New City Services Revealed | Cities Skylines II

Despite being less than 5 minutes long this features video gave us a lot of insight.

The first thing that really stood out to me was how good the assets look. It may just be me, but I feel the art style is a good mix between a more realistic looking version of CS1 along with the detail of SimCity 2013. The cemetery for example has such amazing detail and looks much more realistic in both detail and scope.

There’s also more levels to education with College’s being added to the game which look like a great addition. I could see people saving the University for a higher wealth inner city area and the college for a more lower income area. Police cars will patrol the entire map unless limited by a district. Based on the written diary, it seems prisons are also confirmed to be in the game. There’s also an administration building category which had the following description:

Administration includes services such as Welfare Office, City Hall, and Central Bank. The Welfare Office helps people down on their luck and boosts their Well-being if their Happiness is below half. The City Hall has city-wide effects, ranging from lowered loan interest rates and import costs to reduced crime rates and building leveling costs. The Central Bank also helps reduce loans and boost companies’ profits by lowering import costs while increasing export profits

CO also showed that if one of your city services such as a school runs out of capacity, rather than plopping another building you can simply just upgrade the capacity of the building. It isn’t clear if these upgrades will have a limit as it would make sense since space is limited.

A night scene was used to show electricity being turned back on which had a really nice animation, the night look was really good too and better than what we got in CS1. Speaking of power, the solar panels had a really nice look to them, similar to what we have seen in CS2013.

The pollution effects are really good too, just like SC2013 both water and air pollution have a negative effect on Sims and the visual way water pollution is shown looks great. We also found out about some new service buildings such as a welfare office, telecom/internet, landfill which is drawable, and we got a look at the real time budget.

This is one of those insights that makes me even more excited for the game, hopefully this Thursday’s developer insights will provide even more info.