I had a meeting with Paradox and Colossal Order to discuss the future of Cities Skylines 2... 

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I am 66 yrs old. I use CS more like a HO Rail Set. Instead of buying tons of tracks, and trains, set aside room in a house, and buy a locomotive with a camera, CS allows me to do the same and store it all into a PC. With mods I have released 91 tiles, and a city that maxed out on all the roads, and a population that exceeds 1,000,000. I enjoy the huge metropolis I created. Waiting for CS2 to sort itself out, and I will find a way to use it more like a sandbox than a full simulation.

I would like to see two types of industry zoning, Heavy industry and light industry. Not all industry pollutes if you can have light industry like warehouse and small scale manufacturing that doesn't make pollution and can be put closer to residential as it is irl

In my opinion, the biggest problem with the game is the lack of variety in buildings and architectural styles. All the cities look the same and repetitive. They have little personality.

As someone who doesn’t want to use mods, I was really expecting more cs1 mods being incorporated into cs2. The lack of those mods being incorporated really ruined the game for me, Simple things 1. Line tool 2. Traffic manager 3. Props, assets 4. Zoning tools 5. Traffic light / sign management Stuff like that.

There's something really strange in CS2 is that nothing is tied up together. As you said, the game needs purpose, more difficulty and choices must have bigger consequences. At 17:00 you talk about the train depot that is way too big for its usage, that's true. The game should make you build a small one at first, with limited capacities, and then you build / detail around. Then, when it must be upgraded, it must be hard, relocating citizens, getting into a park or whatever. Same with every aspect of the game. In real life, every action or choice has influence which there isn't in the game.

Phil, you are so impressive. I just love how you went full municipal employee on them 😂 This is truly so skillful - your data collection, presentation, and obviously, storytelling. Bravo, man, and thank you for continuing to be so passionate about your community.

I think I agree with most of your feedback. Going further in the issue of parks, something that bothers me the most is that the parks feel DEAD. In CS1 we could see how our parks and plazas got filled out of people, they were full of life. In further DLCs we had festivals, sport events, pedestrian areas etc that were very lively. We lost all of that in CS2, and that is one of the things I miss the most in my cities.

Thank you so much for meeting with the Paradox/Colossal Order team. Your explanation at the end there was super insightful in terms of the overall vibes being felt by everyone. When it comes to CS2, I honestly feel like it has the bones to be a successful successor to CS1. There were a lot of shortfalls at launch but if we look back to CS1's journey, a lot of CS1's problems were eventually fixed by mods created by that epic modding community (much love from me!). I think that where there is a lot of tension is that players would expect the CS2 team to take note of those popular mods and implement them within their game. Or (as a compromise) to at least make the game as easily moddable as CS1 was. I think that this was a case where neither of those expectations were delivered. But that's just my opinion 🤷‍♂.

I haven’t fully finished the video yet so maybe you covered this but… I would like to see an option to start as the new “planner” for an existing city and then just go from there. Let me change and improve the city or cities on the map. I think that offers a quick option for players who don’t want to build everything up themselves. Even better make the cities procedurally generated so they are unique each new save for endless playability.

I feel, and this is just my personal opinion, that constructive feedback a two way street. I would be much more inclined to give feedback if I didn't feel like I was talking to a brick wall. CO needs to be absolutely transparent right now. This meeting is a step in the right direction, but there's still more to be done here for CO to earn back my trust. A public known bug list that is being actively maintained would be a good start. I don't mind being used as a supplementary QA department. In fact, i love it usually. But I need to feel that the feedback i'm giving is useful.

I think a logical way for the player to progress in CS2 is to have small versions of every major utility and service available very early on, with the option to upgrade as they experience more demand. Once that service is upgraded the player unlocks higher tier facilities they can place outright.

I don't understand how CO seemingly dismissed all of the most popular mods because that's "not how they play." Almost everyone else does, and these were even mentioned in the beta testing by popular youtubers. In my opinion, there are 5 core elements to playing the game which can be improved significantly. 1. Aesthetics. We need decals and props to bring cities to life, as well as different textures, LUTS. Biomes are being added which is great, as is the dynamic seasons and weather. 2. Gameplay. We need a meaningful economy that can fail or succeed depending on the choices that the player makes. The bones are there, but the auto-balance makes it pointless. 3. Simulation. Parks need people, bicycles need to be added, summer time should be full of tourists clogging up public transport and commercial areas, arenas and landmarks should have events that draw crowds. 4. Transport. Road networks, intersection type, and public transport should all have more influence on the game. If the traffic is bad, people shouldn't get to where they need to go, affecting happiness and the economy. Different people should also have different preferences e.g. Tourists prefer trams and boats. 5. Governance. Policies like "old town" should have serious consequences like attracting more affluent retired folk that don't work (meaning workers in those districts will have to travel from other districts, thus increasing traffic). Pollution reduction policies should have an impactful economic loss etc. In CS1 the policies did not seem to change anything. Other games have done this very well.

I own CS1 and all the DLC. I was excited about CS2. Seeing the state it launched I obviously didn't feel like purchasing it at the time and decided to wait, and wait, and wait. It's been many months and they have an unoptimal game. But I still have hope. I will keep waiting for the game to keep getting better and I will purchase it when it's in a worthwhile state. I know I'm not the only one feeling this and waiting to "return" to the game. It's happened with No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk, and it can happen with CS2. If they put in the effort to make a good game people will buy it.

