Cities: Skylines 2 finally unleashes its huge “Economy 2.0” patch with reworked rent and a fix for death waves, but it’ll also kill a bunch of your citizens

Cities: Skylines 2 is completely reworking its economy in a brand new update, in a rework that’s being dubbed “Economy 2.0.”

Announced today, June 24, patch 1.1.5f1 for Cities: Skylines 2 is effectively trying to make the economy “more challenging and transparent.” To do this, developer Colossal Order is removing government subsidies for all cities, for example, while the ‘Taxes and Services’ panel in the ‘Economy’ tab is now unlocked at Milestone one, while the ‘Production’ panel now unlocks at Milestone level two.

However, this all comes with a huge, temporary price: your city will experience a temporarily increased death rate. “We have made changes to when citizens die. The changes add more variety so you don’t end up with a very large amount of seniors who all die around the same time. But to prevent these large future death waves, your city will need to say goodbye to some of its existing citizens,” Colossal Order writes.

This is to counter an issue in Cities: Skylines 2 has where people of the same age end up moving into the city all at once. Since they all age at the same rate, they’ll all die at the same time, and their kids will grow old and die at roughly the same time too, which is what’s prompted Colossal Order to counter these “large future death waves.”

The brand new ‘Import City Services’ policy is a completely new feature for Cities: Skylines 2, so you can toggle the importing of city services between being on and off. Import service expenses can include ambulances, hearses, fire engines, garbage trucks, and police, and all the fees for said imported services will scale with the city’s population.

There’s also some changes for the way school works, namely that the chances of actually graduating high school are now increased, and adults can apply to high school again if they never graduated. That’s great, but there’s now also garbage accumulation accounts for students, employees, prisoners, occupants, and homeless people, which isn’t so great.

Another chief change is the way workers from Outside Connections function. They now no longer pay tax, aren’t included in population or workforce overviews, will look for a new job more frequently, and will also be less “desirable” than workers based in the city itself. There’s a scathing indictment of modern job culture somewhere in there.

This is the Cities: Skylines 2 patch that removes the virtual landlord, which you might have already heard about over the last few weeks. Instead of a landlord, rent for a property is now calculated by adding the land value to the zone type times the building level, and then multiplying that by the lot size, and then multiplying that by the space multiplier. Phew, that’s a lot. 

What’s even more complicated, though, are the overall patch notes, which you can read in full on Steam. The notes are utterly gargantuan, which I guess would happen when you’re entirely reworking how an economy functions. 

Take a look at our guide to the best city builders if you want something else to sink your time into.