Cities: Skylines II

[R55NA]

Played the opening tutorial yesterday at 2560 x 1440p, Medium, on a 3080 10gb and was getting 60fps.

But that was with a few roads and buildings haha.

Many visual glitches, roads turning pure black when building, traffic light shadows flickering, weird delay/lag in mouse movement (maybe stuttering). Unclear visually if I am connected to a road, when building them. Upgrading roads to Medium from Small gives bizarre, ugly results.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

I saw this twitter thread claiming that CS2 is using Unity's new High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP, https://unity.com/srp/High-Definition-Render-Pipeline) which is why the game is running poorly on most systems. They then claim that it will be difficult to optimize the game further for lower spec systems.

Based on these claims, it seems like it will be unlikely for the game to perform any better without making changes to their rendering pipeline (such as reverting to Unity's original rendering pipeline), which will obviously reduce visual quality of the game










EDIT:

Dug through the replies, a product manager from Unity claims that the issues are from high quality presets and that the game runs fine on lower settings

 

[eran0004]

I had my first try yesterday. The game certainly renders in a different way compared to CS1, but I can’t say it runs worse. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is that CS2 appears to skip frames, when CS1 slowed down and waited for each frame to be rendered. For me it’s especially noticeable when I play at the highest game speed.

The continuous curves road tool is great, it makes it so much faster and easier to build long country roads.

The level of detail is really good, you can zoom in all the way to street level and at close range it already looks a lot better than modded CS1. At long range I’d say that modded CS1 is better due to the use of decals and resource textures to add variety to the landscape, but vanilla CS2 is better than vanilla CS1. The environmental effects is a big upgrade.

Shadows are too dark for my liking, I haven’t found an option to tweak those but I guess that will come in a mod fairly quickly. Nighttime is also very dark, don’t know what I’m looking forward to most there - a mod to make it a little less dark or a mod to fill it with terrors.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I've restarted a few times now, no real issues to speak of, but I've seen a few people complaining that things are 'broken' with the simulation. I've noticed a couple of problems myself, mostly around the zoning demand... however I remembered last night Biffa talking about managing demand in one of his videos... something along the lines of 'you can't just zone in response to the demand meter, you have to zone to manage the demand meter'. I do think you have to be more careful and pay more attention to your population demographics. Minor things like when citizens complain about rent being too high, you need to zone more of their type of property for example, never really had to think about that in C:S1.

The one thing I can't seem to stop is torrents of complaints about healthcare. I've maxed out the healthcare centre, it's in the middle of the district and is assigned to that district, yet still the peasants complain!

I have to say, I like it, I'm not getting performance issues, I just can't get used to an un-modded game... it's like livin' in the stone age! I really hope a few of the basic mods hit quickly. Mostly MoveIt!, there's no doubt road building is vastly improved, but I'm still struggling to get symmetry at larger junctions, it's still quite hit & miss sometimes.

My biggest gripe so far is that the generic industrial buildings still look too 'industrial', it seems like you rapidly end up with a lot of chimneys belching out smoke. I'd rather they were a bit more 'warehouse' like, than 'steel works'.

 

[TheCracker]

You'd have thought that they would have taken the best/most popular elements that have arisen from within the modding community and worked them in to this sequal for QoL, but it appears they've just either half-arsed them or ignored them and instead added other fluff that no one really asked for.

I was a bit late to the table with the original C:S, so i don't know how well the earlist version of the game got patched, if at all, but from what i've seen Paradox is more interested in rolling out DLC rather than QoL updates. Unfortunatley.

 

[eran0004]

You'd have thought that they would have taken the best/most popular elements that have arisen from within the modding community and worked them in to this sequal for QoL, but it appears they've just either half-arsed them or ignored them and instead added other fluff that no one really asked for.

I was a bit late to the table with the original C:S, so i don't know how well the earlist version of the game got patched, if at all, but from what i've seen Paradox is more interested in rolling out DLC rather than QoL updates. Unfortunatley.