I know Phil probably briefly talked about this idea but, one _sure-fire way_ for Paradox and CO to understand what the community wants is to pull the data for the most downloaded mods on the steam workshop and *look at their functionality.* That will give them the cheatsheet for what the _must-have_ downloads are in CS1 and what the community wants to see implemented in CS2. 😊

"give us the lowdown chair daddy"

Hearing about potentially not getting 10 years of support broke my heart a bit. I barely ever give feedback, but if I had to give suggestions aside from the ones most people mention, I'd say: 1) Give us a reason to make use of properly zoned areas. I don't like to spam high-rise, I want to make a realistic-looking city. Make businesses look like the area they're in. In a low-income area the businesses should look not so well-off, in downtown pedestrian streets, businesses should look like boutiques. I've tried making streets like Passeig de Gracia from Barcelona, Rodeo Drive from Los Angeles and Nanjing Road from Shanghai, the commercial buildings always look off. Good enough if you look from the sky, completely missing the mark upclose. I'm not a strong detailer, but I want models to reflect the street they're in. 2) I'm making a Northern California fictional city, I've spent close to 500 hours on it between planning and playing, the main problem I see is that there are very few ways of using landmarks. Ploppables are amazing for it, you can build an area around them, but I'd like more variety so that I can make a place feel alive. Make me feel like my citizens want to go shopping on a summer day, increase the demand for services that day, or make dynamic events that actually affect how my city plays for a day (month?). I know concerts and match days will probably be included in the future, but I want dynamic events that happen spontaneously and test my traffic, my logistics, and hotel industry. 3) I have not unlocked the chirpX center specifically because the frequency is too damn high. It can get annoying, let us adjust that or make it work a few times A YEAR, please. 4) Let us choose the kind of businesses that are nearby other buildings. I want a dealership close to my car Megafactory (from the same brand, please). I want restaurants near my oversized office skyscrapers. I want my cims to use THOSE restaurants (not the ones next, necessarily, but the ones in the district), not to waste most time in transit after work to go to a place that doesn't quite make sense. I think adding a proximity modifier for what to do next would make a lot of sense, especially for cities that don't depend so much in private transportation. Everyone knows that place in their city that has that big hotel. Or that absurdly large restaurant that is always empty. Or that tiny takeout place that is always full next to an alley. Let us make our own stories letting us choose which businesses appear in a specific spot. Make it random by default, but sometimes we want to make a story. Hotels have a completely different kind of landscaping nearby compared to a restaurant or a dealership or electronics shop. We should have the option to reflect it in vanilla if we wish to. 5) I think it is easy to overlook how massive our cities can look, this plays into giving better purpose/eventful lives and places with nice vibes, but let us make use of the huge scale better. You let us follow a cim through their life cycle, I want them to make choices that make sense, especially in a larger city. If they move to the suburbs, I want them to mostly spend their lives around there, use local businesses most of the time (not always, as I mentioned, make dynamic events with modifiers). I never see anyone using the basketball court, or playing football, or the small stage from parks. Only way to get use of them is to have homeless people so that they'd use it. 6) Bikes? 7) Let me change the company in charge of the color-changing skyscrapers, please, please I beg you. 8) If they add biomes to currently in use maps, please, let us choose the weather. My northern California town doesn't want to become mired with tornadoes. 9) I want to make emphasis again on your point about priority roads and choosing the length. I like naming them, I like making streets relevant to my lore and make them feel like places that people live in. Nothing worse than having a 19km circular boulevard because you can't choose at which intersection it "ends". 10) Please, for everyone but specially those of us who purchased the ultimate edition for beach properties, we really need something to do with our shoreline. Every time I have to expand towards the ocean I get anxious and stop building just because of how horrible I'd build without proper tools for it. I don't like using mods and breaking savefiles, so I'd appreciate a vanilla tool for beaches, seawalls (not pedestrian street + depressing soil, please), etc. You know the deal. 11) Please, lower the rewards for unlocking the special high-rise buildings. Leveling up the high-rise appartments is a nightmare, I just want to have some special looks. I hate, hate, hate to repeat large buildings. You don't see two Chryslers next to each other, I want to get selective with how many skyscrapers I have in a 150k pop city. Spamming them in a corner of the map just to unlock the good-looking ones hurts. 12) Please, let us adjust the time of the year, it's a pet peeve of mine, but damn, I really don't see my city looking like this in 2060. Let us adjust the possibility so that 1 day equals 1 week or something. Let us roll back the date, too. I don't mind if my cims live only 7 months, I do care about my city looking outdated. 13) I understand that it will get solved with future DLC, and it's not a bit problem for me right now for the kind of city I'm building, but if we get the region packs and someone wants to build a Nagoya lookalike, or a Shenzhen lookalike, they're gonna feel disappointed if their train station looks like a mix of mid-sized city outskirts of Germany+Idaho. Same is true for many other assets. I get why they use that style as a reference, but it doesn't work for downtown, sorry. 14) Policies are so extremely in need I can't overstate it. I want to designate some areas as high-income and others as low-income. I want some people to demand low density-big-level 5 housing. I want to build a welfare office to improve the economic situation of these locations and I want to see the impact. I don't want to just see happy poor people with no impact on how the buildings look. I want to provide means to my citizens, that's part of the fun of master planning. If I want to create a capitalist dystopia, I can. If I want to improve economic means across the board, I want to, too. If I just want to create a realistic city, from anywhere in the world and show that reality, I think this is the perfect game to display that. Use modifiers for the streets, buildings, etc. Get graffities, get trash on the street. Perhaps mix police into the mix. (Protests could be some dynamic events, perhaps?) Make waste management workers have a purpose. Make wealthier streets cleaner, with stupidly clean shop displays. You've used a lot of polygons in a lot of assets, this is a great use of those resources, in my opinion. 15) Sometimes poo gets under the terrain and you have to level everything so it doesn't pollute the water towards infinity, please, fix it. 16) Again, playing into the scale, most buildings are ridiculously big or give abnormal values for its size, no in-between. I have a medium density row houses neighborhood, at level 5 a 1x6 house (3 floors, looks for 3 families tops) holds 12 households and 33 residents. Most of the area of the building is just the backyard! I get the gameplay reasons, but damn it feels overdimensioned, specially when taking into account how population affects performance. 17) Let us choose which model/color of the building gets built for those who have multiple options. 18) If there is a single thing that I want to highlight from this list is... please, make streets make sense. They should reflect the environment they're at. Making generic buildings and businesses may be okay when starting out, but at some point the fantasy falls apart and it really doesn't make sense anymore. It is easy to become disillusioned for something that could be achieved by variations of the same buildings with minimal changes. Think of an RPG game like Cyberpunk 2077. A Jinguji store looks fundamentally different from a store in Jig-jig street, even if the overall shape and characteristics are similar. Just a few decals and fancier advertisement can do wonders. Let us have control over placement of the buildings and I think both detailers, industry/logistics freaks like myself, and the average casual player will enjoy much, much more the game just because with the same assets you increase exponentially the possibilities to plan around these. Players want to come back to CS2, they want to play, they're willing to pay, but they need performance and they need to be able to live out the idea of "their city", the one in their minds, the one that they plan while driving home, or taking the bus and metro while taking notes of the surroundings and saying "huh, that's how they solved it here". The game is making us look outside, and when we want to get back in, it lacks some fundamentals that make the experience of the city worthwhile. I love logistics, but there has to be something else to city life than solving problems. Seeing what looks like real life is what draws many back, we just need that. I'm extremely sorry Philip for the absolute wall of text I've put here, hopefully some of these ideas resonate with you and you can share them with the team. I'm not a frequent commenter, but you're doing amazing work. Thank you for all the effort.

