Citystate II News

[h2]NEW[/h2]

• Prisons: increase security and civil rights when not overcrowded. Can be upgraded to a second stage. By default 0.075% of the population is in a prison, this rate (shown in population stats) increases with lower economic freedom and higher income inequality.
  
• Gulag: Generates revenue based on the number of prisoners, decreases civil rights.
  
• Rehab Center: More expensive than prisons but gives a civil rights bonus.
  
• Summary of policies: displays total effects from all active policies (in the legislation panel)
  
• Inflation breakdown now displayed in budget panel too
  
• Overhaul of UI panels
  
• 2 new 4x4 parks
  
• Chinese Localization!
  

[h2]BALANCING[/h2]
Stabilizing the economic system so crisis are more manageable:

• Education has a greater impact on the industry. Inflation has a lesser impact on the industry. Unemployment and demands have a lesser impact on inflation.
  
• Participation rate can now range from 40 to 82.5% so as to stabilize the unemployment rate. The level of education has now a stronger effect on the participation rate (higher education => higher participation rate => higher unemployment), useful to make transitioning economies easier to deal with.
  
• Increase tax income from residential buildings, decrease tax income from businesses (so sudden changes of the unemployment rate has a lesser effect on budget income)
  
• Added an extra equation to help stabilize a bit the total tax income from businesses when the unemployment rate is high (not realistic but making it easier to handle economic crisis)
  

Abandonment mechanics:

• In bigger cities, buildings were too rarely being abandonned. Speed of decay increased.
  
• Commercial and Industrial buildings can now also decay because of insufficient land value, power or water shortages.
  
• Decay for insuficiant land value only happens if the value is less than half of the 'desired value' (colored in red in the census tool).
  
• Census tool was showing "Ducks have infested the building!" for some abandonned businesses. The true decay reason should now be displayed.
  
• Note: An abandonned building will get rebuilt if there is enough demand, enough power and enough water.
  

Other changes:

• Buying currency and printing money has less impact on the exchange rate
  
• Increased effect of education on the social ladder (+33%)
  
• Immigration: Increased Airport Capacity. Decreased civil rights score wanted by migrants.
  
• Maximum property tax is now 10%. Effect on approval rate and land value decreased.
  
• Changed the GDP per capita computation to be more realistic
  
• Changed the inequality index computation to be more realistic
  

[h2]BUG FIXES[/h2]

• Singapore achievement could not be unlocked.
  
• Parks could be built underwater
  
• Building a coal power plant was unlocking the legislation panel
  
• Residential buildings stage 5 and 6 had troubles spawning on custom density lots
  
• Requirements to unlock special buildings could never turn back red
  
• In bigger cities traffic data was taking too long to update (should be 8x faster)
  
• Optimized traffic pathfinding
  

Next update should come out by the end of March.
The economic system is pretty much working as intended at this point, you can expect much less changes in the future.
The level of difficulty is now more progressive and will not change much aymore but I might add new starting settings if difficulty is still an issue.

Spotted a bug? Please, send me an email!

• Carbon Capture Building (reduces nearby pollution).
  
• Edenium: a sort of sect that increases the birth rate but not religiousness.
  
• Custom density zones (to set the exact max stage a building can reach).
  
• 5 new growable buildings (low income stage 1, middle income stage 7, upper class stage 6, office stage 4, office stage 5).
  

• Political affiliations could sometimes change abruptly and even revert to opposite numbers. If the count was erroneous in your city, it will be automatically reset.
  
• Including special characters or leaving a space at the end in your Nation or City's name was leading to saving errors. Conflicting characters are now blocked.
  
• Stability was reset to 100 after reopening a city.
  
• Screen resolution was not being saved.
  
• Stats in news feeds were missing a space.
  
• Fixed GDP per capita displayed in stats and Nation (x10).
  
• The state media building was recognized as a religious building by nearby houses (not intentional), its monthly cost wasn't taken into account and census tool was erroneous.
  
• The pollution layer were showing very polluted tiles as non polluted.
  
• Road intersection tiles were not displaying data on the traffic layer.
  
• Riot messages were always stating "the riot is destructive" even when not.
  

• Immigration and policies now take longer time to influence political affiliations.
  
• New birth rate computation: religion, education and policies have less impact, health has more impact, default base rate increased.
  
• Doubled tax income from arcologies.
  
• Visual enhancements: post processing, reflections, lighting and materials.
  
• Doubled shadow resolution (on older PCs you might need to lower your shadow settings down to medium).
  
• Changed the sun position of day mode from 7am to 9am
  
• Multiplied by 3 the effect of airports on neighbor cities' immigration caps.
  
• Traffic layer now displays rail tracks usage.
  
• Doubled max limit when leveling terrain.
  
• Decreased frequency of fires.
  
• Slight decrease of riots frequency.
  
• Buildings now evolve faster in larger cities (up to 2x if > 250k pop).
  
• Further increased the positive effect of trees on pollution (x10) and slightly increased the pollution emitted by traffic and factories.
  
• Pollution now affects terrain color and propagates a bit farther.
  
• Religious buildings now have a small monthly upkeep cost.
  

