Saving My City Post Economy 2.0 Patch Took Over EIGHT Hours in Cities Skylines 2! 

City Planner Plays: This didn't take too long, just a couple hours and Magnolia County was up and running with just a few mods! Biffa: This will take 8 hours, your city will collapse, and the economy will be worse than 2008.

I'll be dinking around -- actually looking forward to the tile maintenance. I won't be building my save for all time cities until assets get released.

I am having issues with tramlines complaining about path finding errors. Did anyone have similar problems and does someone know a solution?

This makes me want to play even more than ever now.

I've always thought each town you build should be different. In the real World some cities are happier with higher taxes and more services (left wing, communists :D ) and some are happier with less taxes and less services (right wing). Obviously some in the middle too. Imposing right wing politics in a left wing city should be very difficult and vice versa, with peoples opinions changing slightly over time.

i got a 300k city befor.. after update a just hold 1 h and now i got 320k but a death wave.. i try to fix but is really too much death/mount also MASSIVE education problem.. i need like 5 or 6 X more scooks and everthing. wtf

Getting rid of an elementary school playground to make way for a crematorium. Savage.

thanks Biffa! and honestly I think that having it optimised for new games is a much better priority than optimised for existing saves - I'm regularly fighting restartitis in my CS games so i can just enjoy a new game with the new mechanics

Can we get the 8 hour cut? I'd love to hear Biffa lose his mind for 8 hours.

The economy simulation actually works now. The reason you got a massive unemployment wave was because you increased the commercial taxes way too much. It dug into the companies profit margins and you forced them to lay off their workers by taxing them so hard. If you want the economy to grow you must provide very reasonable taxes to businesses so that they can afford to hire your citizens. Once your citizens have money you can then tax their income as long as you have residential demand. But not too much because then your citizens wont be able to purchase anything at the businesses.

@biffa Looks like when you added the Gas powerpoint at $650K per month upkeep + 2 new tiles at $52K per month upkeep is what crippled your economy. Even when you lowered the output capacity to 50% it was still far higher running costs than the two coal plants at $100K per month upkeep.

Perhaps it's not the best idea to buy new tiles for expansion when you're facing financial difficulties. This update focuses on promoting good governance, such as creating productive employment opportunities, rather than just aesthetics keep that in mind. Adjusting the tax slider appears to have a positive impact on various aspects of the city. Considering the existing employment challenges, it would be more beneficial to increase residential taxes rather than those on jobs. I'm excited to see how you'll build a new city from the ground up with this update. Best of luck!

130K city experienced huge deathwave, the reserves of cash are of course at 2 billion, and yes the upkeep for tiles is high BUT I will say that this update made it so that when I look at my city info panels, I can see that CRIME is actually functional again! I hadnt had any police departments before this patch and you could be functional. Also my city has no specialization production which is a factor for my economy.... so now I'm going to focus on actually making some sort of specialized industry areas (I think thats the meta of the patch, special industry sectors + good taxes) -- ENJOYING THE PATCH! GOOD UPDATE! GOOD CONTENT!!

I hope they implement something like staggered cost for tile upkeep, depending on whats in it. If a tile is just a mountain, with nothing on it, I feel like it should cost less than a downtown area

I updated my Vanilla Save to Economy 2.0. Here are some stats. - the death wave is real. It took < 2 months to heal. I made a fleet of Incinerators and hearses to keep up, and it didn't matter. - During this transition, the game runs the simulation at top speed very slowly even on good rigs (i7, 3090, 64 RAM, etc). Those 2 months took 3 hours or so to adjust, but then it's back to normal. I spent that detailing the city with trees and paths. - population bulged from 90k to 115k! - unemployment bulged from 5% to 15% due to so many new residents. - traffic flared up during that 2 months. Destinations changed for many vehicles en-route, and many new residents filled the roads to move in. Traffic situations I had previously solved all came back in force during the shift to 2.0, but calmed down afterwards. We'll see how the city handles the first stable rush hour though. - Income dropped from 100k / month to 20k/ month on a 8/10/10/10 tax splits. Very manageable, but not a concern. - tile tax was not as weighty as I was worried about (maybe 10-15% of my budget). Service buildings cost more though, and the bulge in population had me importing water/sewage for the first time since early game, which explains the budget changes. - High Schools are actually filling up! Overall, the switch wasn't too bad! I look forward to stabilizing the city, and continuing to grow!

