This week’s Cities: Skylines II info drop focuses on zoning. Zoning is the act of you, the mayor of a city, designating the land for specific building types to be erected there. You do not directly build these buildings (except for the new signature buildings), you set the zone and see new buildings grow should there be demand for it.
Cities: Skylines II still has the three zone types: Residential for people’s homes, Commercial for the place people shop and spend money on goods and services, and Industry where people go to work to create goods. But now there’s one more. Offices, previously categorised under the Industry zone type, are now separated off into their own category, with their own separate zone demand, colour-coded as purple compared to Residential’s green, Commercial’s blue and Industry’s yellow.
Additionally, there are more Residential zone types and they are the following:
- Medium density row housing
- Medium density housing
- Low rent housing
- Mixed housing
Medium density Residential zones are a new category. Row housing sees wall-to-wall buildings, something seen more regularly in cities in Western countries, while the other version will see smaller apartments. Low rent housing are large apartments buildings but with smaller apartments designed for young adults moving out of their parents’ home.
Mixed housing is the most interesting one. The ground floor is a Commercial lot where shops can open, while the rest of the building is Residential filled with apartments. It’s common for cities to have these styles of buildings and it’s good to see Cities: Skylines II is incorporating this.
Cities: Skylines II will also add the ability to plop Signature Buildings. These buildings are built manually like a service building, but behaves as if it’s a zoned building, as they can fulfil zone demand. An example shown in the devblog is Coder Park, an Office Signature Building that “where coffee gets converted into game design, art and code”. Signature Buildings have requirements to unlock, but once unlocked and plopped into a city, it can have local and city-wide benefits.
Other small details from both the devblog and the new trailer includes the following:
- Zone demand now splits into six- Low Density Residential, Medium Density Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Office
- Commercial, Industrial and Office zones come in low density and high density varieties, but unlike Residential, there is no seperate demand for specific density type for these zones
- Instead of clicking on a specific tool to de-zone, right-clicking will now remove zones when the Zone tool is selected (how this is mapped to controller remains to be seen)
- Abandoned buildings will see homeless people taking resident for a while, as these buildings will eventually collapse
- Buildings can still level up. Higher-level buildings have higher rent, but reduction in water and electricity use
- New Industrial zone specialisations. One includes a massive excavator
- Zoning for farmland (as part of Industrial) has a more robust tool where you can form shapes and adjust each line of said shape
The previous week’s info drop talked about how public and cargo transport has changed.
Cities: Skylines II will be available on October 24 for the PS5, PC (Steam, Microsoft Store) and Xbox Series X|S. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass at launch.
Source: Paradox Interactive