Can’t thank you, Biffa and OE enough for your work on helping the CO team move the game to a better place. Your combined lists of improvements and wishes are spot on. So many things to work on, and it’s great to have everything documented in the level of detail that you guys provided. Thank you, thank you, thank you! 🙏🏼 😊

Rent needs to be fixed. If the rent is too high in a single family house, they should move to an apartment or to low-income housing, if one is available. High rent warnings should be silenced if the resident is “wealthy” tier. Poverty should be more persistent. Every single neighborhood in my region has a wealth level of “wealthy,” even the neighborhood immediately next to industry and the one loaded with low-income housing.

I think Content creators spend a SIGNIFICANT amount of time in and around the game. I think they make an excellent choice for providing focused feedback and i generally agree with the things you and overcharged egg have said over time, i am aware of Biffa and i'm sure his feedback is great as well i just am not subbed to him. Paradox/CO can solicit feedback from the general public but it has to be gathered and sorted to get much done, it can take time. Thank you for keeping the community in the loop, i personally GREATLY appreciate the effort you make on this.

Hmmm... I'm Finnish and the parks don't all have fences here 😄

What if they had district challenges? Like a district you draw exists, there would be a rare event that that district demands. Idk, that type of stuff would be fun

I HONESTLY don't understand with sequels like this is where they suddenly struck with amnesia and have to re-learn all the lessons they learned from the first game, like search bars and how players like to play, like the actual prospect of losing.

I absolutely love how you presented this like a planning commission meeting or something. Very well done! Thanks for being a great middleman between the player base and the developers! Keep up the great work

I’m so glad you brought up Mac support. I loved playing CS1 on my Mac and was so disappointed with no Mac version for CS2. I have no plans to buy another computer just to play a game. At this stage I have given up hope and have turned my attention to Transport Fever 2. I’ve tried the simulators on Mac and the Nvidia option but the experience was so bad with crashes which was just the nail in the coffin. I will only consider coming back to play City Skylines after a native Mac version is available. Whatever that contractual obligation is that you mentioned, I hope they get out of it.

a train/metro station DLC / CCP is ESSENTIAL. My favorite part of CS1 was making public transport systems, and the current metro and train stations in CS2 is so underwhelming.

One of my greatest pet peeves about the game is: Why do you get the welfare office before the city hall? City halls has been around much longer than welfare office. I think one thing Cities XL did right was to make City halls available very early on in the game, and to have it provide a limited amount of all city services, including police, fire protection and heath care. Then, as the city progress, you would have specialized buildings providing those services.

I hope the fence around parks is an option, not taken away completely. I grew up around parks that had fences (India), and even the ones near us here (in the US) have fences. Thanks for representing!

I dont play C:S much, I mainly watch videos to see how towns/cities develop over time. My major complaint with most city builders is that you dont get to choose WHY your town/city exists from the start. Like seriously, is it a railroad town, farm town, spaceport, harbor town, etc. My gripes aside, watching these videos let's me enhance my own lore for my custom vehicles. My favorite is "What if Lima Locomotive Works was bought out by a Tycoon", in which I have maps that show Lima, Ohio in that alternate universe. Another favorite is Orion Shipyards, a group of shipyards based in modern day Scapa Flow, Chicago, San Fransisco, Galveston, Kansas City, and Hawaii (the Hawaii one I'm still working out the lore for). Same universe as the undying Lima Locomotive Works, and I have a map of only the Chicago Shipyard thus far...let's just say, downtown Chicago in this universe is VERY different....Your play-through's especially help me merge current maps with fictional ones to tell a story, and I cannot thank you enough for that ability.

It will eventually be a great game! Just like Cities 1. Thanks to people like you!

I’ve struggled to work out why I really didn’t connect to CS2 and I think you nailed it with your first point. At first it was solving the puzzles in not running out of money, then once I knew the game it I tried hard mode and even deliberately building in a way that would cause problems in the future. Solving problems and reaching milestones made it fun. I never played CS1 beyond the last milestone. As soon as I reached it I started another city. Clearly having goals is important to me.

Cities Skylines needs more animations, we lost the fire department police, deathcare, emergency service animations and much more with City Skylines 2. Also no stadiums, golf courses, resort hotels, convention centers, etc. Game lacks tourism centric buildings.

I imagine this isn't a particularly big deal for most players, but having worked in 911 EMS for nearly 15 years, I've always been bugged by the fact that healthcare services are lumped into singular all-encompassing service buildings, specifically the clinic or the hospital. It's not representative of how pre-hospital healthcare (e.g. Emergency Medical Services) is provided for in communities, at least where I am from in the northeast United States. We should have options to place EMS stations that spawn ambulances to bring patients to the hospitals in conjunction with the hospital-based ambulances. We should also have an option for fire or police department-based ambulances. This was possible in CS1 with vehicle spawn point mods along with custom assets for ambulances and buildings. Thanks for putting this together! Love your content as always.

If SimCity Was Still Around, EA Would Never Ask For community feedback & Have Meetings with RU-vidrs. Instead They Would Release DLC & Microtransactions Instead of Making A DLC Free From Colossal Order.

