Hello there city building enthusiasts! It’s time for a new Cities: Skylines II development diary, and this time we are taking a look at the city services available in the game. Brand-new services join the many familiar city services, and while their basic functionality has remained the same, they have more nuanced and complex mechanics befitting a more realistic city-building game.
City services can also be restricted to districts, and we will also take a look at the city-management options provided by districts and policies. Districts make governing the city easier with more detailed information available while policies can be assigned to the whole city as well as directly to the districts, allowing fine-tuning of the various areas to make life more enjoyable for the citizens or more profitable for the businesses.
As usual, we have a highlight video for you before getting into all the details.
[insert video]
CITY SERVICES
The basic gameplay of city service remains the same in Cities: Skylines II: Your task is to provide the citizens with various services that increase their quality of life, bring them happiness and keep them safe. However, unlike in the previous game where you wanted to cover the city evenly with all the different service types, the road to the perfect city in Cities: Skylines II lies in understanding the needs of the citizens and fulfilling them by providing suitable services as well as other activities such as places to go shopping. You can, of course, place the various services throughout the city but doing so can be costly and provides only minor additional benefits overall.
Where city services directly increased Land Value in the previous game, Cities: Skylines II takes a different approach. City services only indirectly affect Land Value as they answer the needs of citizens and companies in the city, which in turn increases their willingness to pay higher rent in the area, thus increasing their levels and the Land Value. For more information about Land Value check out our previous development diary Zones & Signature Buildings.
Furthermore, not all citizens have the same needs. Senior citizens have more free time and value places where they can spend that free time. Families with children on the other hand value areas with schools. Working-age citizens seek residence in areas that have quick connections to workplaces. And companies value services that increase their Efficiency and profit margin. Citizens’ needs can be inspected from their household’s Selected Info Panel (SIP) by hovering over the family’s Happiness icon. Similarly, companies' needs can be inspected in their SIP, hovering over their Efficiency value.
SERVICE TYPES
Roads form the backbone of the city, providing buildable zones around them, paths for agents to travel on, and the basic infrastructure for water and electricity distribution as the water pipes and electric cables run pre-built under the roads. The condition of roads decreases over time as vehicles travel on them resulting in slower travel speeds and a higher chance of traffic accidents. To keep the roads safe to drive on and the overall road condition high, a Road Maintenance Depot is required. It sends out a fleet of Road Maintenance Vehicles that roam through the city, patching up worn-down asphalt.
Roads are discussed more in-depth in another development diary Road Tools.
The Road Maintenance service keeps your roads in good condition and clean up after traffic accidents
ELECTRICITY
Electricity is one of the key components in running a city. Most buildings require electricity to function and citizens are not willing to suffer a lack of electricity for long before moving out. Businesses lose most of their efficiency when they are deprived of electricity which causes their production and overall function to cease almost entirely and will eventually lead to them going out of business as they can’t make a profit and pay their bills.
Cities: Skylines II features various different power plants from the green, sustainable but quite expensive Wind Turbine, Solar Power Plant, Geothermal Power Plant, and Hydro-electric Power Plant to the raw, polluting power of fossil fuels in the form of Coal Power Plants and Gas Power Plant. Nuclear Power Plant represents the awesome power of the atom, it’s expensive but delivers enough electricity to power up almost any kind of city!
The Gas Power Plant is one of many options to provide your city with electricity
WATER & SEWAGE
Water and sewage provide your citizens with the basic necessities and include both familiar and new options. Lack of fresh water leads to people becoming unhappy while companies' functions are halted as their efficiency decreases greatly. City services also lose much of their effectiveness if they are deprived of fresh water.
Similar to in Cities: Skylines Surface water can be pumped from open water sources and the water quality is affected by pollution in the water, caused by sewage sources. Conversely, Groundwater works quite differently in Cities: Skylines II. Unlike in the game’s predecessor, where the groundwater was pumped by placing water towers anywhere on the map, Cities: Skylines II maps feature groundwater deposits full of fresh water. These reservoirs have a limited refreshment rate and are very susceptible to ground pollution, so plan your water supplies accordingly.