The problem with many of the mods is that they can mess up your game if you don’t know how to use them. MoveIt alone can kill your city if you’ve tried to move the wrong object and ended up ruining the pathfinding algorithm.

 

[MatskiMonk]

MoveIt alone can kill your city if you’ve tried to move the wrong object and ended up ruining the pathfinding algorithm.

MoveIt also essentially undermines the economy of the game as there's no financial implication or time resource required to moving, copy/pasting, extending, demolishing etc. If they included something with MoveIt's functionality they'd have to adapt it quite a lot, or limit it quite a lot.

I do get that they have to set parameters for what goes on in the game, and any tools in their game have to work within their parameters, and I'm sure the modding community will oblige when it comes to breaking those parameters, the game mechanics and potentially the game itself or its save files.... but it doesn't half feel limiting after 2700 hours of modded C:S1.

 

[TheCracker]

The problem with many of the mods is that they can mess up your game if you don’t know how to use them. MoveIt alone can kill your city if you’ve tried to move the wrong object and ended up ruining the pathfinding algorithm.

As a pure console user i've little experience of the wild west that is game mods - other than some well curated mods that Bethesda allowed for Fallout 4 (and even then they often slowed the game down to a crawl). I know they have some allowence for mods on the console versions, when they come out, so it will be interesting to see just how much modification they let slip through.

 

[eran0004]

As a pure console user i've little experience of the wild west that is game mods - other than some well curated mods that Bethesda allowed for Fallout 4 (and even then they often slowed the game down to a crawl). I know they have some allowence for mods on the console versions, when they come out, so it will be interesting to see just how much modification they let slip through.

Mods are both a blessing and a curse. They can provide some excellent functionality, but it can also be incredibly annoying when there’s an update to the game and everything breaks. More freedom, at the cost of more headache.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Assets on their way, I'm guessing to launch the ParadoxMods platform maybe...

 

[MatskiMonk]

First patch is out.

Small optimisations by the sounds of it, using the settings I had before I've jumped up by about 10-15 fps

 

[Tornado]

 

[eran0004]

Here’s a smart tutorial on how to build a magic roundabout. Seems to be working well.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Still just messing about, this is my first concerted effort to actually build something, not much to look at though.

Seemed that about 10-13k population the city starts turning a profit. Most of the warnings are about high rent, as is mentioned elsewhere, demand for low density residential is significant and robust, MDres and HDres are far more finickity. Also still lots of warnings about not enough customers for LD commercial, but this pretty much just seems to be an over sensitive alert - nobody goes out of business and profitability of commercial is 70-80% - it seem like it comes on if you build in area that doesn't have 'high suitability for commercial'.

 

[TheCracker]

Are those industry 'fields' actually not just squares/rectangles now? This and the realisically small roundabouts pleases me no end.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Are those industry 'fields' actually not just squares/rectangles now?

Yeah, for all industry you draw out the perimeter now, and it fills it in with a suitable texture. It makes most sense with fields, but it's the same mechanic for the rest. There's more industry specialisations now too; timber, grain, livestock, vegetable, textile fibre (cotton), stone mining, coal mining, ore mining, oil drilling... these raw material providers then service general industry - but general industry this time around is divided up into 18 of its own specialisations, each with it's own mix of raw materials that it requires.

Similar story with Office demand. Software, financial services, telecoms, media are also immaterial goods produced by offices and used for production. So for instance Telecoms; the end users are consumers, industry and other offices, it requires software (produced by offices) and electronics, electronics are produced by industry, and that industry uses minerals and plastics... minerals require rock to be mined, and plastics require petrochemicals and chemicals, which in turn require oil, grain and more minerals... so you can see that it all intertwines in a much more plausible fashion than previous vanilla industry.

