Masz jakiegoś moda na europejskie znaki drogowe? :O

A lot of people get bogged down in specifics, with this or that broken mechanic or missing feature, but I'm a lot more concerned about the bigger picture with this game, how it seems like they had no core vision for what the game was supposed to be. But there's one particular thing I thought about today... it's like they learned absolutely nothing from CS1.

CS1 introduced one real, substantial mechanic that, as far as I'm concerned, should be a mainstay in the genre going forward, namely the ability to draw out an arbitrary district, fill that district with the relevant buildings and objects, and have that district be treated as essentially one building. You can draw out whatever shape of park that you want, or university, or airport, and the game will actually use them as a park, university, airport, etc.

Why is this basic mechanic not represented in CS2 at all? We already have park benches, fountains, lamp posts, and all of that as props, and we already have the ability to lay out very specific shapes of districts, why is this not the foundation of how parks work? How did they come up with the concept for Park Life and not think "this is the only way that parks should work from now on"? How was this not immediately added to the requirements for the sequel?

Some people might not want to create their own park all the time? Great, make some premade park designs that are (behind the scenes) ploppable park districts that we can then customize or expand if we want to. Do the same for airports and universities, and hell, throw in hospitals, fire stations, schools, etc. I'm not saying they need to include all the parts for zoos and theme parks and shit, I'm saying the basic mechanic should be present, at the very least, if not more tightly woven into how the game works and expanded in functionality.

Things like this are why I feel like they just tried to make CS1 again instead of building any kind of real platform for the future.

Mamy styczeń 2025 i nadal ziobro rowerów oraz edytora assetów.

On another note - I do wonder how many people who have paid for the Ultimate Edition will never get to experience what they paid for because they have since died in the 2 years of delays. Just statistically, it has to be in thousands, right?

So to be clear, the work on the asset editor that was promised to us at launch was paused to work on the DLC that's already a year overdue and just got delayed again?

Z modami czy bez?

Late reply, but dang, this one sentence nails it. It describes so much of what's wrong with the game experience at the moment. Playing CS2, there are so many times when you discover something that isn't working as intended, with no real way to tell what's wrong, and/or what to do about it.

- No demand for a certain zone type. Bug or gameplay mistake? If so, how to tell what gameplay mistake was made?
- Mail piling up. Do you need more mailboxes, post offices, or mail sorting facilities, or is there a bug?
- Buildings aren't levelling up. The Happiness page only lists positive modifiers (plus the extremely non-descript sentence about income, rent, and upkeep, without telling you what those values are), but still they don't level up. Something missing, or something wrong?
- Sudden and overwhelming death waves. The game happily chirps that the city is doing fine, but dead people are everywhere and the hearses clog up traffic. Gameplay or bug?
- "Too high rent!" What can players do about that?
- "Not enough customers." Sure, but what to do about it, if anything?
- My city has no parking, but traffic still seems to be manageable and nobody is complaining. Am I a city planning genius, is the situation actually more detrimental than it seems at first glance, or is the simulation broken?
- There doesn't ever seem to be a reason to build more police stations. Is the player doing a great job managing crime, or is something missing in the simulation?
- You finally build a rail station (or airport, or harbour, or cargo harbour), and nobody uses it. Do you need to do anything to unlock its benefits, or did it not have any benefits in the first place? Situation unclear.

And so on, and so forth. The game hiccups all the time, without telling you what's wrong. I've encountered all of these issues and more, many times. Some of them, I know what to look for and how to avoid them, but it sure as heck isn't intuitive (like demand being more connected to unemployment, a stat buried somewhere in the info views, than to the demand bars, which are practically useless). Others, I still have no clue about. Some are probably bugs. Some are unintended consequences of how the simulation works. Some are dumb design choices. Some are caused by the actions of the player, but the game doesn't communicate what they did wrong or how to do it right.

That's the reason - well, part of the reason - why CS2 feels so messy. Things go wrong, but it's impossible to tell why. Players cannot reasonably discern whether the state of their city is intended game behavior or not. What a great way to sum it up.