Live stream of a new city start with patch will be good to see

Seems like you had a devil of a time compared to City Planner Plays. I'm actually glad that you had a different experience so that folks can see there are multiple possible paths post-economy 2.0 update.

I got an older save of a roughly 26k city with no mods and all of the services covered including some electricity selling to outside connections. I fired it up with the update and everything kinda worked. There was a death wave for sure but that went away pretty fast. I even lowered all taxes back to 10 % and I'm still making a good profit. Also lot of peeps moving in, the city jumped to cca 35k after cca 3 in-game months. So I guess it really depends on how reliant the city was on outside connections and other stuff in the first place.

Biffa you don’t need to plop transformer stations down to transmit power from your power plants. They already come with their own transformers 😂!

the tile cost thing is an interesting problem... It makes some amount of sense: It's basically a land value tax. IRL that type of tax is a pretty good idea because it directly emphasizes productive land. However, it's more complicated in this game setting: The productivity is certainly a good idea, but it's not like you can simply get rid of tiles if you overspent. Certain techniques where you only buy some tile to get to some interchange that has been preplaced or something like that are potentially financial ruin now. - IRL this *does* make sense. You're not gonna buy that much land just to fix one small thing that's already on it. But IRL you also can simply buy smaller amounts of land to more closely fit your needs. This, in turn, is of course not as useful gameplay-wise: You wouldn't normally want to buy tiny bits of land like that. Perhaps this is a bit too complicated but it might make sense to be able to only buy certain rights on non-owned land. For instance, perhaps you could just buy a piece of road or an electric line or something, to do with as you see fit, but it costs like double the upkeep than it would on owned land, and you're not allowed to zone there or build any sort of building other than electric lines and roads no matter what you do? Have very high bulldoze costs on such not directly owned land as well. But anyway, that's, of course, a relatively niche concern. 99% of the time you're definitely gonna wanna use "all" land. For now the price of a tile should perhaps simply be down-adjusted as you suggest. I'm willing to bet highballing it in the initial patch was sorta intentional, as the feedback was a lot of "make it harder". Just making it a slider (as the mod provides) seems like a decent alternative idea. Oh and I'm not sure if anything like this is already done, but there should also be considerations for relative land value. For instance, if your land contains portions with potential for economic exploitation (fertility, ore, oil etc.), it ought to be valued accordingly, and water ought to be cheaper than land and such. If those things aren't in yet, I hope they will be. Land that's harder to build on (say, steep mountains) also should come with a discount I think, although that's gonna be more difficult because you can actually change this. If they can update such costs on the fly, that could be an interesting consideration in terms of levelling land: If you do this, the upkeep will end up being a bit higher, so you better make use of all that destroyed landscape :) On the flipside, I guess that could cause exploits where you simply roughen up land you don't intend to use to reduce tile cost, so maybe that consideration is not worth it... The way the pricing would often be done irl is effectively by auctions and land lease: "How much is it worth to you to have access to this land for 99 years" or something. Highest bidder gets the land at a constant tax rate. After those 99 years the contract gets renewed in another round of auctions, possibly with reprioritizing what kinds of needs there are and thus changing which potential wannabe bidders have access in the first place. But of course, in the game, there is only one bidder.

What a great way to start my week off with a Biffa video first thing

If you set up the tax rate based on districts, you can really control the flow of deliveries from industry into the city. I like that. Tnx for the review on all of the changes, I may actually start playing CS2 again.

