This week’s info drop for Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive’s upcoming urban city-builder Cities: Skylines details the map and themes available on launch.
The way the maps are segmented works slightly differently but overall results in a bigger play area. The Cities: Skylines dev blog says it’s “roughly five times bigger than in Cities: Skylines”.
The more accurate number is 4.79 times bigger. And this is due to how the map tiles are sized up.
In Cities: Skylines, a map consists of 25 tiles (5×5) each with 1.92 km x 1.92 km size. The total playable area is 92.16 km2 but in normal play, you get to unlock 9 of the 25 tiles, which brings the actual playable area capped at 33.18km² (unless you use mods to remove the limits).
In Cities: Skylines II, the map tiles are roughly one-third smaller than 1.92 km x 1.92 km but you start out with 9 tiles. And you can then unlock almost all the map tiles for the city which caps at 441 tiles, bringing the playable area to 159 km2.
For context, 159 km2 would mean that the city-state of Macau, at 118 km2, can totally be accurately represented in a 1:1 build scale. It’s not big enough to cover the entirety of Singapore, however, contrary to how it looks on the map, the little red dot is rather big at 728.6 km2.
Maps are also vertically higher, allowing for higher mountains and deeper craters where you can expunge sewage and form a poop volcano.
(It’s a sandbox game, play your way, however cursed it may be.)
What’s more interesting is you can unlock map tiles that are not adjacent to each other, so you can build smaller, isolated towns off city limits. Also, all pre-built maps will include a way to connect to Outside Connections to allow the import and export of resources to other cities outside the map.
Cities: Skylines II will be released with 10 maps in the base game, all being inspired by real-world locations. Maps will have a theme (that determines what building style plops by default), the ability to have roads obey left-hand or right-hand traffic rules, new for the sequel, weather and latitude. The latter is there to simply tells you if the city will be in the Northern Hemisphere or Southern Hemisphere, which affects how seasons work.
The ten maps are as follows:
- Archipelago Heaven
- Barrier Island
- Great Highlands
- Lakeland
- Mountain Village
- River Delta
- Sweeping Plains
- Twin Mountain
- Waterway Pass
- Windy Fjords
Cities: Skylines II will include two themes at launch: North American and European.
There’s definitely a very Western-centric representation when it comes to the maps and themes available in Cities: Skylines II. Why not have a setting to have a map placed on the Equator line so they don’t experience the four seasons? Hopefully mods and post-launch updates/DLC can remedy this down the line.
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 Forum