Being able to do bike infrastructure is one of the best parts of modded CS1 for me. Protected bike lanes, traffic lights where cycleways meet roads ect. Not being able to do this at all in CS2 is just a dealbreaker for me, and I can’t see myself having fun with the game until this, along with far better public transport options (BRT, more and high capacity buses, a variety of trams etc) are added. If CS2 made significant improvements over CS1 on this (so like being able to make Dutch style cycleways) it would immediately become so much better than CS1 from my perspective.

They need to add bicycles, bike paths, and bike lanes. I'm sick of them leaving stuff out from the original game. I would've bought the game day one if bicycles were in it. I will buy it as soon as they add bikes.

As a Scandinavian I would like to add that Finland is not a part of Scandinavia, only Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Cheers for the video, really nice to have this come out and shows they care and really want to fix the game.

14:25 sorry if you get to it later in the video, but to add to this list, I would say the game desperately needs some form of Undo It! It is far too easy to ruin a city In one click, there should be a cntrl Z feature

Can we just give them a round of applause for meeting with content creators in the first place? That should be common practice for large game devs at this point. Have meetings with people who play your games a lot, and are competent enough to give you valuable feedback. Edit: I haven’t been able to play CS2 yet. I own it, but performance was so bad I couldn’t play it. Idk if the performance is playable yet, but I’m building a new PC probably this month, so maybe I’ll try it then.

Mind blown homie I didn’t know you were a brotha 🤯 the way I pictured you was totally different.

Thanks for voicing those concerns to CO! I agree with a lot of what you said. I'm waiting until CS2 gets into a good enough state to really dive into it. As far as suggestions/wishlist:, I've always wanted to build a dense Hong Kong style city, so my wishlist is coming from that perspective. 1) Have additional mixed zoning types and commercial built into transportation stations/hubs - In Hong Kong (and a lot of cities in general), you'll have a shopping center at the bottom and maybe offices, residential, or both on the upper floors of a building. Also, there is also substantial commercial activity near station because of the amount of foot traffic. 2) Allow for zonable surfaces - The idea is that you put a surface down and as long as that is connected to a road, you should be able to zone. In Hong Kong, many residential towers are not directly on a road. You have to walk to get to a road. 3) Have a slider at the start of the game for a citizen's cultural leanings - Let me explain this one. I'm thinking we could have a slider where we could have citizens are extremely communal, extremely individualistic, and anything in between. How this would affect the game is how citizens derive their happiness from the space they live in. For citizens who are more culturally communal, they have a smaller happiness penalty for living in higher density residences, but is offset by a lesser happiness bonus for single family homes and a smaller radius in which they would be fine with traveling to to get their basic needs met (meaning that they will incur a happiness penalty for example, if there's no food availability with a 15 tile radius). The opposite is true for individualistic, where you have higher penalty for living in higher density, but a high level of happiness for single family homes and a higher radius for traveling to meet basic needs. 4) Planning roads/space reservation - It would be nice to be able to have a non-functional road or building to be able to save the space needed for all of the larger buildings and development. I don't really want to bulldoze existing buildings if I don't have to and it would be easier to plan where I want things if I can put a placeholder the size of the building or road I want and prevent putting other things like actual roads, buildings, and zoning from being built there. 5) Be able to add multiple commercial companies in a building - The way this should handled is that I think all commercial buildings should have a toggle whether or not it will contain more that one business. Then if so, the commercial area is then calculated for the building. Shops selling consumer goods will require a range of space, with some like automotive, will require a higher space, than another good, such as pharmaceuticals. Then, using the remaining commercial space, a company is generated and a random space within that range is selected, which also determines the number of jobs available. The game will then continue to pick companies until the remaining space is less than the minimum of any good.

i find really interesting (and cool) the fact that game developers are engaging with the community through content creators like you. Very few other industries have this sort of thing and i wonder if we'll start seeing this in other areas (i.e. apps developers, music, etc). It's really cool how this can inform the development cycle.

On the topic of density: Trying to build a tokyo style city is literarily impossible. Apartments are unusable and nobody will move into high density residential.

So glad they asked you to do this. I never picked up the game because of all the bugs and most of the issues you spoke of. If they fixed your list or gave it some love, I'd pick up the game.

Cities: Skylines 2 is a lesson in the problems with ‘ten-year games’; you cannot re-implement ten years of progress into a new game, but that’s what the users will expect. That’s not to say they couldn’t have done better, but it feels like there was no winning from the outset. Expectations were insurmountably high. Games like ETS2 and Minecraft survive because there isn’t an ETS3 or a Minecraft 2. You don’t kill the mods, you don’t break basic functionality, you just continue upgrading the core game again and again.

I really do appreciate how paradox and colossal order are dedicated on fixing the game and trying to improve the best as they can

Dude the "telemetry data" line is so fucking sad and is honestly I think responsible for most of the downfall of AAA gaming. They make bad scenarios, data shows nobody plays scenarios, so they think "oh well scenarios aren't worth investing in." Their focus should be on making a fun game. Fire all data scientists.

To your point about industries, I've always thought it was weird that the game starts with residential. It'd make much more sense for your first zones to be industrial.

As a creator, my biggest problem is the water. Ive msde several guides on how to make real data 1:1 grayscale heightmaps for the franchise, but i can't be bothered making maps, because of how water simulation works. As a player, im frustrated by many of the things you mentioned, but i wanna add tunnels. A road needs to be more than 10 meters deep, to go below another road or infrastructure. When did you last see a tunnel with a ceiling 10 meters tall?! That's 33 feet or thereabout. And the 11 foot 8 bridge in the US is not tall enough. It needs another 3 feet or 1 meter to be safe. That's something like a little over 4 meters, so why do our bridges have to be at least 7,5 to make a cross?! Thats around 25 feet!

I love this collab and working with other creators and with CO actually taking time to talk with you like this and get the word out- it's incredibly rare these days and despite the issues with CS2... this is a GOOD sign.