My 120K city is already back in the green with tax at 8% and no extra charges for any fees or services by locking all the map tiles with the mod 529 tiles, and then unlocking only one ones I need. Unfortunately the death wave has slowed the simulation speed down to a crawl so it's taking forever to get past the first two months.

Tile upkeep is a bit insane as a concept to start. What are you even paying for?? Maintain vacant land? Is the tile upkeep going to decrease as you zone the land? In theory, developed land is no longer owned by the city and no long requires maintenance. Roads already have upkeep. Fire helicopters for forest fires already have upkeep. If the tile is mostly water, does that reduce the upkeep? In my existing city of about 45K, post update I'm spending nearly 6mil combined on fire and police importing, when I have abundant extra police and fire trucks sitting around my city

My tram lines broke after the update. If I try to change an existing line, it says "pathfinding failed". I tracked the bug down to the trams not being able to pathfind through intersections. Does anyone else have this bug? I would like to know if it is a mod related bug.

The tile upkeep is a weird one. I don't really see the point in it? Fortunately the unlock all tile mod allows you to adjust the % of upkeep as I was veeeeeeeeeeeery negative haha.

"households without adults" sounds like some dickensian novel :) anyway it would be interesting if a ghetto would form inside the city, with the lowest income huge families, orphans etc.

Generally the update is good, but the tile upkeep cost is very strange and seems like a coarse way of making the game more difficult.

The prices for importing and exporting goods should be determined by supply and demand with other players. As in if a bunch of players start exporting electricity, the price goes down because not enough players are importing electricity.

For me this patch was super-easy. I just left it running for 30 minutes, and everything went well. Didn't have any huge dying, didn't have any issues with commercial or industrial sectors, overall - *my city significantly improved without any intervention.* After that, I just had to fix throughput of some roads and mass transit, as they started hitting the max capacity! My earnings perhaps went a bit down, but I'm still earning more money than I'm able to spend.

Cheers Biffa. Does seem more and more like a city manager game rather than a city builder. And completely unplayable on the console. If you can't balance the city without mods, us mortals have no chance. 😂

Is it just me or are health services literally crippling

Honestly the tile upkeep was not too bad for my existing save with a city of ~100k. I was still profitable and had room in the budget to try subsidizing a few industries that were importing a lot. Pre-patch I was generating $20+mil/mo in profit, post-patch it settled around $2mil/mo in profit. I have around 150 tiles with an upkeep of $2.5mil/mo. The real killer was the service upkeeps spiking and wiping out most of my profit margin but it was manageable, feels more realistic, and provides a better challenge. The death wave and traffic were pretty bad and unemployed hit about 20% but I had around 20,000+ people moving in per month, about 10x more than were dying, and it all sorted itself out pretty quickly. Before I knew it the city had quickly grown from 100k to 180k, unemployment back down to 5%, and the profits were raking in!

In a realistic sense what is 'Tile Upkeep'? What does it cover? Or is it just a figure added to try and balance economy? I ask because if it was as simple as a land tax, surely it would be named as such.....

Very nice video biffa

P.S. 2:10 You can't lock Unlimited Money after you've unlocked it and saved.

I always love a good Biffa Fix-It video. You get to fixing and I'll start the tea. Gives you a lot more mileage out of your CS2 gameplay. :)

Thanks for the words, always appreciated.

My city goes -90M from +110M due to this tiles upkeep update in Economy 2.0, worst experience, i hope they will resolve soon

Still no updates on traffic though? Cars changing lanes at junctions? I can't find any mod that will fix this, you can only force them into lane AT the junction and then they change lanes at the lights anyway.

awesome vid Biffa woww it looks harder then ever befor awesome job man love love your work man keep going :) 😍👍😃 awesome work as always too.

Tile upkeep is probably the worst idea from the whole patch, everything else seems just fine.

