Cities: Skylines 2's huge maps blew me away with their sheer size and scale

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Cities: Skylines 2’s huge maps blew me away with their sheer size and scaleI clearly need to think bigger with my city planning

I clearly need to think bigger with my city planning

Image credit:Paradox Interactive

A series of apartment blocks in Cities Skylines 2

Confession time: if you’ve been keeping up to date with Colossal Order’sfeature highlight video seriesforCities: Skylines 2over the last couple of months, you’re probably not going to learn a huge amount from my experience of playing it at Gamescom a couple of weeks ago. I spent most of my hour-long demo session steadily working my way through its extensive tutorial, as I have not, in fact, playedCities: Skylinesbefore now - although I can at least confirm that its tutorial is very newbie-friendly, and that I now feel more prepared to give it a go properly when it comes out in full on October 24th.

But the thing that really impressed me was just the sheer scope of its playable spaces. We’ve known since the end of July that its maps areroughly 5x biggerthan those in the first game, and when I saw Colossal Order’s Maps & Themes video, I thought, ‘Yes, those sure look enormous!’ But actually seeing them in person really put things into perspective for me, especially when I tried zooming the camera out and it just kept going and going and going and…

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The tutorial plonked me right into one of the very far corners of this fjord map, and without really realising just how much of it extended beyond the reaches of my zoomed in starting area, I set about learning the basics of putting down roads, connecting up water pipes and electricity lines and generally getting to grips with setting up the requisiteresidential, industrial and commercial zones. All within… err… maybe the same 1km square region perhaps? I was quietly feeling quite pleased with my little plot, even if my ratio of houses to shops was a little off-kilter and I had four different kinds of energy production going on for maybe as many houses.

I aspire to this level of city-planning… |Image credit:Paradox Interactive

A night time urban scene in Cities: Skylines 2

A series of skyscrapers from Cities: Skylines 2

(Apologies to my accompanying Colossal Order and Paradox reps who were doing their best to guide me in the right direction - I imagine they must have been biting their knuckles at my sheer ineptitude, so I’d like to thank them from afar for bearing with me).

Eventually, though, I had to create a sewage pipe that ran out to the sea, and only then did I really appreciate just the sheer size and scale of the playable area I had at my disposal. Since I’d concentrated all my buildings in the top corner, the pipe stretched for literal miles, and in hindsight looked really quite daft - a lesson I’ll definitely be putting to better use when I get to play it properly. And as the error of my ways was slowly dawning on me, I took the opportunity to just zoom my camera all the way out to get the full sense of this place, and crikey, this map just went on for days. A ridiculously large space, and it was clear right there and then that I was suffering from a case of ‘incredibly small town thinking’ (don’t blame me, I live in Bath, a city whose centre you can traverse on foot top to bottom in the space of 20 minutes. 30, if you’re going slow).

Now that’s what I call a fancy-looking hospital. |Image credit:Paradox Interactive

A hospital from Cities: Skylines 2

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