Sewage treatment is a crucial part of city management. In Cities: Skylines II sewage must be either pumped out of the water network and into open waters through a Sewage Outlet or treated in a Wastewater Treatment Plant where it is purified and pumped back into the freshwater network. The pollutants gathered from the treated wastewater become solid waste which can be hauled to any of the city’s garbage management sites.
Both Electricity and Water are discussed in more detail in next week’s development diary Electricity & Water.
Make sure your water pumping services are nowhere near pollution to avoid sick citizens
HEALTHCARE & DEATHCARE
At their core, both Healthcare and Deathcare are relatively straightforward services and function much like they do in the game’s predecessor. Medical Clinics and Hospitals provide healthcare for the sick and ambulance transportation for those too sick or injured to travel to the medical facilities by themselves. Additionally, healthcare services provide citizens in the surrounding area with a passive Health bonus while ambulances will respond to traffic accidents, taking care of injured citizens and bringing them to a medical clinic or hospital for treatment.
Improve your citizens’ health with the Health Research Institute (left) and provide local healthcare services with a Hospital (right)
Deathcare prepares the deceased on their final journey, transporting them to the cemeteries and crematoriums in hearses. Citizens can die of old age, if their Health decreases too much, if they are involved in a traffic accident, or if they are inside a building when it collapses due to being abandoned or affected by a natural disaster.
A cemetery provides citizens with a final resting place and can improve their well-being too
Citizen Health is positively affected by the availability of resources the household uses and their consumption as well as the availability of Healthcare. Negative effects on citizen Health are different pollution types, previous illnesses and injuries, and any uncollected garbage. A sick citizen cannot contribute to their workplace and thus affects the company’s efficiency. Therefore it is important to make sure that citizens are healthy and able to contribute to maximize the city’s success!
GARBAGE MANAGEMENT
Every building accumulates garbage as a by-product of humans living, working, or spending free time there. Various factors can contribute to garbage being accumulated such as: building and zone type, building level and size as well as citizen education level. Higher-level buildings generate less garbage as do citizens with a higher education level.
Garbage is handled by building Landfills and other garbage management buildings which tend to pollute their surroundings, with the Incineration Plant pushing out a lot of air pollution as well, so they should be built far away from residential areas and preferably downwind to avoid the air pollution from affecting the city. The facilities send out garbage trucks that collect garbage from buildings and bring it back for processing. Landfills simply store and slowly process the garbage while the Incineration Plant burns it, turning waste into electricity. The Recycling Center separates the usable parts from the garbage and turns them into resources that can be used by manufacturing companies to produce goods and products.
Landfills (right) can take up precious land while recycling centers (left) and incineration plants process garbage faster
EDUCATION & RESEARCH
Education is an important service for a successful city. You can provide your citizens with education by building various schools that correspond to different age groups. Children always go to Elementary School if one is available, while Teens and Adults have the freedom to choose whether to go to school or switch to working. Teens can go to High School while Adults have the option to either go to College or one of the Universities available in the game. When choosing between school and work, citizens calculate which is financially more beneficial for them: to start working now in a lower position and earning money, or studying for a higher possible position earning them more money. Some citizens also simply choose to study or work depending on their inherent interests.
Provide your citizens with a college education to fill well-educated job openings
Citizens have 5 levels of education: Uneducated, Poorly Educated, Educated, Well Educated, and Highly Educated. Every time a citizen graduates from a school, their education level increases by one. Citizens can also fail to graduate at which point they evaluate their options and either continue studying or get a job. Education levels are important when filling job positions in companies and city services as most of them have a certain amount of job positions for the various education levels. If companies can’t fill all open positions with the applicable employees (i.e. not enough workers with high enough education), the service’s efficiency decreases and in the case of companies, their production output is affected negatively. Higher-level companies have more job positions for higher education levels compared to low-level companies and in general, higher-educated employees are more sought after than lower-educated employees.