14:36 I think an important thing would be to have the buildings respecting the topography, and not force autoleveling for a graveyard, that are commonly found in hilly areas.

In Europe most small towns don't have any services or schools at all so it makes sense that you don't unlock many things at the start. But then again it is far too easy to get a power plant or landfill which just doesn't happen in towns of 5000 people or whatever.

Okay a finn here. Most parks do not have fences around them. That feels like an excuse

I haven’t played CS:2, but I believe they continued this behaviour from CS:1: The healthcare system feels unnecessary. You build tons of clinics or hospitals because people want to see them, but no-one ever goes there unless something’s wrong with your city. So all the infrastructure just sits there, empty.

27:20 Thank you, I have been saying this from the start that the decision to release less than one patch a month feels really bad when the game is broken. It's part of the reason many of us feel that Colossal Order has handled things poorly. Some of the other games I play are seasonal games, that release fresh content every 3-4 months, and are also by what you might call "indie developers". The new content patches are large and often have bugs. *They fix the bugs as quickly as possible* and they often release *multiple patches per DAY* until the game is in a state that they consider stable. These are also games that are on Steam and have to go through Steam's process. This makes it particularly hard to relate with CO's philosophy here.

Hi, fellow Madison, WI resident. I have been watching your videos for a while and didn’t realize you were local. I live on Fish Hatchery! Keep up the good work!

This game feels like CO got lazy and made the game closer to Sim City, moving away from what made CS a superior game.

I mean a pretty simple answer to “why content creators?” Because of point 5, a content creator is both themselves and a larger audience by extension at the same time which means the devs can get questions from that content creator as well as their community at the same time so we feel included in the process to a certain extent while also getting info from people who make a living out of making content on the game, it’s a win win!

Paradox is a blight on the gaming industry. $1,000,000 bet that there is 2x as much content waiting to be released on DLC to feed Paradox's classic style of "DLC every quarter"

I've watched the videos that came from this meeting and I'm going to echo the folks who are so grateful to have voices like you, Biffa and OE and so grateful to have open ears listening to the CS community's issues with the game. As a Pre-Orderer with less than 30 hours in the game, I'm near vibrating with excitement to see the updates that develop from this meeting. We appreciate y'all ❤❤

A suggestion that hasn't been made yet: A big reason why I haven't played the game yet is the weird school system. Lots of elementary school students, but hardly anyone attending high school or university. I watched a recent video from May 25, 2024 (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4cUymQo7ICc.html) and only 5-6% of primary school students attend higher school? - 39k primary school students -> 21% of the residents are primary school students, which seems a bit too much to me. I think 3-6% would be a more realistic number - 2.6k high school -> 1.1% of residents attend high school. I think the number should be 3-4 times larger. In short: fewer primary school students, more higher school students.

As a Scandinavian I don’t understand the summer break thing. Sure, a lot of people have a lot of time off and companies are obligated to give summer holidays, but workers don’t have unlimited holiday and it’s not like we go without food and fuel for two months because everything is closed. They should be able to plan around it and keep some velocity.

Maybe I’m just living under a rock but I’m fairly impressed they took the time to meet with Phil et al to have these conversations.. idk many other big companies that would care that much to do so? Fingers crossed for the future

I am SOOOOO glad you were apart of this. FOR YOU are the ONE PERSON who helped me fall in love with City Skylines 1. You should be paid to read books, your voice is amazing! I was trying to find a way to nominate you to be in their group! Well, I will wait and see how they do their updates and watch a few CS2 videos to see how/if it is improved. Then I will give it a try when the discount is applied, as I understand they had 10 years with the old game. YET! HAVING THAT REALTIME information shows you what you have to beat. Then the response was: 1 month : nothing, 2 month: nothing 3: month: nothing 4 month: ummm wow.....ok.....a p o l o g y 5 month: nothing 6 month: YT, we had no idea you wanted better than CS1. That does not sit well with me. I am pretty super happy with my maps and all things I can do in CS1. I am not certain I will ever buy CS2. I am baffled they are/were so clueless.

I am really upset that in 10 years of this game existing no one is talking about making cities come alive by implementing a social class system that all cities have in real life. I always wanted to be able to have poor, middle-class and rich neighbourhoods in my cities. I want gated communities and ghettos, I want them to interact, I want them to conflict with each other and to be able to resolve these conflicts by implementing social workers and reforming the economy system in my city. I want tents in parks with homeless people like we were promised to have in CS2. Basically I want all of those things from SimCity Societies but actually working. Without it, it is still a sandbox, a screenshot simulator and I think no one is realizing that. But I guess it will take another 10-20 years for all of that to come to life 😣

Thanks CPP. First post! A few things on my wishlist. Summary: 1. Density slider. 2. District policies for housing. 4. Industrial zoning restrictions. 5. Commuters! 6. More port assets. Explanation: The jump to high density (offices especially) doesn't feel meaningful and creates unrealistic expansion. High density should pack in more people and create more congestion that challenges you to manage "downtown" infrastructure carefully. Hitting peak realism with thousands of workers in a tower may not fit everyone's playstyle, but if the demand formula is stable then adjusting the observed density in buildings would impact the way your city is laid out. I want a tower to feel like a stack of 10 small office buildings rather than 2, and demand should determine the true size of buildings constructed. Also, I live in Washington, DC, currently, and a middle density zone for offices (or height restriction) would be huge. District policies right now don't do much besides tweak traffic. Boring, because there's no way to map traffic accidents and pedestrian collisions, so why do I care about speed bumps?? I would like to see row houses lowered to one household (more in line with who they were built for), and then see policies added to "allow" duplexes or higher, basement units, mother-in-laws, or other policy measures that shift the true density of a neighborhood. This would be interesting to play through when you start maxing out space and getting high rent complaints. It would be great to stratify industrial zoning to prioritize storage vs manufacturing or allow it to grow together. Not sure if it's peak realism but the outskirts of city centers seem to prioritize buildings for logistics and moving goods instead of stinky, noisy, manufacturing. I think this would also help clarify how industrial supply and demand works, especially if they were different demand types. Commuters. Is this even a thing? There doesn't seem to be any type of traveler through ports of entry other than "tourists." I'm not even sure that new residents use ports of entry or only come in on roads. In addition to updating the draws for tourists to include (idk) number of level 5 offices and industries (simulating business travel and encouraging more hotels), it would be great if a number of open jobs could be filled by people entering from city connections. This no doubt would be tricky for devs to balance with housing demand, but could lead to some interesting build descisions (or mistakes). Right now, I can't tell what brings agents to ports of entry other than pockets of "attractivenss" and I can't measure foot traffic! I have a passion for ports. Im from a port city, and I hope they really amp this up in the now long delayed bridges and ports DLC, but right now, there are pitifully few options for developing coastlines. I would like to see functional piers of all kinds, loading for barges (which could go with your raw material extraction in remote areas), ferries, dry docks, navy pier (nice for a signature building), seawalls, landings, fishing piers (and the industry from CS1DLC), all in addition to modular buildings for light civilian and recreational use. All kinds of goods and activities travel along local waterways beside ocean liners and longhaul cargo. Bring them to life! Sorry for the long post. I love following your creations! -Farylz

