Cities: Skylines 2 developer Colossal Order has released a new dev diary in which the studio sheds light on its process for creating and simulating citizens.
The latest Word of the Week column talks all things "citizens, education, and public transport", going into detail on the game's ridiculously detailed citizen simulation systems and how they're implemented.
According to Colossal Order, citizens' behavior sometimes doesn't go the way players expect; sometimes they despawn, for instance, or they may make a choice regarding whether to attend school or work as a city grows.
This behavior is intentional; in the former case, it's to stop citizens teleporting to avoid bad traffic, and in the latter, it's all about making citizens "a bit more passive" to reduce said traffic.
The Word of the Week column then moves onto how citizens choose which products to buy, which they do "through a weighted random check". Items are weighted depending on how likely citizens are to need them, and different age groups even have different preferences.
We also get to learn more about Cities: Skylines 2's education system, which is a sticking point for Colossal Order; the dev says it's not currently working "as well as it could", pointing to a number of factors like an overabundance of elementary schools. Balancing work on this is underway, apparently.
If you've ever noticed public transport vehicles like buses getting "bunched up" in certain areas, Colossal Order has a reason for that happening as well.
The developer says it happens due to vehicles spawning on a new line or due to traffic, and that there is a system in place to address it, but that it "may take a little while" if vehicles are bunched up on a new line. Again, a fix is in the works for this as well.
Cities: Skylines 2 is available right now on PC via Steam or the Xbox store, and it's included as part of a PC Game Pass subscription too. A version of the game is also coming for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S at some point this spring.
