This game vs CS1?

[Roblox Bodybuilder]

Hey! I am looking to potentially buy CS2. I played almost 50 hours of CS1, and I really enjoyed it. Gameplay wise, are there any notable differences between the two games? Which gameplay do you find to be better?
(You can compare CS1 with all dlc to CS2. And I don’t really like using mods often, so CS2 having less mods isn’t a huge factor for me).

[Cathartic Flatulence]

CS2 is pretty much constantly broken with some sort of major issue every version update.

IMO CS2 is better, but not by much. I think you'll get 50 hours out of it, but once you hit 400k population, the simulation slows to a crawl.

[sternenstaub70]

Originally posted by Cathartic Flatulence:

IMO CS2 is better, but not by much. I think you'll get 50 hours out of it, but once you hit 400k population, the simulation slows to a crawl.

You lucky one, many players have a slowdown with half of the size or even earlier.

I wonder if PDX/CO ever planned that players have cities with more than 200k-300k.
Maybe they never planned players having cities with millions of inhabitants.

In CS1 the game often started to slow down with cities at about 100k-200k,
so that's definitely a big improvement to CS1. And that was probably their primary goal.

And probably that might have also been the reason for their slogan "hardware is the limit" which I would translate now as "you can have way bigger cities than in CS1, but at some point you might experience severe speed problems"

Meanwhile I'm pretty sure, once the console version gets released, it will have a population cap to avoid speed problems.

[Major Kudos™]

Simple, It's the vastly different method mods are applied.

* CS1 = 100% COMUNITY controlled STEAM mods where only your imagination is the limit. It is the main reason the game has started a new growth phase.

* CS2 = 100% OWNER controll and curation of All mods BY PDX. Modders cannot release anything not approved by the PDX dictators. It is the main reason this game has been in steady decline.

[Brother Rogue]

They changed what worked in CS1 and added things that don't work in CS2

Just stick with the first one, you aren't missing much, at all.

[bobdaktari]

Comparing both games without mods - my pick would be CS2 as it looks better and things like building roads/intersections is vastly better/easier

if you're looking at similar play time wait for the game to go on sale :)

[Cosmic Sea]

As it stands, CS1 with all DLC is a slightly better game than CS2. With mods and especially custom assets, CS1 is SIGNIFICANTLY better than CS2 and probably will be for a while. Especially the longer the asset editor takes to get here.

[Daveyboy]

Most people seem to prefer CS1, but I greatly prefer CS2 and haven't ever felt the need to go back to the first game since getting it.

In favor of CS1 though it still has more content particularly if you have the DLCs, plus much better available mods. There are no cycle lanes, zoos, amusement parks, stadiums, etc in CS2 yet. Giving a district a certain "theme" is still easier in the first game due to leisure specialization, financial districts DLC, green cities DLC etc, though that's getting better in CS2 now with the free region packs.

In CS2 I feel the core game is better. Things feel more realistic in general, the budget actually seems to make sense now (note this was buggy in earlier versions but starting a new city in it now it works a lot better and no longer throws silly amounts of money at you), way less volatile than the CS1 budget which was all over the place. Vehicles move about more realistically, though it's hard to comment about pathfinding as people getting lost and going the wrong way etc is simulated just as in real life rather than always following a perfect route to their destination, plus you have random traffic accidents breaking out. People actually move out if they don't like the way things are unlike CS1 where I never once saw that happen. Snow works way better as it's a weather event now that occurs during the winter instead of having constant-snow versus no-snow maps like in CS1. The graphics look better to me even at low detail settings. Road signs and markings look way better than stock CS1 without mods.

Although it's by no means perfect, CS2 easily wins out for me. I enjoyed my time with CS1 but it felt more like a fun toy that was way too easy even in hard mode and didn't have a whole lot of simulation going on apart from the traffic. There were things that always bugged me about the game which seemed to get worse over time with each new DLC that was piled on, probably because the core game wasn't created with those things in mind as it wasn't expected to be as successful as it was.

My biggest gripes with CS2 that I hope get fixed in time are: lack of bicycles/cycle lanes/cycle paths, the radio bulletin about a housing shortage that I seem to always get a couple of minutes into the game and then maybe every 15 minutes or so no matter what, the fact that the news makes a big deal about every little forest fire that's miles away from your town yet doesn't bother mentioning tornadoes (not that I think there's a great deal you can do about them, though they don't seem to do that much damage anyway) and ability to split a road at a custom point (like in CS1) so the same road name doesn't have to continue beyond a junction.