CO addresses Cities Skylines 2 economy problems

It’s messy, but some fixes are on the way

Colossal Order is back with another Word of the Week, and this time, the strategy game update is about fixing Cities Skylines 2’s economy. The news comes after CO’s CEO Mariina Hallikainen called the CS2 community increasingly toxic and suggested Word of the Week only made things worse, though fan feedback encouraged CO to continue publishing the weekly behind-the-scenes updates.

The CS 2 economy post addressing Cities Skylines 2’s economy, Hallikainen says that the team is working on fixing several economy features that don’t function as intended and provided clarifications for systems that do work, but are presented in an unclear fashion..

One of those is specialized local production. Skylines 2 makes it pretty plain how it works – make your own goods so you don’t have to import them – but some invisible aspects mean you’re probably losing money without realizing it. You can’t easily see which companies in your city are importing goods, so planning your production involves a lot of guesswork. Future updates will fix the issue by clarifying which businesses are spending money on imports.

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Skylines 2 also makes it hard to see where hidden costs are. Hallikainen raised the question of import fees for some services, but not others, such as the cost of importing electricity versus the cost of importing health services. While there’s no charge for – for example – having an ambulance drive in from another city, your city loses out in other ways, such as reduced productivity at businesses. These costs are tough to track, but Hallikainen didn’t say whether CO plans on tweaking this part.

The same is true for profitability, one of CS2’s more confusing elements. Business profitability varies from zero to 255, but zero doesn’t mean the business makes no money. Hallikainen says it just “predicts the value of revenue or loss of money.” How helpful that is probably depends on the person reading it, but the general idea is that a lower profitability rating should encourage you to look for problems in the business – employee troubles, for example, or issues with your resource supply line.

The rest of the post explains how the loan interest system works and what you should be looking for in your balance sheet, though Hallikainen did say the team is working on large-scale changes to the land value system, some of which will appear in the next patch. The end goal is making it easier to understand how land value works, with some changes made to the demand system and what factors influence rent prices.