I personally think that upkeep on owned tiles is a dumb idea. I think that if you bought a tile that isnt producing you money then youve already wasted that space, making it so it has an upkeep generally reduces quality of life and creativity. No longer will you play by the games rules to do something small, or create a small town further out, instead youll only really grow if you have the funds, of which you cant get cus you have no space, space you need to use to gain money, which youve just wasted on space. They could have done a lot more to make the game harder, this, to me, wasnt the right direction. Instead I would rather the tiles be more expensive tbh.

Nice Video!

I’m sorry but it sounds like they went from it being to “easy” to maybe to hard. They need to make it so you can choose easy, medium, and hard to turn things on and off so you can get what you want. It’s not fun if nothing you do stops your city from going up in flames.

the new import services is bad... i want to pick and choose what services i import.. i only want to import garbage and health/deathcare.. but NO its either you have ALL of them or NONE of them... that is bad because of how expensive it is to import the services.. and how picky citizens are about not having a service....

I genuinely feel these changes have made the game more harder , it’s loosing is fun to play elements, and only catering for the pro players, I don’t see any child support homes , , the taxi level is too high even if you have alternatives, yet they need to off say a external bus and one rail station link with x life that has to be replaced if the town , they need to remove the train station cap in the options so it plays like city 1 for some people,

It looks like everyone got a scenario for their City builds. Really looks like everybody's going to have to start over from scratch or cheat to win. 😂😂😂. It just shows how off balance everyone's city is and its still going to be a community mod game for function. 2 steps back for one forward.

biff biff 22:00 you drop coal plants then sub stations the plant already has a connection out to the road then the sub on the other street then you do another plant on the other side. then you connect both plants to the same sub you made alot of extra cost idk i guess im over thinking it maybe good for failover

Did you have death wave???????? I love how this morning, the message on the forums said, be prepared, your seniors will die....Bad, I laughed.

I think the condemned buildings were something happening with your zoning, such as a mod being turned off 6:05

I dislike this Tile Upkeep - I've gone from making 6M to -22M since the patch release. To be able to continue to receive achievements, I HAVE to play with this on and completely rethink the game, which no player should have to do. Paradox should be giving players a choice of Tile Upkeep if they want a late game challenge or not and have an achievement. For me, making profit and city planning is a relaxing game, not have to worry about excessive debt over tiles, we never had this in CS1.

i dont know what has happened with me... i LOVED skylines spent over 4k hours into it.. but skylines 2 i cannot manage more than 5 hours at a time and then i uninstall it for a few months anyone else feel like this ?

Hello, i play the game for the first time, 0 mods all dlc. I had my trafic at 30%, i managed with your help to boost it up to 70%. But my city is still verry bad. Would you be so kind to take a look, maybe just a quick tip to help me fix it? I think the city is decent, even the layout, it just could use some profesional help.

16:00 hilarous to see that THIS fix didnt work. How come they just cant get that working?? If i want convenience food let me place it!! Why do we need another workaround to have the, coming in?? Adapt taxes all up, convenience food lowest, then wait, and delete and then correct the tax rate again? That just cant be the solution??😢😢😢

Have to start a new city from scratch before we can pass proper judgement. In all honesty, this game has been Far Too Easy up to now. Im thrilled and excited to see these changes! Its wonderful to hear the Dev are still Deving, and not just making DLC content. Sure, Im gonna loose about 100 hours of Cities Iv created so far. But hey! Building them is the fun bit, and this is a great excuse to start over!! *puts the kettle on* Now, wheres my comfy pillow, I need a blank map!!.

I fixed my city, it was nice to have something todo for a change. Its cost me 25 mil, lost 75% of the population, and deleted about 20% of buildings i gues. After that i gained population and it went above of what ive had before, and profit aswel. Goot patch so far.

Hey Biffa, Unsure you are aware, but did you know you can have your high and low voltage power lines buried? It's pretty much my go to anymore in CS2.

@biffa watch out for the spiraling unemployment problem. I had unlimited residential demand and consequently hit 56% unemployment before i noticed that poverty was becoming a huge issue. Thought it was their new rent system but its demand and jobs.