As a special effect, Elementary Schools give a Well-being bonus for families with children living close to the school. This encourages families to move into areas that have Elementary Schools, and can, to some extent, be used to guide how a certain portion of the population behaves.
Encourage families to move into an area by providing them with a local elementary school
FIRE & RESCUE
Fire & Rescue services are quite straightforward gameplay-wise. Having a Fire House or Fire Station present in the city decreases fire hazards in the area surrounding the service buildings. The fire department sends out fire engines to put out building fires, and as fires can spread quickly it is important to sort out traffic jams so that in the case of an emergency, the fire engines are not stuck behind traffic while trying to reach their destination.
The Fire Station is ready to respond to fires in the city and can be upgraded as your city’s needs increase
Firewatch Towers can be placed in the wilderness to keep watch on and lower the risk of forest fires in their surroundings. Forest fires can easily spread and light nearby buildings, so you will need the Firefighting Helicopter Depot to send out their helicopter fleet which can put out both forest fires and building fires.
Build Firewatch Towers and Firefighting Helicopter Depots to combat forest fires
Fire & Rescue Service also includes disaster prevention and response. Fire engines rush to rescue citizens trapped in collapsed buildings, while the Early Disaster Warning System detects natural disasters early and sends out notifications to citizens to take shelter. If the city has Emergency Shelters, citizens hurry there and wait out the disaster.
Emergency Shelters provide a safe place for citizens during a disaster while the Early Disaster Warning System notify them of an impending disaster
POLICE & ADMINISTRATION
Police keep order in the city and their presence, be it Police Stations or the Police Headquarters, decreases crime accumulation in their neighborhoods. Patrolling police cars also encourage citizens to behave well and they decrease crime probability along the roads they travel. Unless limited by selected districts, police cars can patrol the entire city.
The Police Headquarters keep your citizens safe and can detain criminals until they are transferred to a prison
Police respond to crimes and attempt to capture the criminal at the crime scene while the crime is in progress. Arrested criminals are put in jail, and some criminals are sentenced to serve prison time. These prisoners are then transported either to a local Prison or to an Outside Connection to serve their sentence if a local prison is not available. After serving their time, their criminal status is reset and they return to the city. Prisons function also as production facilities, producing resources used by manufacturing companies in the city.
Put criminal citizens to work in a local Prison while they serve their sentence
Each building generates crime probability, which is the risk of a criminal selecting a building as the target of their criminal activity. Crime probability also affects citizen Well-being which in turn affects their chance of becoming criminals. Other factors such as lack of electricity, insufficient water and sewage service, pollution, garbage, and lack of leisure affect citizen Well-being as well.
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.
The Welfare Office helps your citizens get back on their feet when life gets tough
TRANSPORTATION
Cities: Skylines II features familiar public transportation options from buses and taxis to trains, trams, subways, ships, and airplanes. In addition to the automatic cargo transportation by road via delivery trucks, cargo transportation for rail, water, and air makes a return giving you more control than before.
Each land transport type features its own depot from which they send out their fleet of vehicles. Water and air traffic don’t have depots, but instead, the harbors and airports are connected to the seaways and Outside Connections respectively. Airports are the only transportation building that can be upgraded to also include a cargo terminal as other transportation types have separate passenger and cargo stations and terminals. Check out the development diary Public & Cargo Transportation for a more in-depth look at transportation.
Both citizens and businesses benefit from a robust public transportation network
PARKS & RECREATION
Parks and Recreation fill a different role in Cities: Skylines II than in the previous game where they affected Land Value quite directly. Placing a lot of them in the city was beneficial as they saturated the area, greatly increasing the Land Value. However, in Cities: Skylines II parks, plazas, tourist attractions, and landmarks (or any other city service building) don’t directly increase Land Value. Instead, they answer to the citizens’ various needs and if their needs are met, citizens find the area where they live appealing and this increases the Land Value as the citizens are willing to continue living there and pay higher rent.
