Cities: Skylines 2 is making an necessary change to how public transportation works

One of many points with the unique Cities: Skylines is the best way you unlock new public transportation choices. The unlocks are primarily based fully on inhabitants milestones: you get entry to taxis and buses when your inhabitants reaches 650 individuals, however cable vehicles, trains, trolleybuses, and monorails come later down the road when you’ve sufficient residents to qualify as a Large City and a Small Metropolis. Which means you want 1000’s of residents earlier than you may entry these necessary companies.

The issue is that well-designed cities are constructed round public transportation techniques like trains and trams, and that works significantly better than constructing a metropolis that helps 1000’s of residents and then attempting to cram public transportation into an current design. Lay the tracks earlier than you construct the skyscrapers, in different phrases.

That is why it is nice information that in Cities: Skylines 2, new modes of public transportation will not be unlocked by inhabitants milestones. As a substitute, as we realized at this time within the new Cities: Skylines growth diary, public transportation choices are unlocked utilizing one thing known as “growth factors.”

Sadly we do not know precisely the way you earn growth factors—that is being saved for a future growth diary. However we do know you can spend these factors on the kind of public transportation you need to unlock subsequent. Buses and taxis will nonetheless unlock primarily based on inhabitants progress, however after that, every thing else can be unlocked by spending your growth factors, so the selection can be yours as an alternative of being primarily based on the scale of your metropolis.

That is a sensible change. As the event diary says, the unique milestone system “resulted in equally constructed cities as every possibility was all the time unlocked on the identical time, whatever the participant’s want to make use of them or not.” In Cities: Skylines 2, if you wish to focus your younger metropolis on utilizing subways, ferries, streetcars, and presumably even airplanes (and hopefully blimps!) you can unlock them within the order you need and get entry to the techniques you want sooner than you’ll in any other case.

I believe it is a nice tweak to the components, and I am hopeful the event factors system will prolong to different components of the game—public transportation is not the one factor dictated by inhabitants milestones, but in addition distinctive buildings, totally different industries, and different companies. The extra choices we get to make about after we get to entry new companies, the higher.