My city didn't require any fixing at all. All I noticed was a sudden death wave, but that sorted itself out soon enough. p.s. I did run into the tiles problem, as I had inadvertently unlocked all of them in a previous build, but fortunately the 529 tiles mod has the option to re-lock them when loading a save and I was able to use that and then re-purchase the ones I was using.

The same thing happened to my city first it was a death wave and then everything got so expensive every demand plummeted and then I’m going bankrupt The game is not fixed is they just screwing us over this city is still boring. Where is all the mechanics on people going to the parks the firefighters coming outing fires coming out of their car ambulance people coming out football stadium game going on. Where is all that from city skyline 1 we need to be like a real world. We need more community events going on in the city. Put some government voting where people can vote for a governor mayor maybe more exciting not just zoning watching building buildup and the game is boring. Come on.

Arent the shades of blue the density of the ground water source and not pollution? Im fairly certain the complaint about polluted water is from the handful of people living down river near the lumber area... right next to the poo filled river, gotta move that sewage outlet further down stream.

I’m just not going to buy this game until CO finally improves the variety of RICO assets. It’s just atrociously repetitive still.

How to survive the death wave after economy 2.0? 😢 I've already lost over 10k people and the death wave seems to be infinite

The fact that you can manipulate what factories rise in your city is a game changer for me... i am gonna love creating specific factory areas to produce stuff for exporting! that is a huge change in my opinion love it!

I had a city of 300k when they rolled out thr update. And im still working on it!

What is the point of a tile upkeep fee. I think it's actually kind of stupid. That's what city services are for. That's what we pay for when we plop services down. I don't see the point in a tile fee. Seems like a more redundant fee. I don't know of any city that pays a fee on areas of town that they annex. Yeah they pay to provide services to the newly annexed area, but there's no additional fee just to hold the land. Seems silly to me

Tile upkeep 61.3 million. Nah thats not a problem for me. Just need to come up with 62 million and I'll fine.

So CS 2 is not completely ready and Bethesda game studio's broke FO4 well I decided to give Banished another try ..

Ive found i only get new tiles if i absolutely, absolutely need to. Results in very challenging traffic problems.

I'm not going to lie, I'm a little disappointed that you had to use a mod to do this. I'm curious, did you really expect jamming all the taxes to 30% for industry and commercial to not result in all your businesses leaving and your unemployment to skyrocket? I think the biggest problem that both you and City Planner Plays have is the huge swathes of unused land in your city. I think the trick going to be using your tiles more efficiently. Like, any open space can be farmland or forestry until it is redeveloped into residential, commercial or other industry.

so is the patch out now for everyone?

Why is your crematorium directly next to an elementary school? That is rather a bit disturbing...

My unemployment was just at 4.10% and risen up to 32% after this patch

Unfortunate that it does seem a bit buggy still, but I know they'll keep working at it, so I'm not concerned

tbh was surprised my city was relatively unaffected aside from an actually insane amount of traffic

My city was -12 million per month in tile upkeep costs and my city is a similar size to yours

Way to difficult to start a new city. I'm broke in 10 min😢

Great video Biffa, thank you for sharing your struggles with us!

What is that screen at 1:01? How do you get your mods to display like that?

You can sell energy once you have installed such a large power station.

Tile upkeep sounds like a very dumb mechanic.

Why this game still looks and plays worse than the first one?

Late to the party, but this might be my favourite episode yhet!

Hi Biffa this looks like a taxi strike in South Africa😅

oh that explains why my city is crazy in debt now.

Lmao. Someone literally got run over in the first minute lol

I'm losing 70K per month since patch and demand is maxed out on everything 😂

Biffa can I ask please is cities 2 worth buying I really want too but it's £41.99 is it worth nearly 50 bar with all its faults if I have cities 1 should I not be investing in this game want a RU-vidrs opinion and I know you will be honest and open about it

One of the best movies out there really explaining the economy 2.0 changes. Thanks. Pitty this movie was made with a small city, not showing the problems larger cities were facing.

