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Development Diary #10: Game Progression

Welcome! It’s time for another Cities: Skylines II development diary. Today is all about game progression, which has two layers: Milestones and Development Trees. As you might expect, Milestones unlock new services, policies, and infoviews, but the process of unlocking them is different in Cities: Skylines II. Development Trees, an entirely new feature, exist for each service and bring a new level of customization to game progression. Both systems are tied together as Milestones give you points to spend in your Development Trees, allowing you to unlock more advanced services.

Our goal with this approach was to give you the freedom to create the city you want without requiring you to reach high population numbers or using the Unlock All function. If you want to build just a small town next to the International Airport or the ChirpX Space Center, then you’re able to do just that. So, let’s dive into Milestones and Development Trees!



MILESTONES
In Cities: Skylines, Milestones were unlocked by reaching certain population thresholds which varied depending on the buildable land of the map and gave you one path to the next Milestone: Build more residential areas. With Cities: Skylines II we have taken a different approach. Each Milestone is unlocked by reaching a specific amount of Expansion Points (XP), which are accumulated both passively and actively through building your city.

Passive Expansion Points are awarded 16 times throughout an in-game day as a result of increases in both Population and Happiness, giving a well-functioning city steady progress towards the next Milestone. Meanwhile, active Expansion Points are granted immediately as a result of actions you take, such as placing or upgrading a service building, constructing a signature building, or expanding the city’s road network.

01 Milestones.png

Each milestone comes with several rewards and new options for your city

MILESTONE REWARDS
There are 20 Milestones to unlock, from Tiny Village all the way to Megapolis, and each one grants you a mix of Monetary rewards, Development Points, and Expansion Permits, as well as access to new City Services, Policies, and Management Options. As your city grows you will need to answer more of your citizens’ needs by providing them with additional services, such as Public Transportation and Communication. You also gain access to Districts and can customize areas of the city using Policies. You can find more about those topics in the City Services development diary.

Milestones also unlock new zone types to help your village grow into a thriving city, as well as more ways to control your city’s economy through increased Loan limits, Taxation, and Service Fees. If you missed it, we covered these options in the previous development diary Economy & Production.

The number of Monetary rewards, Development Points, and Expansion Permits increases with each Milestone, enabling you to respond to your city’s growing needs. We discussed Expansion Permits in Maps & Themes, which just leaves Development Points, so let’s get into how they work.

02 Unlocked Milestone.png

See the rewards you’ve earned when you reach a Milestone and go straight to the Progression Panel to spend your Development Points right away


DEVELOPMENT TREES
When you unlock a new service through a Milestone, you only unlock its basic buildings and features along with its corresponding Development Tree, which can be found in the Progressions interface. Here you can spend your Development Points to unlock more options, including more advanced and unique service buildings. Points can be spent as soon as you receive them or saved for later if you are not sure what you want to expand next.

You may want to unlock the Wastewater Treatment Plant to avoid polluting your surface water sources as soon as possible, maybe you want access to Harbors to benefit from the map’s seaways, or perhaps you want to provide your citizens with more sources of leisure with Sports Parks. As you unlock all Milestones you receive enough Development Points to unlock everything, but you choose the order depending on what your city needs the most.

Each Development Tree is divided into different Tiers and has a varying number of Nodes to unlock. The first Tier includes the basic buildings and functions of the service and this Node is automatically unlocked when you gain access to the service. As an example, when you first unlock Public Transportation, you have access to both Buses and Taxis as well as things like Stops and the Line Tool. The subsequent Tiers offer more advanced options which cost more Development Points to unlock, but provide you with new options.

Some services, such as Public Transportation, have multiple Branches with different options, and while you need to purchase the previous Nodes on a branch to unlock the next one, you do not need to purchase everything in a Tier to move on. For example, you can gain access to the International Airport without needing to unlock Water, Tram, or Subway transportation - as long as you have enough Development Points to afford it.

03 Development tree.png

Development trees allow you to unlock new and more advanced options

How you choose to spend your Development Points shapes your city. Unlocking more transportation options early on allows you to integrate them as your city grows, while advanced power plants can provide your citizens with cheap and reliable electricity. We’re excited to hear which options you prioritize and how that differs from city to city. Next week we focus on the citizens of your city with the Citizen Simulation and Lifepath.


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Pretty much only one comment but breaking it up into my usual bullets so it's not as terrifying of a wall of text:
  • [Love] - I love milestone awards that feel thematic, like hitting a certain level of high tech workers & unlocking a science center, or applying research trees in a manner that still lets us have creative freedom but also have that sense of evolution and progression, or maybe if the ability to do certain things is somehow tied to happiness / approval.
  • [Loathe] - I loathe when more city-critical or creatively-constraining things are locked behind these achievements, though, like maybe I want my small town to be based around locked light rail, or maybe I want to grow a city from scratch around its locked oil reserves, or applying some mix of locked policies from the get-go. The Dev Diary mentions being able to build up a small town beside a space center, which seems to address this... but I'm not sure I'm seeing that in what's being shown.
  • [What I See] - I'm not yet sure how I feel around what's proposed & whether it falls more on what I love or what I loathe. From what I can see it's feeling like something I'm going to find myself bypassing with an immediate Unlock All at game start, which I kind of feel bad doing because I'd feel like I'm missing out on some bits that I might enjoy, but I totally recognise maybe this is just a Me problem.
  • [Ideal] - I think what I'd perhaps be most amenable to is not-so-much locking new things behind the development tree... but maybe unlocking upgrades within the tree? So maybe my scrappy little town gets its Space Center where our cutting edge scientists conjecture that the Earth might revolve around the Sun. And I need to use Development Points to grow its capabilities until it's eventually launching interstellar ships throughout the galaxy.
  • [Map Tiles] - (and about those Expansion Permits: I'll also point again to my concerns with map tiles over in the Dev Diary 7 on Maps)
  • [Bypass] - I'd definitely appreciate if the game included bypass options to let players tailor the game to how they want to play. So maybe we could toggle on the whole map at once, or maybe unlock all buildings from the get-go but keep upgrades locked, and maybe also an option that keeps more thematic achievements (like unlocking a Mayor's House at some threshold) still locked.
Thanks!!
I think you summed up my feeling accurately.
 