I love the idea of weekly challenges. Like think of No Mans Sky (quick silver) or State of Decay (bounty hunter).

I love the scenario idea! This would be a great way to bring the community together!! Provided Paradox gets the game up and running to expectations, this would be a fantastic way to improve their image and community morale. I have absolutely loved cities skylines 1 and have been so hesitant to get the 2nd game because of everything you, Biffa and Overcharged Egg likely talked to the developers about lol. Can't wait to see what comes out of this discussion, you are all great ambassadors for this game and community. Super stoked!!

Thanks for your work advocating for the community. My biggest gripe about all of this is that I feel like they didn't do the work to identify what the most popular mods were that made CS1 so enjoyable and have those included in the base game. That would solve a TON of feedback that I have for the game, because I want all the basics and those quality of life things without having the worry about mods breaking my game. The majority of my feedback you already covered, so I won't repeat those things here. But in addition to your feedback, here's what I'd like to submit: On the topic of Districts, it would be nice if you could draw boundaries with the same tools as roads (why can't we do curves instead of having to polygons with 100 vertices?). Another good option would be the ability to create a district out of a space enclosed by roads so that boundaries follow the contours of your roads. It would be nice to be able to control how big the property boundaries are for things like schools, universities, cemeteries, etc. For example, you plop the school BUILDING, and then you determine the footprint of the "campus" to how large or small you want it using tools similar to the district tools. Then, any upgrades you plop within that space is part of that school's campus. This would ensure you don't have a huge school parking lot in the middle of a city, but also each additional upgrade doesn't have to be touching the actual building. This mechanic could work for cemeteries too, so we can make sprawling ones--and we can plop graves within that boundary to expand its capacity, and make clever shapes that roll across the landscape. (Essentially Park Life DLC, but also for more things than parks)

The game could really use a more consistent theory of time. The year takes forever. Sometimes I play three or four gaming sessions and never leave winter (complete with green lawns). And yet people are graduating high school in 11 months and college in three months. The region goes from empty to a bustling metropolis in three years. If the day/month went by faster I think that would help.

They removed the "game" from the game with CS2 having the feature to export and import everything. The export and import of things like water, sewage, energy, trash, and any services should be very expensive, if used longer, the price should go up over time maybe. Maybe the export of trash, dead, sewage should not be possible at all or limited in some way. Water and energy import could also be caped, so only small towns can be fully supported and larger cities would only get energy for a certain amount of time.

20:51 lmao almost!! 😂 the stress goes on the second syllable. the first one is unstressed. so it's just "ta-LEM-a-tree" /tə'lɛmətri/

When you mentioned the difficulty sliders in Manor Lords I was like YES! I know it’s a very different type of game and it’s not even close to being finished yet but I’ve had more fun with Manor Lords than any city builder since Anno 1800. So much of it feels intuitive and “right”. I think a lot can be learned from the reception of that game.

A part of the problem is that they've gone ahead and released an updated version of Cities Skylines 1, 'Cities Skylines 1.2' instead of Cities Skylines 2. Nobody who played the game seriously played the base game or played the game without mods. The sense that you get from the developers is that they played the base game without mods. That said, they've gone ahead and made an updated version of that, Cities Skylines Base Game 1 now with updated graphics and a new simulator, AND IT DOESN'T WORK. For the actual community, the actual player base, the people that actually play, the expectation was that they would no longer NEED the standard mods to play the base game. The expectation was that all that nonsense that the mods corrected would be the default state of the new release 'Cities Skylines 2' new and IMPROVED. With line tool, traffic control, search functions, prop placement, all of the CRAP that you basically HAD TO HAVE as a mod to play the original for more than an hour once a month. (If you want to know what the core mods are go to the steam workshop and look at the most downloaded mods- that's the real game right there, that's what the community expected, I mean seriously, year on year patch after patch these mods were updated, why? Because the freaking game wasn't playable;e with out them, I mean seriously, reach deep into the bag Paradox and pull out a clue). If it's Colossal Orders intention to rerelease all the old expansions but in a new format, I'm done. That's bullshit. All that stuff is default now. Nobody made them decide to release a second Cities Skylines and if they were going to do it they needed to understand what that meant. They needed to understand that their job was to exceed expectations not repeat past performances with new graphics and an updated simulator. Honestly GET REAL. The argument that they 'have to make money' became redundant the moment they released a product that the players want to refund, if they're not making money on the greatest city builder franchise of all time that's on them, it's not because they needed to keep something for the expansions. There's a million expansion ideas out there. The community was so jazzed, so excited with anticipation, how do you screw that up? They didn't understand what Cities Skyline 'TWO' meant. It meant THE MAJORITY of the stuff from Cities Skylines 1 including the expansions with the expectation that new expansions would come later. Not Cities Skylines base game 1.2. I say the Majority, not every system, not every detail, they needed to understand what has become canon, what has become core. If they want to release expansions its needs to be something that the community hasn't seen or experienced before not the same thing they did ten years ago but with updated graphics and a new simulator. I don't think they can win the community back at this point. I think they shot themselves in the foot. I think they'll run out of money before they've released anything remotely like what the player base expects / expected. They're in a sense a victim of their own enormous success. Shame.

