"Unplayable". "Shouldn't have been released". "Atrocious".

Based on the early reviews I read last week, I was disappointed that this game almost certainly wouldn't run on my mid-range 6 year old ROG laptop. People with $5k desktops were describing a game so slow they couldn't even play it, so I figured I'd be lucky to see the main menu.

To my shock, not only did the game run, but I don't think I even would have noticed a performance issue had no one mentioned it! Has everyone been messing with me? Sure, it's certainly not running at 10,000 fps and the camera jerks a little when you scroll or zoom, but come on. I don't even know my fps. I don't care. Why would I? It's a city builder. It's not impeding my enjoyment of the planning, the design, the tinkering, the problem solving.

I'm prepared for the downvotes, but this game is beautiful. I can only assume the developers are working frantically to improve the performance, and they probably did rush the release too much, but look past it for a minute and you'll see some incredible work.

UPD CO answeared https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/im-export-bug-hints-symptoms-and-causes-all-resource-management-in-the-game-is-a-deception.1604434/post-29216506

UPD2 Some videos to complete the picture.

TLDR: If you expect the in-game economy simulation to include features like supply chains, exports, and imports of goods, and resource processing, it doesn't. Here are the main issues:

First Part: Your city doesn't generate a 'demand' for goods. When you build a cargo terminal, the assigned ships or trains will deliver ALL resources in the game to it, even garbage. They deliver an amount equal to (terminal storage)/70 of one of the resources at a time. A cargo port has 15,500 storage capacity, so you will see ships carrying 222 metal ore, 222 food, and so on.

https://imgur.com/3JRjNnr

These deliveries occur even if your city has no commercial and/or industrial zones.

Second Part: Shops in commercial zones and industrial facilities will never use these resources. I tested this by placing a cargo port, cutting all highway connections in the city, deleting all industrial zones, and creating new commercial zones near the port. Commercial buildings spawn with a certain amount of goods to operate with, according to their type. You can see this by clicking on a delivery truck and checking its owner. There's an invisible warehouse inside every commercial or industrial building.

I waited until their storages depleted (without any interaction from customers btw), and the port's storage filled with goods (222 food, 222 plastics, etc).

https://imgur.com/mFAkBzm

[To clarify, this van was sent because I reconnected the highway for a moment. This is the only way to acces the empty invisible storage, otherwise, the shop won't spawn any trucks.]

So, I had commercial zones with no goods, no highway connections, and a port full of goods. Do the shops send their trucks to pick up goods from the port? No, they just stand without goods to sell but still generate income and pay taxes! They won't go bankrupt.

https://imgur.com/XTnow0d

Third Part: You already know that exports are broken, but I tried to test it. I placed a train cargo hub near a forestry industry and cut all highway connections. I had over 700 tons of surplus wood and no industry to process it. Check this gif to see what happens next.

https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExcm1uN2c1NmRyMGVkcHowdGlrYWFoaGl6Mmc1aWdmN3ZnZW9wZmt0NiZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/84RaSc2YN9Ijzxgw99/giphy.gif

Why don't they deliver wood to the terminal? Because they can deliver wood ONLY to logs storage, which can randomly appear in an industrial zone. If there are no storages, the trucks will simply disappear, even if they could export wood logs. So, if you have no logs storage in your city, all your timber factories will buy logs from the outside.

But maybe they export logs by teleporting them? Nope. I forced one of the invisible forestry storages to have 65.9 out of 60 tons of logs, and they remained at 65.9.

https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExcm1uN2c1NmRyMGVkcHowdGlrYWFoaGl6Mmc1aWdmN3ZnZW9wZmt0NiZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/84RaSc2YN9Ijzxgw99/giphy.gif

To summarize:

Shops and factories don't need goods/resources to generate income.

You can't import goods by trains or ships to be used by shops or factories. They will stay in the terminal storage indefinitely.

You can't export anything.

This post may seem chaotic because I'm frustrated that this game offers nothing more than the ability to place houses everywhere. My apologies.

The last screenshot of my city. https://imgur.com/hTOoRaW

(need help)

I'm about 90 hours in on CS2 and I'm pretty disappointed with this game so far. Big fan of CS1. I've had no issues running the game or major bugs but what disappoints me is that I don't see any major improvements over CS1 as far as game mechanics. I expected a much more robust game that included many of the most useful features added by CS1 mods, a much better selection of assets, and more of the expansion pack features (plazas and promenades, for example). For some issues I've figured out workarounds for, like placing paths alongside roads blocks zoning.

I understand that future updates and mods will fill in some of those gaps, but why aren't they part of the vanilla game when released? Relying on the modding community to flesh out the basics of your game is ridiculous, especially when building off the back of a successful and time tested game like CS1. It stings a little extra considering it cost me $130 to pre-order.