This is the first dev diary where I've looked at it and gone "eh? maybe we can mod that out." It feels overly gamey, like I don't really want skill trees in a game like this. And when you're throwing around skill trees with point costs and XP, it feels like trying to make an RPG out of it.

I get that population based unlocks have their own issues, but this just feels off to me, like I'm going to need to grind for happiness before I can build a bus station.
It does feel artificially gamey.

I'd rather a system with funding where larger services require an investment to build or develop, rather than an xp system.
 
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Modding is a topic for the future as I'm afraid we aren't ready to share our plans yet.

That is unfortunate. Does that mean the plans for modding will not be shared until after the public release of Cities: Skylines 2? Actually, I am unclear on whether support for modding will be in the initial release or that will come later.

Also, I want to tell a bit of a story to illustrate why I think allowing for unlocking things for a small town would be good. Many years ago, when I played SimCity 4, I would experiment a bit just for the fun. One thing I did was to do a small town with separate residential and industrial areas placed a considerable distance apart from each other. I would then use the unlock cheat so that I could build a monorail line between these areas.

While this is probably not realistic (especially given how notoriously expensive the monorail are compared to other existing rail types), I just thought it was an interesting scenario to say at least.

Now, today, though, I am not really too enthusiastic about unlocking ALL things just to unlock a specific thing, as I used to. I used to cheat a lot just to play for the fun. Not now anymore, though, as I am now generally more selective. I guess I am mellowed out now or something. Lol.

(Just to be clear, though, I only cheated on single-player; as a matter of principle, I am absolutely against cheating on multi-player or for achievements (I personally don't really care for Steam game achievements anyway), both of which I regarded to be ethically worse than cheating on single-player in which it is just you having fun yourself)

So I think, in my opinion, this new way of unlocking things is a good thing and allow us to experiment a lot more without need to resort to cheating or to use an option to unlock all things.

I also want to point out that, for those who prefer the old way of unlocking things from the previous game, there is nothing to prevent you from constraining yourself personally from using any assets or services until a certain population milestone, in which you can then spend the development points for them. That is assuming, of course, that the storage for development points are not limited so much to allow considerable build-up of development points over the long run without using them (compare with resource storage in Stellaris). There is nothing to stop you from making your own rules in the game... Cities: Skylines is, after all, a sandbox game.
 
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Yeah between that post and one post about weather and seasons have left me with some lingering oncerns about the modding aspect. I still hope and think they're likely unfounded, and I remain convinced some editing including of maps will be in the game, but the radio silence is troubling.
 
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Yeah between that post and one post about weather and seasons have left me with some lingering oncerns about the modding aspect. I still hope and think they're likely unfounded, and I remain convinced some editing including of maps will be in the game, but the radio silence is troubling.
Map and asset editors were confirmed a long time ago.
And since the game's moddability was a big part of CS' success, I'm 109% sure the sequel will be just as moddable.
 
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I know editors are confirmed, but some of the replies lately leave me with some doubt about how complete those editors will be, at least at launch.

Logic says you're right and the sequel will be just as moddable because that was a big strength of CSL1, but some of the recent replies are disquieting nonetheless. Game developers have done deeply illogical moves before (see the move away from moddability in Civ, a game series that for twenty+ years had been the poster child for highly moddable games).

"We aren't ready to talk about modding plans", likewise, is probably, I suspect, because they're working on an alternative (Paradox Mods, presumably) to the Steam Workshop so people who don't get their game on Steam still have modding access, but with only two months to go to release the fact that they aren't ready to talk about modding is at least a little disquieting.
 
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Map and asset editors were confirmed a long time ago.
And since the game's moddability was a big part of CS' success, I'm 109% sure the sequel will be just as moddable.

I know editors are confirmed, but some of the replies lately leave me with some doubt about how complete those editors will be, at least at launch.

Logic says you're right and the sequel will be just as moddable because that was a big strength of CSL1, but some of the recent replies are disquieting nonetheless. Game developers have done deeply illogical moves before (see the move away from moddability in Civ, a game series that for twenty+ years had been the poster child for highly moddable games).

"We aren't ready to talk about modding plans", likewise, is probably, I suspect, because they're working on an alternative (Paradox Mods, presumably) to the Steam Workshop so people who don't get their game on Steam still have modding access, but with only two months to go to release the fact that they aren't ready to talk about modding is at least a little disquieting.

Hmm, actually, I can't remember if script modding was originally supported in the initial release of Cities: Skylines. Anyone knows?
 
for instance having airport and subway before trains? :D I think the new game progression is great, much better than CS1 in which only pops counts!
Personally, I play sandbox mode, so i just hope I dont have to deal with unlocking everything. Cause there have been times that the airport was the first thing I built before even zoning a single thing. (mostly after the airport DLC came out.) I just hope there will be an option where everything is available so I can design how i want from the first plop.
 
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