Thanks for the nice video! My thoughts after playing the game was that it kept reminding me of SC4, though the latter did some things better even though it's a 20-year old game. For example, if your city is doing well and has the demand for it, it'll grow top-level buildings. With C:S2 you always get the lowest level buildings first and this makes your cities look so repetitive. Also, the animations when buildings are growing look better in SC4, it's like they're actually being built. With C:S2 you always get a huge crane (even for a small house) and once the building is finished, it shows all of a sudden.

10:00 All or many. As a Finnish person i can't even say where would be a park that has a fence around it. Unless its a children's playground or some kind of sports field. I think the park designs in CS2 are absolutely idiotic.

I think its super cool they sat down with y'all. Very rare these days companies will actually listen to their customers. I picked up CS1 a year ago and just have to remember that was a game that had years of mods and updates. CS2 will get there and I think this is a great first step

I'll be honest, this whole thing makes this studio look wildly incompetent when it comes to game design.

Great video! I'm glad that the community has representatives like Biffa, Egg, and yourself that CO and Paradox are willing to sit down and talk to. I'm still hopeful that we'll see the game in a great state soon!

How I see: Colossal Order and Paradox had a lot of the work done for them in CS1, modders showed how the game could be so much better and we all hoped for a better CS2 based on that, instead they dropped the ball, hard... I remember how they choose to focus in all the wrong things: pre-order bonus, "influencers" in cranes, special editions, so many weekly videos to generate hype and pre-orders, minimal amount of content with the label "DLC", calling out the community because of the criticism about the state of the game, proprietary game launcher moving mods away from the workshop and now we have "maybe we can't have 10 years of support because people may not come back to the game", like it wasn't they own fault! For me I'm done, CS1 modded it's miles better than CS2 (that I refunded) and with how they are now more "corporate talk" than ever I don't expect much, as soon the community show any good will they will flood the game with lazy DLC and then move on... I don't agree with the more aggressive "gamers", but you can't expect "positivity" after you take money from people, deliver such bad product and have no idea when or how the product will be better, especially when you had all the information with CS1 and all the modders work for that game...

Excellent work, Phil. Kudos to CO for initiating this meeting, hope they take your feedbacks seriously & implement most of the fixes/suggestions.

Would it not be better to have outside connections give diminishing returns based upon milestones? That way you start off and it's cheaper to use them helping you get a foothold into the city, but later on it quickly starts to become increasingly more expensive, compared to local services? By making it more expensive right off the bat you end up with the reverse, not having them early on when they're most helpful, but once your economy is strong you can switch to them for a financial benefit, and that to me is counter intuitive. How about this as an idea? User-made scenarios? Create a scenario editor so modders can do the heavy lifting and those who want scenarios can play them and those who don't, won't. However that would be a long term project and I don't think scenarios are important right now. I said this on Biffa's channel, there's a real chance CS2 could go the same way as Imperator Rome, so Colossal need to focus as a maximum priority getting the game in a playable state because everything else is superfluous to that. I love CS1, I play CS1 regularly, but I haven't touched CS2 since launch and I am not going near it until I know I can actually play the game and not be hit by a crippling bug. I don't want to be halfway through a city and the game breaks, that's a waste of my time. The game _has_ to be playable to bring people back. Once it is playable, then start on the long road of improvements, engage with the community with polls on what we think they should focus on, that way we know we're being listened to and makes the community buy into this journey of getting to where we all want the game to be. Oh and for Christ's sake please don't base your feedback on likes, likes are time dependent; if you don't comment in the first hour, you're highly unlikely to ever get a like on a comment on a video, that's just the way it is. Someone can watch this video next week, come up with a superb idea and not have a single like and you'd just disregard it because no one's seen it. Read the comments yourself and make a determination as a veteran player.

As a very casual sort of player some of the indepth stuff is going to go past me, but what I noticed and what annoyed was with the housing and lack of bikes I am dutch damn it I want my bikes :D But really being able to make more dense cities is what makes sense to me, single family homes here are rare in cities, you will find some in the outskirts but even then it is quite dense and often still row houses and apartment blocks mixed in.

Phil, I was almost going to make a suggestion to improve CS2, but then I realized the game is basically irredeemable. They'll never make the (big) changes necessary to take this game to the next level. For example: if you play a game like EU4 - another gem from Paradox - you'll see how deeply intricate/interesting a strategy game is supposed to be, where all sorts of currencies (gold, monarch points, prestige, armies, manpower, aggressive expansion, etc) interact and merge together to provide the player with choices (including random events). You deal with situations as they emerge and you're forced to make trade-offs, effectively managing an empire. There is no such thing in Cities Skylines, and will never be. Not in the way the game is currently designed. I know they're different genres, but they didn't take any cues from EU4. They only took cues from Victoria 3 (which, surprise surprise, is another "feels dead" game!) In CS2, all is subsumed to the ONE currency - money. All other "currencies" (like happiness, traffic flow, health, wealth, profitability, etc) are nothing but background noise that no one cares about, hidden away in some graph or menu, with no real consequences/effect on gameplay. So long as you "make money", you're good. Sure, there's different WAYS to BUILD a city, but you never feel like you're MANAGING a city. And that's the key distinction... it's what makes CS2 a flawed game. The game doesn't give you any goals to strive towards, nor does it present any problems for you to solve. At least with CS1 you had traffic... You basically just "paint the city" and let the simulation do all the work for you. It feels hollow, non-strategic and devoid of meaning. It's not engaging or captivating. The simulation can be as deep/accurate as you'd like; but the way we INTERACT with that simulation will remain shallow, limiting the game's potential. Basically, CS2 is to games what LoFi is to music. LoFi is not a redeemable genre of music because it's not REALLY trying to be music - just like CS2 isn't REALLY trying to be a game, either. It's just a p(r)etty simulation.

