Cities: Skylines II has continued to evolve since its launch in October 2023, and now we're about to be treated to the fifth update, entitled "Spring Cleaning". In it we get a whole host of new features, as well as a bevy of bug fixes and performance improvements. The new "historical" feature is a very welcome one as sometimes you just want to preserve a building's majesty rather than allowing it to "evolve" into something else.
Sometimes, there are moments when you’d just want to keep your city and buildings looking a certain way, without upgrades changing the aesthetic of your houses. Luckily, with our next patch, there is now a solution for this; we have added a Historical Building option, which prevents selected buildings from leveling up or being abandoned! This means that if you want to stop the progression of your building at level two and keep that specific look, you can choose to do so!
In addition to the feature above, there's also a new User Interface and benchmarking tool to the team continue to gather data to tune. We also have a lot of improvements to the overall Gameplay flow. Let's get into the details:
For example, we have adjusted the education system in a way that better aligns with the elementary and high school demand. Previously, you might have noticed that elementary schools were filled with students, while higher education remained empty. This was caused by elementary school education lasting 7 times longer per student than high school. We have now balanced these demands, which means that you should see more students attending high schools as well! In addition, there was a secondary bug where the students used to participate in leisure activities only during study time, which we have now fixed in this patch.
We have implemented a lot of other fixes for some of the issues you have reported as well, like citizens getting stuck during robberies, outside connections not working with non-highway roads, photo mode visual settings not matching the game rendering, and more! We also investigated the ports in the Bridges & Ports DLC. Players with extensive ports in their builds will find a significant fix to an issue where commercial and industrial buildings did not use the ports to upgrade buildings at all for importing goods and storing mail, even when they were available. After this fix, the level progression of commercial and industrial buildings will work properly again.When it comes to traffic, we have removed the citizens’ ability to move in and out with taxis to reduce traffic jams, and fixed the issue where buses, trams, and trains could get stuck in a permanent boarding state, preventing departure and causing vehicle queues. For those who would like to increase the amount of bicycles in their city, we have implemented a feature where the existing Urban Cycling Initiative policy will increase the chance of bicycle usage from 20% to 50%. This will be great for anyone trying to create a bicycle-centric city build.
After thorough research, we noticed that there is somewhat of a problem with the dogs and the overwhelming number of them. Now, as much as we love our furry friends here at Iceflake, having tens of dogs in one household is a bit too much. We have now reduced the overall number of dogs by adjusting the household pet limits and spawn probabilities, which in turn reduces the number of dogs in your cities.
The office buildings and their demand have received a fix in this patch as well. Previously, due to a bug, the office demand mostly depended on a company's demand for office products, almost completely ignoring citizen usage. However, the only office good that companies need is software, so almost all of your offices would produce that, which caused too many software companies to spawn. These production statistics have now been adjusted in a way where they are sampled over a longer time period, which reduces the fluctuations caused by the time of day. Signature office buildings have also received a fix, since they were previously treated incorrectly as available for sale, causing the office demand to actually drop.
The new benchmarking tool will be a helpful for both the team and for players wanting to find where the game needs additional adjustments to remain stable. It's awesome to see this level of detail as it shows a lot more than just a number.
It's pretty clear that the team is putting a great deal of resources into addressing fan concerns, as well as layers of polish to help the game shine. What comes next? Well, they addressed that as well:
As per usual, we have already started planning and preparing the next patch, which includes more bug fixes, as well as some adjustments to the traffic and pathfinding, for example. While we keep working on the next patch, we hope that you will enjoy Spring Cleaning to the fullest when, if all goes as planned, it launches at the end of April! Let us know what you think about the changes, and what you are most excited to see!
An exciting future for Cities: Skylines II, and you won't have to wait much longer to get to blowing out the cobwebs!
Cities: Skylines II is available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
