I've fallen down a Cities Skylines 2 hole
I was under the impression that Cities Skylines 2 was still bad. It isn't!!
Cities Skylines 2 launched badly. I am not enough of an expert to be able to comment intelligently on the badness - I bounced off of CS1 several different times. However, here's a whole podcast episode I listened to about this once. After completing it, I immediately forgot everything in it except "Cities Skylines 2 bad."
Well, at some point Paradox handed development off to a different studio, Iceflake, which has been running the game since December of last year. I have no idea how much has changed in the last six months or so... but the game is good, now. I like it a lot more than Cities Skylines 1.
I also have, like, 40 mods installed.
I think the reason I bounced off of the first CS game was that it felt oddly frictionless. Cities Skylines 2 has some of that frictionlessness - I've seen youtubers refer to it as a "city painter" rather than a simulation game - but it does hit you much more quickly with massive traffic and transit planning challenges. This is obviously extremely interesting to me! I am the kind of person who plans day trips where I ride trains for fun. So, I'm playing CS2 like a transit design game (a transit game for babies - if I was smart at this shit I'd probably be playing Subway Builder). I am having a good time!
The game does seem like something you NEED to play with a ton of mods installed. I grabbed a lot of country-theme asset packs right when I first started it up, and being able to theme different parts of my city after different real-world cities and countries is a big part of whatever fantasy I'm accessing here. I am currently playing with a "Europe-themed" city, but I built an industrial district using the Japan asset pack, and I am about to build an American single family home hell suburb off to one side of my downtown area.
There are also a ton of mods meant to allow you to manipulate the game rules and "paint" the city you want. I have various transit overhaul mods installed, various mods which allow me to move things I have already placed, mods which allow me to mess with traffic and road nodes, etc. I don't think I would have fallen this deep down the hole without that kind of power over the play experience.
I have played citybuilders constantly throughout my life. They're probably my favorite genre, if you do the hours-math from my childhood until now! However, I've never had that foundational experience with Sim City that most people seem to have had - I was playing historical citybuilders, like the Caesar games. I thought of citybuilders as a "history game" genre, and I was simply never interested enough in Sim City to bother trying to get my hands on it. So a lot of the comparisons that people make when they talk about the Cities Skylines franchise are just alien to me.
I've seen some people saying that they wished the game was harder - contrasting it to Sim City games, in some cases. CS2 is definitely extremely easy! I only experienced budget crises at the very start of my map - I'm now at the point where I should not ever have a budget shortfall again, and any time I want money, I just wait until it accrues. I turned off natural disasters. All my challenges are just about optimization and making good things better.
And you know what? That's okay for me! I really feel that playing this game is something I could "get good at" - that I could get better at making a "realistic" or "efficient" city by setting myself goals and just messing around with the tools I have. If you need a city builder to provide you more challenging friction, you probably would feel differently.
Anyway, here's a screenshot I took of 500 people getting off a train to visit my city and immediately crossing the street to get on the streetcar system. This, to me, is the videogame:
