This week’s info drop for upcoming urban city-builder Cities: Skylines II is all about providing services to your citizens. Some of these have been indirectly been revealed in previous weeks, but now we can get a good look at what kind of city services required to have citizens live, work and play happily in your city.
The list of city services include the following:
- Electricity
- Water and Sewage
- Healthcare and Deathcare
- Garbage Management
- Education and Research
- Fire and Rescue
- Police and Administration
- Transportation
- Parks and Recreation
- Communications
- Landscaping
Communication services has been expanded not to only have a postal service, but also the requirement to build signal towers to provide telecommunication, as well as server farms. Citizens need their data connection, just like us these days, and it’s about time this aspect of city building is integrated into a city-builder.
The administration buildings are interesting too. You can now plop a Welfare Office to help people down on their luck, or a Central Bank to lower import costs for companies, hence boosting their revenue which means more reason for them to stay and pay tax.
Speaking of staying, some service buildings are not mandatory to be built. You can import or export services to Outside Connections. If you have surplus electricity you can sell it. If you don’t have a college or university built, citizens will go out of your city to get the education they need (with the likelihood for them not to return back, compared to having those buildings in your city). You can call in extra fire trucks or police patrols from an Outside Connection, but they’ll take time to turn up.
More importantly, you are not necessarily going to have to build cemeteries. No more of the silly moments where the city is full of dead bodies waiting to be transported to a deathcare facility. They can simply get the hearses to drive out of city limits.
A lot of city services buildings are upgradable. So rather than having to build multiple copies to extend coverage, now you can just upgrade the same building, which has a visual change once done, instead.
Landfill area can have custom shapes. So instead of having to plop a couple of landfill areas, you can just build a big one.
Some content from Cities: Skylines DLCs has been rolled into the base game in Cities: Skylines II. Universities and emergency shelters (which implies natural disasters are a thing) are now part of the base game.
This week’s accompanying blog post is the most wordy yet, with a lot of other details that should intrigue you if you’re looking forward to play Cities: Skylines II later this year.
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