When it was first released back in 2023, Cities Skylines 2 had a lot of problems. There were performance issues and key parts of the simulation relating to the economy, traffic patterns, and taxation were imbalanced or frustratingly skewed. Now, more than a year later, Colossal Order’s city-building sequel is in much better shape. With games like Manor Lords and the almighty Civilization 7 competing for strategy fans’ attention, the new Cities Skylines 2 update, which addresses employment and the economy, is an excellent reason to keep playing or otherwise give the game another chance.
The last major Cities Skylines 2 update was the Detailer’s Patch back in December. The region packs have also landed, alongside the Urban Promenades and Modern Architecture creator packs, bringing significant improvements and bulking out the construction and design options. At the moment, the original city-building game is still winning the Steam popularity contest – in the last 30 days, Cities Skylines 1 has averaged 11,626 players concurrently, as opposed to CS2’s 7,700. But Cities 2 is continually getting better. The new update targets our frustrations regarding in-game employment.
Put simply, until now there have been too many dead people in Cities Skylines 2. Your citizens reach retirement and age out of the job market, potentially making it difficult to staff all your industries, offices, and commercial enterprises with workers. The new update improves the “death probability curve.”
In short, once you have the new update installed, all your senior citizens will be aged down to early adulthood or the “mid-range” of old age. The citizen age is now limited to 120 in-game days, and if you have a lot of dead people in your savegame who haven’t been collected yet by a hearse, they’ve been summarily deleted.
When you first install the patch, you might experience a sudden spike in unemployment – a lot of senior citizens who were previously too old to work are now regressed to working age, so that means a lot more people who need jobs. However, over time, this will even out.
“As some of them [senior citizens, aged down by the update] reenter the workforce…unemployment may rise depending on the job situation in the city,” Colossal Order says. “The amount of seniors in the city is expected to drop very low, but as the population ages and the new death probability calculations take effect, it will stabilize at a more reasonable level than previously.”
As well as employment and citizens’ lifespans, the new Cities Skylines 2 update also provides some interface fixes thanks to fresh terraforming, vegetation, parks, and landscaping icons. There are also balance changes for the two creator packs – in both Urban Promenades and Modern Architecture, vehicle capacities, upkeeps, and workplaces have all been rebalanced.
There’s more work to come on Cities Skylines 2, but gradually, Colossal Order is taking the game in the right direction.
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