The citizens of Cities Skylines 2 are fickle, frustrating, and often inexplicable. You build them schools. You build them universities. You designate zone after zone of commercial districts. And yet they continue to complain that there aren’t enough educational opportunities available and that they can’t get jobs. Meanwhile, some of your more advanced buildings are backed up with garbage – even if you’ve spent hours perfecting the trash collection services in your city, the problem doesn’t seem to go away. But that’s all about to change. With the likes of Manor Lords and Civilization 7 vying for the top strategy game crown, Colossal Order is not sleeping on CS2.
The new Cities Skylines 2 update may seem small, but it contains some seriously significant fixes for the city-building game’s sometimes busted simulation. We recently heard that three new content creator packs, alongside Urban Promenades and Modern Architecture, are on the way. Now, Colossal Order delivers a fresh patch that adjusts job-seeking values, makes your citizens more likely to actually attend school and college, and eradicates the overflowing garbage problem.
Specifically, Cities Skylines 2 patch 1.1.12f1 optimizes “citizens’ job-seeking calculations.” If the labor market in your game has often felt skewed in your disfavor, now it should work a lot better. Likewise, the garbage accumulation values for buildings including the post-sorting facility, the international airport, the wastewater treatment plant, and basically all varieties of power plant have been adjusted down, so they won’t become overwhelmed with waste.
Most significantly, the new Cities Skylines 2 update increases student amounts for college and university buildings, and if you have the radio telescope research building somewhere in your town, you can use it to increase city-wide interest in higher education, pushing more of your citizens towards getting degrees and becoming eligible for higher-paying jobs.
The user interface has been tweaked and further perfected and there’s a useful fix connected to Cities Skylines 2 mods. Now, if you load a custom map that also has its own custom climate, that climate should actually load in properly – in the past, you would often get the map, but not the custom-made weather settings.
In terms of upcoming fixes, Colossal Order says that it is aware of an issue whereby hotels complain of not having enough customers, despite all the rooms being occupied. The studio says it is working on a solution. More than a year since Cities Skylines 2 first launched, it may not yet be the game that we all expected and hoped for, but these incremental improvements are very welcome. Given some more time, hopefully, CS2 can find its feet.
In the meantime, you might want to try some of the other best strategy games, or maybe the best RTS games available on PC right now.
You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or grab our PCGN deals tracker to net yourself some bargains.