Overall I really like that, but the assets themselves are a bit crap compared to Industry DLC, and also, you seem to have no control over what your general industry actual is... so where I've got tonnes of oil to spare, I'm still importing most of my petrochemicals because not enough crude>petrochemical industrial units have spawned yet... in C:S1 Industry DLC you had control over extractors and processers, but now we've lost that second stage.

edit: one of the other big changes as far as industry goes, is the way rail cargo works. Rather than trains just spawning at random when someone orders 1t of cargo, you set routes and specify the number of trains available, so it's much, much easier to manage cargo rail traffic than before - once trains start arriving and leaving full, you just add another train to the route. Given how much of my time was spent in C:S1 managing cargo rail infrastructure, this really is a game changer!

 

[TheCracker]

Yeah, for all industry you draw out the perimeter now, and it fills it in with a suitable texture. It makes most sense with fields, but it's the same mechanic for the rest. There's more industry specialisations now too; timber, grain, livestock, vegetable, textile fibre (cotton), stone mining, coal mining, ore mining, oil drilling... these raw material providers then service general industry - but general industry this time around is divided up into 18 of its own specialisations, each with it's own mix of raw materials that it requires.

Similar story with Office demand. Software, financial services, telecoms, media are also immaterial goods produced by offices and used for production. So for instance Telecoms; the end users are consumers, industry and other offices, it requires software (produced by offices) and electronics, electronics are produced by industry, and that industry uses minerals and plastics... minerals require rock to be mined, and plastics require petrochemicals and chemicals, which in turn require oil, grain and more minerals... so you can see that it all intertwines in a much more plausible fashion than previous vanilla industry.

Overall I really like that, but that assets themselves are a bit crap compared to Industry DLC, and also, you seem to have no control over what your general industry actual is... so where I've got tonnes of oil to spare, I'm still importing most of my petrochemicals because not enough crude>petrochemical industrial units have spawned yet... in C:S1 Industry DLC you had control over extractors and processers, but no we've lost that second stage.

edit: one of the other big changes as far as industry goes, is the way rail cargo works. Rather than trains just spawning at random when someone orders 1t of cargo, you set routes and specify the number of trains available, so it's much, much easier to manage cargo rail traffic than before - once trains start arriving and leaving full, you just add another train to the route. Given how much of my time was spent in C:S1 managing cargo rail infrastructure, this really is a game changer!

That sounds pretty intuitive 👍

I can't imagine what content that will leave for the inevitable 'Industries' DLC to contain. Other than more control over what industry buildings you decide to place and things like Unique Factories, it seems like it already has most bases covered. For me 'Industries' was the biggest game changer from all the C:S1 DLC.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I can't imagine what content that will leave for the inevitable 'Industries' DLC to contain. Other than more control over what industry buildings you decide to place and things like Unique Factories, it seems like it already has most bases covered. For me 'Industries' was the biggest game changer from all the C:S1 DLC.

The fact that they've cut Fishing out after it was introduced in Sunset Harbour makes me think they may just add more things to the existing mechanic which would be great, there's massive scope to. As I say, the biggest thing lacking in what we have now is control of processors (and warehousing)... a bunch more materials/immaterials and 'upgrades' like the ploppable services have, might be enough. The old EDS mod which allowed you to set up specific supply chains would be interesting functionality, though if the simulation is better this time it might not be needed.

One other thought, you also get more granular control of tax rates. 10% is always the default rate. I had massive Office demand, and my Office company profitability was about 90%, so I cranked the tax on 'Media' (produced by offices) up to 15% to get more of that sweet sweet corporation tax revenue... a while later my office demand totally disappeared, I set the tax back to 10% and the demand eventually returned (this may not be causality to be fair), so I'm wondering if I cut tax on Petrochemical, if more of my industry will spawn more Petrochemical processors and I can cut my deficit (currently local production ~20t, deficit ~170t)

 

[TheCracker]

I'd forgotten about the whole fishing industies element. I suppose rolling that into C:SII Industries DLC would pad it out a bit. As long as they handle it better this time round. It felt like an afterthought that didn't quite gel in C:S1.