My guess is if a city organically grows from a new start with the new economic model, the upkeep cost will not be crippling. Obviously an existing city, in the new patch, will have all kinds of financial problems, not just because of things like services, but also as inhabitants needs to change jobs, change housing type etc to find a new equilibrium, and in all that upheaval, the city's finances will be in a mess.

I managed to get out of my financial hole, with under a hundred thousand and going negative (I thought my game was over) by... Lowering taxes on commercial and offices and expanding outwards with them. Then, my tax revenue just skyrocketed. Initially, I went super negative because, well, my tax revenue was shot. See, commercial and offices were around 1-6%., so you're getting nothing. But I quickly recovered and zoned commercial and offices where I could, and my revenue promptly returned positive. This will also solve your unemployment problem, assuming you've got your education covered. After you've got your commercial, industry, or offices (whichever you choose to lower taxes on), you raise it and get rich essentially. High-density commercial and offices are incredibly profitable for a tax base, so once you get them, things start feeling easy (or maybe it was a weird quirk with my game). The taxes you were using (10-14%) is what you'd do to never grow as a city ever - your demand tanked. On the other hand... The tile upkeep is a bit much. I also found it difficult to get critical services early on, and I continued to have an issue with it until I got 2 million in profit before the money started being a thing. And that was with 60,000 people in the city - I may need to experiment with newer games to see what works and doesn't. Anyhow, I hope this somewhat helps you in your journey!

Tile upkeep is a ridiclous thing to add.

finally I can discourage Car traffic ^^

I don't really understand the need for a tile upkeep cost. IRL, when new towns first formed, they generally didn't buy land, they just claimed it. Later on, land owners would sell land to be built on. I suppose there is the case of "ground rent" for leasehold properties, but that's not really "upkeep" for just bare soil. I would have thought that the "upkeep" cost of land is mainly paid for through spending on city services such as road maintenance and utility maintenance fees. There might be a little bit of forestry or landscaping cost, but It probably wouldn't be very high. I think I will probably end up playing with the 529 tiles mod and lower the upkeep cost right down, because that feels more realistic to me. IRL when towns and villages form from nothing, they do so in a fairly spread out way, with farms and fields using a lot of cheap land. It's only as they grown and land value goes up that you have to start using the land much more efficiently (which is why skyscrapers exist in New York, but not out in the countryside).

I'm in the middle about it. If you have a good save you have been working on and things go bonkers, that is beyond annoying. I guess it's up to each and how they build, but starting over, when you have a nice city to begin with, is just out of the question. So, if it causes problems, then it's a problem in my eyes. I honestly just want things fixed and for CS2 to act like a very nice, updated version of CS1. Should have been that way to begin with. All these constant fixes that start messing with things just make me wait longer and longer to buy the game. I want to relax and enjoy it and not fix things for hours on end. Sticking with CS1 sounds better 😁 I'm still having issues with my computer so I'm literally commenting from the outside looking in. I couldn't play it atm if I wanted to because of my pc. I can see though what Biffa is talking about and I have to say it sounds too annoying.

My city got destroyed with this update, I turned taxes up to 13% turned off all monuments, and still, I am well in the negative numbers (like 500k) and the tile upkeep is stealing like 70% if my income, and I have bought those tiles. Still I am pleased with this update

I'm so excited about this update. I love fixing cities. I am surprised CO released this update right after second most important holiday in FInland, Juhannus (Midsummer Day) when everyone who can is going to summer cabins in the middle of nowhere. Thanks Biffa for all advices, I'm lucky enough to have a few cities to fix!

Interesting. I didn't have these issues in my city, but I did have quite a lot of specialised industry exporting which I think covered me so my money went from stupidly high to roughly even. I've a feeling starting a new city from scratch would be a lot less rough.

I feel like I can finally watch CS2 now after this update. I stopped watching after your third video. I would rather watch Mrs gelatine. Haha I’m glad we can possibly have more cities again.