Examples:

• Roads
  • No zoning setback to allow for future wider road upgrades
  • No ability to turn off zoning for a road
  • No ability to give one road priority over another with respect to zoning
  • No ability to nudge a node or a curve (like the move it mod)
  • No ability to choose to have a road follow the terrain or have a uniform slope from end to end, we're stuck with "best fit"
  • No ability to terraform around a road and raise or lower it as needed without bulldozing and rebuilding.
  • No ability to force a road to be a tunnel so you can terraform over it
  • Can't have trees and parking spaces at the same time. Not even sure if roadside trees have any benefit with respect to noise and pollution?
  • Can't select which options a road will have when creating, must create vanilla road and then go back to place trees or wide sidewalks, etc
  • No lane specific tools
  • No way to adjust speed limits
  • No one way lanes
  • No bike lanes
• Parks, Parking, and Cemeteries: why are these fixed assets instead of growables? Let me choose playground, dog park, sports park, walking park, parking lot, parking structure, underground parking, or cemetery, then zone an area for that and have one grow that fits the space. The cemetery is especially egregious, since the only choice is a massive one. Some choices would have minimum sizes, of course, but why can't a swingset and slide or a jungle jim fit in a 1x1 square?
• Pedestrian paths
  • Why do we still have to have long slopes to elevated paths? A tower with a circular path would only need to be 1x1 instead of having to have a 1x6 path or more. Even a 2x2 tower would be better, although 16mx16m seems excessive for a set of stairs. Same for going underground.
  • Plopable assets like hospitals and schools should have connection points for elevated and underground walkways
  • Underground parking should allow underground walkways to be connected
  • Pedestrian paths should be able to be placed on an assets' grounds, especially support pillars for elevated paths, and access points for underground/elevated walkways
  • Parks should not have to have road access if they have path access
  • No options for pedestrian paths, like lights, benches, and trees
  • Covered walkways don't cover walkway intersections or short sections
• Pedestrian only roads:
  • Why are pedestrians not confined to the sides of the pedestrian roads, or at least have the sense to get the out of the way of fire trucks, ambulances, police, and garbage trucks?
  • Road options, like trees, don't work on pedestrian roads
  • Where are the service buildings for pedestrian only areas to keep service vehicle traffic down?

TLDR; I'm enjoying playing the game, I just feel like I could have stuck with CS1 and continued to enjoy all the tools and $100's worth of expansion packs I already had. For me, CS2 is a letdown since it doesn't seem like a major upgrade to CS1.

​

It would have been better if they would have patched the game before starting the refund process. At least the save game is loading.

So for my first real attempt at a city I wanted to create something similar to where I live, Nebraska. There's basically only two cities in my entire state, a dozen or so large towns, and rural abyss everywhere else. If you look at Nebraska on Google Earth, you zoom in and if it isn't water or a building, its a farm. You can drive for 8 straight hours seeing nothing but farmland. Just looking at the scale of it from orbit is stunning, there is just so much food being grown.

But in CS2 I'm expected to believe that only like half a dozen tiny patches on the entire map are able to be cultivated? Fucking really? REALLY? I am genuinely baffled at how this was thought to be an actually good gameplay mechanic. Am I meant to be playing a Bronze Age simulation where only a few fertile areas on the planet are suitable for cultivation? Actually, scratch that, even the Bronze Age peoples were capable of better agricultural practices than whats expected in Cities Skylines 2. And EVEN IF there were "fertile areas" on the map, we live in the 21st century!!! Just use fertilizer!!!

Its so easy to fix this, just some bulletpointed ideas:

• Farmland should be suitable basically everywhere except higher altitudes and rough terrain and close to the coastline. Again, we live in the modern era, look at the world around you. Not a single space of the Mississippi Drainage Basin is wasted. The Chinese, Vietnamese, etc are putting rice paddies on near cliffs. Vast swathes of the Amazon & Congo rainforests have been cleared for agriculture. Even Southern California drains itself of its water reserves constantly with how much produce it grows. You can grow food near damn anywhere temperate on this planet. Why does CS2 expect us to only grow food in the most pristine Ukrainian black soil.
• There can be modifiers to efficiency based on the fertility of the farmland itself. Positioning your farms near good soil or near rivers should boost the efficiency and amount of produce. Nobody is going to deny that there is good and bad soil on the planet, there are markets towards importing and exporting soil, but its silly to think that you can only grow in a few good areas.
• I see no reason this would cause balance issues. Its near impossible to satisfy the food needs of any moderately large town because of how little the farms actually make in the first place. Shouldn't we allow ourselves to build more farms to compensate? Its a tradeoff of a lot of space in favor of not needing to import as much food.

Genuinely is there any benefit to the current implementation? Its not balanced, it looks atrocious, it lowers player expression, its not even remotely close to realistic, so why???

•The road tools are giving me broken zoning grids much more than CS1 did. Turning off guidelines reduces but does not eliminate this problem

•Contour lines are black instead of white. They are less visible in the day and completely hidden at night.

•The US single family homes, while very nice models, do not look anything like American suburbia.

•Using the cut-and-fill roads to make quays is difficult, convoluted, and generally infuriating

•The radio announcements are very cool the first time. Hearing doctor whats-his-name talk about the housing crisis every two minutes for an hour straight is not so much. More announcements or play them less frequently.

•Demand appears to be broken. There was always infinite demand for low density residential, until suddenly there was zero demand for any residential while all my commercial buildings were complaining about no customers

•Trees growing over time is neat in concept but very annoying for detailing. The border around them also makes this difficult.

•Connecting sewage outflow to road pipes is an exercise in frustration and it seems like I can’t connect pipes to the end of a road

•Everyone is demanding healthcare despite my clinic having more than enough capacity

•Chirper messages never shut up. Add a cooldown, please

•Hard to control building height

•Missing detailing options such as fences

Honestly it’s very minor. As you can see in the first image (courtesy of CityPlannerPlays), the only real way to make a pedestrian crossing is by creating these horrendously ugly loops that look like they take ages to cross, and take up so much unnecessary space.

In reality, you’d obviously never see something like this because of the technology known as stairs and elevators.

I just feel that out of all the immersion-breaking features of the game, this is the one that does it for me. In the meantime, praying that paradox or a modder adds something like this as an asset someday.