On a side note, can you place buildings, say train stations, airports etc that require road access, without there needing to be a road existing there first? - i always found having to estimate where a road needed to be before i built the building a really backwards way of doing things.

 

[MatskiMonk]

without there needing to be a road existing there first?

Yep!

As has been pointed out already, some of the assets are massive though, placing them is a bit harder in that respect. I don't have an airport yet, but I'm thinking it will be vast.

 

[MatskiMonk]

40k Citizens, pretty much everything on High graphics wise...

36 fps with the entirety of the used map in view on an 8gb 3070 - I maintain that if you like city builders, and can run it, performance shouldn't be a barrier to getting C:S2..

I'm only half way to Megalopalopolis and the city is basically printing money with strong demand for all employment which means residential demand can't be far behind, seems like progression is much of an S-curve. Takes a while to get to the High Density stuff but then everything skyrockets.

 

[JohnBM01]

After giving it some thought, I am considering getting "Cities: Skylines 2." The experience I got playing C:S1 was simply to get acclimated to that game's style. I feel C:S2 shouldn't be too bad performance-wise that it won't be as enjoyable. I usually play a lot of games on low settings, and then tune them up carefully to where I can enjoy the best possible settings.

I am using Steam for all of this. So it is sort of a gamble to get this game on Steam rather than sample this with XBOX Game Pass. It is a gamble I'm willing to take. At worst, it would just be a mostly unplayable game I accept buying- like rFactor 2. I read C:S2 uses the more complicated Unity3D HDRP or something. It therefore may be more taxing on CPU than with C:S1.

If I do get this game and play around with it, I will share my experiences with you all. I also will limit myself to the base/vanilla version and no DLC (at least unless I'm satisfied enough to get DLC for it).

 

[Pearl Jam]

I gave this a try seeing as it’s on Gamepass but after 3 attempts I had to give up as I had no idea what I was doing, even the tutorials were confusing me, shame really as I’ve never played anything like this and it looked really interesting from all the stuff you guys on here created, think I’d best stick to flying and driving sims 🙈

 

[MatskiMonk]

I gave this a try seeing as it’s on Gamepass but after 3 attempts I had to give up as I had no idea what I was doing, even the tutorials were confusing me, shame really as I’ve never played anything like this and it looked really interesting from all the stuff you guys on here created, think I’d best stick to flying and driving sims 🙈

The tutorials are a bit crap, but if you've never played a city builder like this it's bound to take a while understanding the principles of what it's trying to get you to do. There's no real overview of it, so if you didn't play the first game it might not be clear what you need to do.

I'd say it's worth persevering, there's always these threads to ask!

 

[Shaun]

The tutorials are a bit crap, but if you've never played a city builder like this it's bound to take a while understanding the principles of what it's trying to get you to do. There's no real overview of it, so if you didn't play the first game it might not be clear what you need to do.

I'd say it's worth persevering, there's always these threads to ask!

Yeah I really need to have a go, it's been downloaded but sadly haven't had the time yet.

I didn't play the original Cities Skyline but loved SimCity back in the day.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Yeah I really need to have a go, it's been downloaded but sadly haven't had the time yet.

I didn't play the original Cities Skyline but loved SimCity back in the day.

C:S was the only city builder I'd really played, so I don't know what the differences are when compared with SimCity.

At a basic level, when you start a city, you need to build some roads from a highway to where you want your city to be. You then have to lay down some roads and start zoning to set what will spawn there... then you start adding services etc. and as the city grows it becomes more obvious how/what you have to build.

... the thing is, that very first step is one that is so easy to overlook, and yet so fundamental, faced with a blank map, one of the first things you really need to consider is hoad hierarchy. Aside from sorting out water, sewage and power connections/sources, the first thing you'll zone for will be low density residential housing, so those first roads you build out need to go all the way from Freeway/Motorway > Arterial > collectors > local, basically before you build anything.

