Cities: Skylines II’s heavily anticipated “Economy 2.0 update” is now live, bringing with it the titular overhaul to the game’s economic systems, plus changes to building upgrades, modding support and more.
It’s a significant milestone for the city-builder, which stumbled out of its late October launch and biffed a premium DLC release earlier this spring. Developer Colossal Order went back to the drawing board with a pledge to get core systems right before it started shilling any more DLC; this patch is part of that effort.
In Patch 1.1.5f, players will find new options for sub-buildings in the upgrade menu for City Service buildings. If that sounds a bit esoteric, don’t worry, there’s an updated tutorial for the City Service building type. But the gist of it is that these buildings can be relocated and removed, or the whole sub-building feature can be turned on or off to the user’s preference.
As far as the economy goes, obviously when dealing with a system this large, it’s going to take some time to see the effect of these features. But economy means more than money changing hands. It affects things like solid waste accumulation, which now takes into account population groups like students, prisoners, commuter employees, even the homeless.
The overall tuning of city services means that electricity import costs are going up, and water service fees also will be adjusted. The goal is to “make the economy more challenging and transparent.” Government subsidies for these services still exist, but they have been tuned with that objective in mind, too.
There are a slew of other modding and performance changes; check the full patch notes to see if they scratch a particular itch for you. The bottom line is Cities: Skylines II has rolled a long-promised update that should get around to resolving a lot of the friction that made the launch version of the game feel unpolished, if not incomplete.
Cities: Skylines II is available for Windows PC via Steam. A console version for Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 is planned, and tentatively slotted for a fall 2024 release, following a delay out of its originally planned spring 2024 window. That was pushed back as Colossal Order redoubled efforts to fix the main game on its lead platform for users who had bought it there.
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