I’m almost afraid to find out how many hours I’ve spent trying to get the road network and traffic patterns exactly right. City Skylines 2. Yes, housing, retail and healthcare are important too, but my main focus is on highways and interchanges. And yet – still – my favorite Sims find ways to sabotage my ideal projects. Colossal Order and Paradox are hard at work fixing the continuation of city building – with Civilization 7 on the way, city strategy should be in great shape. Luckily, Cities Skylines 2’s mammoth new update fixes a bunch of bugs, overhauls tourism, and makes adjustments to how homelessness is presented. It also improves the road system while making it more complex.

It’s been over a year since Cities Skylines 2 first launched, and the city-building game still feels unfinished. The fundamentals remain strong, and with each update Colossal Order gets closer to delivering the sequel we expected back in 2023. The economy and land systems have been significantly reworked, and the mod structure is finally in place. The new CS2 update now fixes bugs and improves how your citizens get to work.

The biggest change is finding the path. Until now, you could build a straight road, but for some reason your Sims insisted on a more convoluted route. Luckily, that’s changed: a new update increases the preference of buses and trams over direct roads, significantly reducing travel times.

There was also a problem with people parking their cars in designated motorcycle parking areas, which again led to congestion. This has been fixed. On the other hand, vehicles will now cause more pollution overall. The new update also tightens up road management by increasing the noise pollution generated by motorways – if you have a large road next to a residential area, you’ll have to build sound barriers to keep people from leaving and property prices from falling.

If you’re annoyed by the tourism system in Cities Skylines 2, Colossal Order makes some much-needed changes here as well. While hotels won’t appear in your current commercial zones, they are now much more likely to appear when you create new commercial zones, giving a vital boost to tourism. The temperature in your city will now also influence how many holidaymakers you attract – expect a larger influx of tourists during the warmer months, but make sure you’ve budgeted for the colder months when the market drops.

We previously reported on how Colossal Order approaches one of the most sensitive issues in all of Cities Skylines 2: homelessness. Players complained that even as they built massive amounts of low-cost public housing and took measures to help the homeless, more tents continued to appear in public parks. In the new update, Colossal Order states that this will no longer be an issue, and that a careful initiative to mitigate the problem of people losing their homes will lead to a reduction in homelessness.

The developer also says that it has made changes to the backend of Cities Skylines 2 to make the release and implementation of future region packs smoother and easier. The team says it is “working hard to get each pack ready one at a time” and encourages players to “stay tuned as they (Colossal Order) will be sharing the roadmap with you very soon.”

The new Cities Skylines 2 patch brings over 60 fixes ranging from UI to audio, landscaping tools and more. We’re still waiting for a firm release date for the new regional packs, but this is certainly another big step in the right direction.

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