A million thanks to you for trying your absolute best to support the community here and to be incredibly helpful for the progression of this games success! Been a long time follower of this channel and I am so grateful that you continue to grow this platform into something more and more people can get behind and enjoy! Always exited to watch your videos, thanks once again 😄

My takeaway is that it sounds like a lot of the problems with the game come down to bad creative decisions rather than technical issues. "But all parks in Finland have fences so whats the problem? Oh you wanted props? Why?" etc

This is an amazing presentation, this is better than most c-suite meetings I go to, amazing and professional. I'm still on the fence on buying the game and happy waiting for a cs2 that's an actual improvement on cs1. One point of feedback regarding the video: If you have twich chat "unreadable" when zooming in on parts of the screen, I'd rather have the screen change so you can still read the comments from chat.

Your face looks different than I imagined 😂😂

Thank you for bringing this up. You made the feedback to devs in a very structured and easy to understand way. I completely agree on all of the suggestions and wishlist you said. I just hope their management see solution on making fixes faster because time is really their enemy here. Also if they can somehow compensate the modders if they want to incorporate their solutions into the base game, I would see it as a plus. Some wishlist from my end: 1. Where is the lightning? I saw it in the trailer before (when they mention hailstorm) but havent experienced any. 2. Make more policies that can be applied city wide and district wide. 3. More textures in agriculture industries. 4. Option to have grass. 5. Better visibility when building underground roads/tracks 6. Slider in percentage (probably) on agents. This will provide flexibility on lower end systems to finally enjoy the game.

American car centric city sprawl lovers like me are under represented in the cities skyline community. Buildings that don’t have enough parking for costumers and employees should go out of business. edited: multifamily homes and buildings should require at lest one parkin spot per household. The exception would be in a super dense inner-city with good public transport. Also zone able parking lots would be great, at least where i live most buildings especially apartments and row home are not bult directly on the street.

Phill, your videos are the reason I play this game, and I’ve learned a lot - thank-you. Having said that, I stopped playing when I realised nothing I did made a difference. Traffic despawning makes traffic jams nothing more than a cosmetic nuisance. And yes, I would love a despawning slider. What really put the nail in the coffin for me was removing all public transport made ZERO difference. And all busses running bunched up together on one corner of the city while my bus stops have over 200 ppl waiting. A pet peeve of mine is hobos, in the game my parks usually spawn with hobos. I can’t seem to help them no matter how much low income housing or social services buildings I place. If the game is going to give us a challenge, it would be nice if we had the tools to address it. I am waiting for the game to have these things fixed before I touch it again. I know that could take a long time, but I am hopeful they will eventually sort it out because the game doesn’t make much sense the way it is now.

They need to run 2 week sprints rather than waterfall patches.

Hi. First time commenting on your channel here. I played CS1 for years and loved it. It was one of the biggest things that kept me (almost) sane while I was recovering from a medical issue. I can't begin to tell you how excited I was when CS2 was announced. I even built a new computer from the ground up so that I could make the most of what appeared to be an amazing step forward for a game that meant so much to me. Then I started watching the first look videos that you and several others published. I made the decision to hold off on purchasing the game until I saw that a lot of the flaws were ironed out. You can imagine the disappointment I felt when CO said that bug fixes wouldn't be rolled out ASAP in favour of releasing them with other updates. Here we are now, at this point in the games life cycle and a lot of what I'm still seeing is the same problems that we began with. Sure, they have made strides in fixing some of the really big issues, but they appear to be neglecting the things that made CS1 such an enjoyable game. When every city looks the same, it does not have replayability. So far, there are limited mods available to change that. I think that's what I found so great about the first game. I could make a city look like where I grew up, or where I live now. I could make it look and feel like the city I want to live in, or have a place that struggles to keep its population. What can CO and Paradox do to win me back? That's a great question with several answers. First, I would suggest that they reach out to the modding community that helped them so much before. There are so many really talented people who created mods and assets for CS1. Plus, by opening that avenue again, it could take some of the heat off CO so they can concentrate on getting the behind the scenes mechanics working better. CO isn't wrong in that the scenarios aspect shouldn't be a high priority. I only played one scenario myself, and found that I prefereed the sandbox approach. Granted, there are people who like that sort of play, but that's not me. I'm sure I could come up with some more suggestions, but this being my introductory post, I think I've rambled on enough. I hope what I said makes sense.

First outside of the bots lol

CO needs to watch every video on the Not Just Bikes video and then bring all of that in. Bicycles, bicycle garages, bycicle/bus/train hubs, all the traffic calming / cobble stone roads, various bollards and other protections / blockages to protect non-car users; smart traffic lights, the works... And then they should just call the DLC that contains all that, "Not Just Biks".

This game is so broken! How they could screw it up this bad after making CS1 is an accomplishment in it self. 🤣

I tried playing the other day and got frustrated that the city I was building was only demanding mid-density housing when I had 0 low density/single family homes. It only wanted like row house and it didn't feel real. I'd like that to be improved to create the sense of suburbia and the smaller communities close to cities without being in the city. I just don't feel like the demand at any level is real. Even building specific industrial (mining, farming, forestry, etc.) isn't lowering industrial demand and that feels off to me. I appreciate how communicative CO and Paradox have been since they realized the mistake, but we need more progress. Thank you Phil for meeting with them and thanks to CO and Paradox for hearing the community out.

I haven't watched the whole thing yet but it just occured to me that you should be able to upgrade existing zoning without it destroying the existing buildings, like in SimCity 4, so that buildings will upgrade to higher densities naturally over time.

Thanks for working on the behalf of fellow fans of city-building games in general, and specially C:S 1&2. Lots of great suggestions! I currently are saving money for a new computer, that I really need for newer games, so I haven't even invested in C:S2 yet, but it seems like that haven't been a bad idea at all. My son have it, but he haven't said anything about loving to play it.

Kudos, Phil. Your work as a real city planner paid dividends with your suggestions and solutions. I am honored that PD and CO had enough respect for you and your work to include you and other top creators in providing open feedback. That was awesome and concur with your suggestions as a CS 1 player (no macOS support for the game)