[h3]NEW[/h3]
- Marinas and boats
- Library: speeds up the education level growth of nearby buildings
- Radius showing bus and train station serviced area
- Smooth terrain mode: can be activated in the gameplay settings menu, -before- loading a city
- Thai Localization (Special thanks to Cherdphong Sutithep, Plan Pimlada and Chinnapat Sawatwongvicha)



[h3]BUG FIXES[/h3]
- AM buildings could not progress to stage 2 and above if demand for BM was negative.
- Service buildings were sometimes very difficult to select.
- Destroying a large area while in pause and with a government building involved could make some buildings indestructible or stop the city's growth
- Gov headquarters stage 2+ could not be selected and opened (fixed for new headquarters or if still on Stage 1)
- Changing a lot zone type were causing some visual bugs, displaying wrong max stage and creating incorrect vacant lot size
- Parks monthly cost was not counted in the total expenses!
- In rare cases the power capacity of all cities could add up to zero and cause a divide by zero error.
- Destroying a train station could in some cases stop the city's growth.
- The broken water pipe visual effect was spawning in the air or inside buildings
- Unemployment can no longer go below -10% or above 99% to prevent "NaN" bug and extreme inflation and approval values.
- Pedestrian walkways button displayed wrong maintenance cost
- Ends of pedestrian bridges were misaligned
- Enact policy button tooltip was displaying incorrect stability impact
- A state owned building that was under construction when exiting the city was not reloaded at its correct position and could be seen floating above the map
- Additional safeguards to prevent infinite plane spawning
- UI volume setting was apparently still not saved

[h3]CHANGES/BALANCING[/h3]
- Participation rate now increases when the education level increases. Expect a slightly higher unemployment rate in educated cities.
- Removed central bank infinite money exploit
- Fasten the reaction of the economy to changes. The larger the city the faster demands can be impacted by changes.
- A lack of workforce was not decreasing the demand of commercial and industrial buildings
- Destroying and decayed buildings no longer give back business demand points (demand is recovered progressively by the economy anyway)
- Tax rates can now be increased even without enough stability points
- The student capacity of universities is now counted from all universities in the Nation (reloading cities with universities necessary). Universities working over
capacity now have a lower grade and a lesser effect on the education level.
- Improved bus and train usage (especially for cities with lots of stops close to each other).
- Added incentives for commuters to use highways and increased the capacity of highway access roads, now 30000 (before was 500 - need to be rebuilt to get the new capacity)
- Bankruptcy process no longer sells and destroys roads
- Bankruptcy no longer induces "free power" production situation
- Profits from sales of service buildings and private properties during bankruptcy multiplied by 2
- Improvements to road/avenue intersections to support more cases.
- Moved grass and tree tools under the terraforming section
- State owned buildings can no longer catch fire

[h3]NEW[/h3]
- Red-light district: once unlocked is free to research and build, can be built multiple times, generates 600 'retail' jobs.
- Parking lots: Instead of getting abandoned, high stage office, retail and residential buildings are replaced with parking lots. New buildings can then replace parking lots without having to restart from stage 1. Riots, crime and fire still cause abandonment.
- 5 new residential buildings: 2 new upper class stage 7, new lower class stage 2,3 and 4.

[h3]BUG FIXES[/h3]
- Schools stage 4 were not showing on the education overlay (your old schools could be invisible after loading, still functional but rebuild them if necessary)
- Intersections between gravel roads and streets with trees were creating invisible road tiles
- Starting a city with state owned buildings would cause the city's economy to stop working
- State-owned factories and retail were not generating any tax income.
- Immigration effect on political affiliations was not computed correctly and had instant repercussions. Now more progressive.
- Futurologist achievement could not be unlocked
- Added a second reference check to make sure 3x3 parks are saved
- Riot alert message title was not localized
- Riot alert message: "Move to riot" button was not visible enough
- The number of rioters in the streets was always higher than indicated in the alert message
- Fixed a bug affecting the duration of riots, possibly responsible for the riot sound never stopping
- Riots were spawning on walkways and rails
- Alert messages were not showing if the tutorial was stopped halfway through and alerts were still displayed even if turned off.
- Music were stopped in large cities with too many audio sources. New audio optimizations.

[h3]CHANGES[/h3]
- Added warnings in budget and policy when stability is too low to enact a policy, change taxes or print money
- Increased average approval of tax rates
- Increased base religiousness level and decreased effect of religion on political affiliations (large left leaning cities were having troubles expanding, more feedback still needed)
- In a new city, if residential lots were built on high value land, houses were not getting built. Removed maximum land value requirement in small cities.
- Approval rate from policy can no longer go above 100% or below -50%
- Decreased by 50% the effect of high demand on the inflation rate
- Minor visual changes to shadows and window textures

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]
- An error in the pathfinding method was causing buildings to decay unecessarily
- Fixed Avenue intersections resetting to straight lanes when built over
- Fire engines were playing a broken water pipe sound FX when they arrived at destination
- Buildings with a health level above 100 were colored in red in the health overlay
- Births in arcologies were not taken into account in the stats panel
- Government HQ was displaying incorrect maximum stage
- Corrected multiple news messages trigger conditions
- Removed volumetric clouds in StateCopter mode. Were causing several issues and sometimes affecting performance outside the mode.
- Abandoned industrial buildings were still emitting smoke
- Fixed unreadable GDP value with zero population.
- Added a safeguard to the way data is loaded to prevent the budget from crashing when loading a city
- One of the font was not displaying Japanese correctly.

[h3]Changes[/h3]
- Land value of vacant lots is now computed right after being built. The census tool will display "Land value too high for low income citizens" or "Land value too high for basic manufacturing" when applicable.
- Lowered maximum land value for a new BM to be built to $1250/sqm
- Reduced monthly cost of pedestrian walkways by 50%.
- Buildings without road access now get abandoned faster
- Added credits