Cities Skylines 2: Removes the Agent Limit

Cities Skylines 2: Removes the Agent Limit

Cities: Skylines 2, the successor in the popular city-simulator series, is eliminating the agent limit, an issue previously faced in the original game. This major change unleashes a new level of performance, potentially pushing the capacity of players’ gaming computers.

The developer, Colossal Order, explained in a recent dev diary that this new iteration “doesn’t feature hard limits for agents moving about in the city”. This signifies a larger scope for simulation and pathfinding, leading to larger populations within the game. The only constraints players will encounter now are the capabilities of their gaming hardware.

The term ‘Agents’ in the Cities: Skylines context refers to individual people or services simulated in your city, such as pedestrians, garbage trucks, etc. The previous version had a cap of 65,536 individual citizen agents, and due to the structure of the game’s programming, this limit was insurmountable, even by modding. Although a higher population level was achievable, only a fraction of those individuals could be simulated at once.

One Reddit user humorously sums up the eventual limit as when “the game crashes”. Anticipation for the new game has already provoked discussions about hardware upgrade among PC players, as one user comments, “RIP to my CPU”, especially since the developers reveal that traffic pathfinding calculations will now fully utilize multicore CPUs. The game will also be launched on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S, providing a unique opportunity to test the capabilities of these consoles.

So far, Cities: Skylines 2 is gaining approval particularly for smartly resolving the concerns of dedicated fans even with the simplest upgrades. The game will be released for PC and current-gen consoles (except for Switch) on October 24, and will be available on Xbox Game Pass from the first day.