In C:S2 you then hook your water/sewage/electricity to the Arterial/Collector/Local roads, and you can start zoning/building.

I think people new to the genre maybe have never considered road hierarchy so those first couple of hours getting from a blank map to even a sensible small town can be hard. I've no idea how relatable that is to SimCity.

 

[TheCracker]

I think people new to the genre maybe have never considered road hierarchy so those first couple of hours getting from a blank map to even a sensible small town can be hard. I've no idea how relatable that is to SimCity.

SimCity was almost identical, though obviously more basic*, other than you start with a map with no outside connections or existing infrastructure of any kind. You can connect to neighbouring cities, but you have to build roads or train lines upto the border/edge of play area before you get the pop-up to 'connect' to those other cities.

*I played upto SimCity 3000, but there was at least another sequel after that which was probably more advanced.

 

[MatskiMonk]

SimCity was almost identical, though obviously more basic*, other than you start with a map with no outside connections or existing infrastructure of any kind. You can connect to neighbouring cities, but you have to build roads or train lines upto the border/edge of play area before you get the pop-up to 'connect' to those other cities.

That sounds alright actually, I've always felt C:S could do with more interaction stats with it's outside connections - being baked in they seem a bit 'anonymous'. In C:S I've watch cargo trucks drive of the top of the map to a city, and then watched another drive off the bottom of the map to the same city, like the game was just picking a city name at random.

 

[eran0004]

Not the best city I've ever made, but quite good considering there are no mods available yet.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

This guy decompiled and ran a debugger on CS2 to determine why the performance is so poor. Their conclusion is that everything is too high fidelity and it's most likely caused by Unity's new rendering pipeline

Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

[...] Cities: Skylines 2 like its predecessor is made in Unity, which means the game can be decompiled and inspected quite easily using any .NET decompiler. I used JetBrains dotPeek which has a decent Visual Studio -like UI with a large variety of search and analysis options. However static analysis doesn’t really tell us anything concrete about the rendering performance of the game. To analyze what’s going with rendering I used Renderdoc, an open source graphics debugger which has saved my bacon with some of my previous GPU-y personal projects.

[...]

So why is Cities: Skylines 2 so incredibly heavy on the GPU? The short answer is that the game is throwing so much unnecessary geometry at the graphics card that the game manages to be largely limited by the available rasterization performance. The cause for unnecessary geometry is both the lack of simplified LOD variants for many of the game’s meshes, as well as the simplistic and seemingly untuned culling implementation. And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution (which should at least in theory be much more advanced) is because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games. Similarly Unity’s virtual texturing solution remains eternally in beta, so CO had to implement their own solution for that too, which still has some teething issues.

Here’s what I think that happened (a.k.a this is speculation): Colossal Order took a gamble on Unity’s new and shiny tech, and in some ways it paid off massively and in others it caused them a lot of headache. This is not a rare situation in software development and is something I’ve experienced myself as well in my dayjob as a web-leaning developer. They chose DOTS as the architecture to fix the CPU bottlenecks their previous game suffered from and to increase the scale & depth of the simulation, and largely succeeded on that front. CO started the game when DOTS was still experimental, and it probably came as a surprise how much they had to implement themselves even when DOTS was officially considered production ready. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started the game with Entities Graphics but then had to pivot to custom solutions for culling, skeletal animation, texture streaming and so on when they realized Unity’s official solution was not going to cut it. Ultimately the game had to be released too early when these systems were still unpolished, likely due to financial and / or publisher pressure. None of these technical issues were news for the developers on release day, and I don’t believe their claim that the game was intended to target 30 FPS from the beginning — no purebred PC game has done that since the early 2000s, and the graphical fidelity doesn’t justify it.