How is CSII Today?

[jasonbarron]

I loved the first one, though I haven't played it in ages. I gather that CSII has disappointed a lot of players but it's been slowly improved since launch. I have a hankering to start building again and am considering buying this title.

So, how is it now? I see some people complaining of crashes and low frame rates, how prevalent are those issues today after a 1+ of patches? I have a pretty beefy PC (4090 rtx/64 gigs of ddr5/Rizen 9 7950x3d cpu), can I run it with a decent expectation of stability and ok frame rates with a big population?
Setting performance aside, how well does the simulation actually work? I know that it hasn't been out long enough to have as much released content as the first one, but is there enough content to keep me busy for a while?

Thanks in advance for any advice/insight.

[Cosmic Sea]

Still boring, incomplete, and for many people broken. There's still no asset editor as we continue to approach the 2 year mark.

[fpg]

I love it. I didn't like CS1 when it was released because IMO it was a city painter with a too simplistic economic engine which is what I like. I may be wrong and should have come back later with the mods, presumably, but I did not.
CS2 has the right level of complexity for me and is a sweet spot between sim and detailing/painting.
I had a RTX 3060 and it ran reasonably, now an RT 7800 XT and it's at 40 fps. My pop is 100 k, I'll hit the CPU wall at some point. Crashes I had some, maybe 5 over 75 hrs total. I suspect it has to do with mods management, eg not restarting after installing a mod.
With the Region Packs, the different maps and the slight challenge to keep your economy going steadily and people coming in, I'd say it can keep you busy for more than a while. Normal difficulty is what you'd expect in other games. I wish there was a more difficult mode but a mod (pun intended) will certainly bring the missing modes.
I suppose that if you go on unlimited money to do 'city painting' you would miss CS1 content, but it will certainly come over time. Cities Skylines 1 was there for almost 10 years, I don't see Paradox ditching CS2 after 2 years even after a rough start.

[envorexy]

Lags like hell even with a 4080 super when you reach the 200k milestone , coding that makes your game crash every 5 minutes , game freezes every 50 seconds and idiotic pathfinding ai sums it up.

[Major Kudos™]

The VANILLA game is the best it has ever been.
Modded? That is still infested with crashes, glitches and retatded simulations.

[fpg]

Originally posted by Major Kudos™:

The VANILLA game is the best it has ever been.

I'm briefly highjacking this thread : Major Kudos™, thanks for for explaining mail service in some other discussions (sometimes heated so I did not want to revive them). Works perfectly, first source of happiness.
Back to original question : you'll see many people questioning the economy and the game mechanics. Sometimes the question is valid, some other times, people jump to conclusion because of the intial state of the game...

[Major Kudos™]

Which is why I stated "It is the best it has ever been" not good great or even close to greatest. Just better. Honest opinion.

On the other part I added about modded.

Also another honest opinion from my alternate ultimate account that I run completely modded on a different i9 machine (Minor Kudos).

The PDX mod system is just a mess in it's still BETA form and 19 months from game release still responsible for the majority of complaints aimed at CO. Again, Just because of the bad state of release.

[BoraBora]

Yes, it's not terrible anymore, Just really bad. It'll probably be average in 2027 and almost good in 2029.

[jasonbarron]

I appreciate everyone chiming in to help clarify my choice. I think I will end up buying it, just trying to decide if I should wait until it goes on sale or give in to temptation now.

[Major Kudos™]

Originally posted by jasonbarron:

I appreciate everyone chiming in to help clarify my choice. I think I will end up buying it, just trying to decide if I should wait until it goes on sale or give in to temptation now.

Follow the force..... (Would have made more sense yesterday)

[Cigarette]

I was going to post somthing just like this, but the public sentiment has been mixed. I might have to look into the game again, and perhaps some mods, mainly (hopefully) ones that add music, as i always felt thats somthing the Cities game lacked [if it wasnt locked behind a paywall]

[GameMaster]

The game is something that I come back to on occasion, but the problem with quite a few people here is that they're comparing a base-game to a fully modded, fully DLC'd predecessor.

CS2 is, surprisingly, good in my experience, with some problems like mods using only the primary harddrive. Note this is with a PC that's a good 10 years old with minimal upgrades.

Compared to the data-leaking spaghetti monster of the previous game with all DLCs (if you want to use mods and all the DLC, you'll need 32GB+ of RAM and 8-16GB+ (last I've checked) of VRAM, I had to set up my PC to use 40GB+ of VRAM)... it's good though some code spaghetti is still around (the real time pathing of vehicles is especially memory-hungry).

[lukas]

Still in terrible state and still a lot of knights making a lot of noise here that game is fine....paid co and PDX employees making sure that you will buy ^^

Remember about that rule. If game is fine then no one sits on forum....so what should we think about people's claiming that they are playing all the time, yet all the time they are sitting here instead of playing ?

[Sylvaa]

Originally posted by GameMaster:

The game is something that I come back to on occasion, but the problem with quite a few people here is that they're comparing a base-game to a fully modded, fully DLC'd predecessor.

CS2 is, surprisingly, good in my experience, with some problems like mods using only the primary harddrive. Note this is with a PC that's a good 10 years old with minimal upgrades.

Compared to the data-leaking spaghetti monster of the previous game with all DLCs (if you want to use mods and all the DLC, you'll need 32GB+ of RAM and 8-16GB+ (last I've checked) of VRAM, I had to set up my PC to use 40GB+ of VRAM)... it's good though some code spaghetti is still around (the real time pathing of vehicles is especially memory-hungry).

My PC is reasonably new (~18 months old) and I decided to use a small (250gb) boot, and a couple of large game installation drives, and I refuse to fill 50+ gb of that with this rubbish, and I am not buying a larger, slower boot drive to accommodate it, either.

Note, that 50+ gb is with a single real DLC and a bunch of free asset packs, it's frightening to think how much would be filled 10 full DLCs deep.

[Jan]

awful. ive been trying to load into the game for an hour now. worked fine last night, today? verify integrity, reload mods, crash, corrupt, verify.... etc. dont buy

[jasonbarron]

Originally posted by GameMaster:

The game is something that I come back to on occasion, but the problem with quite a few people here is that they're comparing a base-game to a fully modded, fully DLC'd predecessor.

CS2 is, surprisingly, good in my experience, with some problems like mods using only the primary harddrive. Note this is with a PC that's a good 10 years old with minimal upgrades.

Compared to the data-leaking spaghetti monster of the previous game with all DLCs (if you want to use mods and all the DLC, you'll need 32GB+ of RAM and 8-16GB+ (last I've checked) of VRAM, I had to set up my PC to use 40GB+ of VRAM)... it's good though some code spaghetti is still around (the real time pathing of vehicles is especially memory-hungry).

How does one go about setting their PC to use 40+ GB of vram? Are you talking about using dual graphics cards?