 shows how difficult it is to build effective roads. I solved traffic on my map with an extensive, fast and direct public transit network, and well-connected bike paths along the same alignment for those who don't want to pay. For roads specifically, timed&sensor traffic lights (TMPE mod) and one way systems in built up areas work well too from what I've seen.
  I am a little scared of the extra management they've popped in to CS2 but I'm hopeful they'll get the balance right
- All the problems we have in current cities are problems we choose to have.

I'm hoping (more than likely in vain) that we can have the opportunity to do some of the wackier stuff seen in SimCity: Societies. By that, I mean I would love to craft an authoritarian police state, a beautiful pagoda-filled village or a Disney-esque paradise town.
SimCity: Societies was very bad in a lot of aspects (game froze all the time, roads were awful and it was massively unbalanced) but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss it at all when it comes to city building. I just wanna make clown schools and have a bunch of free-roaming clowns, damnit.

Game is $1 but the dlc is like $2K a piece.
- This is Paradox we're talking about. There will be 2,000 pieces of DLC for $10 a piece.

I kind of hope they add dystopian elements. It would be an extra thing on top of my message of my sewage canals

I really enjoyed the first, though I was terrible at managing traffic.
Now I can be terrible at managing traffic AND homeless!
- Yea, my cities' bottleneck was always getting the traffic to be able to have the hearses do their job. Somehow that's what causes a city to stop growing, compared to other factors like the economy.
  
  Corpse throughput, yay!

I wonder if building realistic cities is possible. Not being able to do it was turn off for me in the first game
- What do you mean? I thought the first one was one of the most "grounded" city builders ever made. Do you mean specific mechanics or maybe visual styles?
  
  I mean how cities are made/planned in real life
  In Cities Skylines you have residencial, commercial, industrial and office zones, right? That is not how you make a city irl. Photographic proof
  https://iloftmalaga.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/23.jpg
  https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/vr-splice-j/06/2c/0c/ee.jpg
  https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e8/3c/19/e83c19a673784c08e68b45cf58a937e2.jpg
  https://www.65ymas.com/uploads/s1/77/34/5/calle-mateos-gago-de-sevilla-una-de-las-ma-s-emblematicas-de-la-ciudad.jpeg
  https://www.madrid.es/UnidadesDescentralizadas/UDCMedios/noticias/2010/01Enero/21Jueves/NotasPrensa/TioPepe/ficheros/Edificio%20tio%20pepe.jpg
  irl when you make an apartment building the ground floor is used for commercial purposes (you can have banks, restaurants, clothes stores, butchers, surpermarkets, whatever...) as you can see in the photos I linked.
  Even more, you can buy (or rent) an appartment and make it an office for your business, so, appart from industrial zones, everything is mixed irl
  The developer is European idk why the game focuses only in american style city planning that are highly inefficient and car-centric. You barelly need a car when you have access to all kind of services at 10 or 15 minutes walking
  The ingame "High density residential zones" should include some type of commercial activity in the city to be more realistic
  
  I know one thing it didn't simulate was parking

I remember years ago playing SimCity for the 1st time at my cousin's house. Started playing in the evening and stopped when the birds came out and the sun came up...much to my surprise.
I got Cities-Skylines about a year ago and I think I put less than 5 hours into it.