Parks provide citizens with outdoor activities to fulfill their need for Leisure
Parks and Recreation buildings offer citizens options where they can spend their free time fulfilling their Leisure demands which in turn positively affects their Well-being. This need for Leisure can be fulfilled in many different ways such as going shopping in a commercial area, enjoying entertainment and meals in places like restaurants, and visiting the various city parks, plazas, sports venues, tourist attractions, and landmarks. Weather and time of the year have an effect on citizens’ choices to fulfill their Leisure demands. Warm and sunny weather encourages them to spend time outdoors in the parks while rainy or cold weather makes them choose indoor activities such as shopping instead.
Parks and Recreation buildings also have an Attractiveness value which affects how attractive the city is for tourists by adding to the City Attractiveness. Tourists stay at local hotels when in the city and make decisions about visiting city attractions based on their distance from the hotel and the location’s Attractiveness value. Tourists might choose a more attractive park or landmark further away if the net result is faster fulfilled Leisure demand regardless of the travel time and cost. Tourists are specifically interested in visiting the various tourist attractions and landmarks.
Both parks and tourist attractions increase your city’s attractiveness
COMMUNICATIONS
Communications is a new service category in Cities: Skylines II and includes the familiar Post service as well as the new Telecom service which provides the citizens and companies with an internet connection.
Post services fulfill the citizens, companies, and city services’ need to send and receive mail. When citizens are able to send and receive mail, they gain a Well-being boost which contributes to their Happiness, while being unable to send postcards to their friends and family, love letters to their loved ones, and opinionated letters to the editor, decreases their Well-being. Similarly, companies and city services benefit greatly from functioning Post service with an increase in Efficiency when their mail is collected and delivered.
The Post Office sends out post vans to collect mail from mailboxes, used by private citizens to send mail, and directly from companies and city services. The collected mail is stored in the Post Office until it is sent either to an Outside Connection or a Post Sorting Facility. The Post Sorting Facility sorts the mail into local and long-distance mail which is then delivered back to the city and to Outside Connections, respectively. Without the local Post Sorting Facility, all mail sent from the city is transported to Outside Connections as long-distance mail and only mail coming from Outside Connections can be delivered within the city.
The Post Office will collect and distribute mail in your city
Telecommunications is all about providing citizens and companies with a high-speed internet connection. Each citizen, be it a resident in an apartment building, a worker in a company, or a student in a school, uses a small portion of the available network bandwidth (1 Gbit/s) and each telecom building has a bandwidth capacity and range describing how many citizens it can service and how far its service reaches.
Good telecommunications service coverage increases citizen Well-being as it provides them with recreation, fulfilling their Leisure demand. The amount of Well-being a citizen gains from using the internet depends on the strength of the network signal, which is always strongest near the source of the signal and decreases as you get further away. Commercial companies benefit from telecommunications by increasing their sales as citizens are able to shop online, while industrial companies get better deals from resource providers as they are able to communicate better and have a wider reach, resulting in lower material costs which in turn increases the companies’ profit margin.
Both the Server Farm (left) and Telecom Tower (right) provide telecom coverage in the city
LANDSCAPING
Landscaping has remained largely the same in Cities: Skylines II. In the Terraforming section, you are able to adjust the terrain to suit your city-building needs by using the familiar tools: Shift Terrain, Level Terrain, Soften Terrain, and Slope Terrain. Landscaping also includes options to plant trees, which have a life cycle in Cities: Skylines II where they grow older and bigger as time goes on. Placing new trees on the map using the tools in Landscaping’s Vegetation menu plants tree saplings that eventually grow into mature trees. Similarly, if a forest fire destroys a part of a forest, it will take time for new trees to grow in place of the old, burned trees.
Terraform the landscape or plant trees from the Landscaping menu
Pathways are another familiar feature in the Landscaping menu enabling you to create pavement paths for pedestrians including various styles of pedestrian bridges. As citizens make pathfinding decisions, one of the options to move around in the city is walking. If there are pathways allowing quick access to various parts of the city, then citizens may choose walking over private cars and public transport - the best part is, not only does walking not contribute to traffic congestion but it is free so the citizens have more money to spend elsewhere!
Pedestrian paths provide citizens with shortcuts through terrain or options to bypass roads