This week’s info drop for the upcoming urban city builder Cities: Skylines II goes deep into the improved economy and production model the game simulates and keep track of.
Also, plenty of familiar systems are tweaked. You can adjust taxes, but it works a bit differently. Rather than residental tax being based on the residential lot a citizen is living in, this tax cuts directly to their wage, based on education level. So essentially you can tax the rich, directly, if that’s how you want to run your city.
However, citizens can get jobs where they are overqualified if the job based on their education level isn’t available. It’s not a perfect taxation model, but we’ll see how it works out within the game.
Loans work a bit differently too. In Cities: Skylines, and most management games with a loan system, you get to pick from three packages of loans, each with a different amount and requiring you to pay in full plus interest before taking the same loan package again. Cities: Skylines II does it differently as you only take one loan, but it’s adjustable. You can increase the loan at any time (with increasing interest as a result) or repay them partially, in full, or automatically deducting your budget every month.
The accompanying dev diary blog post is quite the read as it details exactly what the model takes account of. For instance, big families would prefer to live in large apartments. A household will move out and find a place with cheaper rent should they cannot afford their current residence anymore. They can consider moving out of town entirely, but moving away isn’t cheap, and there can be an instance where the household cannot afford rent anywhere, but also cannot afford to leave the city, forcing them homeless.
Homelessness was revealed a few weeks back, and this state of living is in Cities: Skylines II due to this new economy model.
Businesses will maximise profit, and increase profit from sales of goods and services will trickle down into companies hiring more people. Each industry company produces a specific product that may be used by other companies to produce other goods. You can incentive specific industries to set up shop in your city. Commercial and Industry zones are taxed based on what goods or service they produce. So if you want to attract the electronics industry, making minerals cheap to source by having minerals factories produce them locally, as well as reducing their specific tax, is how you do it.
There is an overview panel of what material is in demand or in surplus, as well as a chart to show how the production chain of the goods.
The tax slider goes from -10% to 30%. So you can give tax breaks. Service fees for utilities like road maintainence, electricity and water can also be adjusted as well.
Cities: Skylines II at launch will feature 9 specialised industries:
- No specific conditions:
- Livestock farming
- Stone Mining
- Must be built on Fertile Land
- Grain farming
- Vegetable farming
- Cotton farming
- Requires Forests
- Forestry
- Must be built on specific deposits
- Coal mining
- Ore mining
- Must be built on oil deposits
- Oil drilling
And lastly, at the start of the game, your city will have a government subsidy to ensure you have the budget to start off the first few years, which will gradually be reduced over time. Between this and the change in how water pipes and electric pylons work, Cities: Skylines II should solve the silly early game of having to ensure all the utilities are connected and hope that you turn a profit or face the consequences of an early spiral of debt where you have to take a loan or reroll the map.
Cities: Skylines II is really going deep judging by this overview of the economy and production models. And should solve its odd early-game gameplay. Plus, you get to tax the rich, which should be fun.
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