This is how Cities: Skylines 2 vastly improves on the original game's traffic AI

This is how Cities: Skylines 2 vastly improves on the original game's traffic AI

Paradox and Colossal Order's Cities: Skylines has been a major hit among city building and management fans since its launch in 2015. But one of the most common complaints has been traffic management.

For the sequel, the developer has rebuilt traffic AI from the ground up, adding multicore CPU support for calculations, massive pathfinding improvements, dynamic rerouting, and much more.

Cities: Skylines 2 is replacing the strictly proximity-based pathfinding seen in the first game, which would often block up the game's citizens and service vehicles on roads due to not taking any alternate routes and always sticking to the shortest path to their destinations.

Meanwhile, the sequel's vehicles on roads will take into account the road network, traveling time, and cost when traveling. They will even adjust their routes depending on dynamic events like road accidents and traffic jams, a major improvement over the first game.

Citizens will also calculate the time it takes to use a road, fees associated with fuel usage and parking, the comfort level of the route, and the driver's age when making decisions. They might even break some road rules to save money and time, making some citizens more dangerous drivers.

The sequel's smarter vehicles will also use all available lanes on roads, evening out the traffic in multi-lane roads. They can also dynamically switch lanes while traveling to be more efficient or to overtake slower vehicles.

While the traffic simulation calculations are much more complex in Cities: Skylines 2 compared to the original, they are also much more efficient according to the developer. Colossal Order says it is seeing higher simulation performance thanks to this and full utilization of multicore CPUs.

"Overall, the performance of the simulation and pathfinding is vastly improved which means larger populations are possible," adds the developer. "The only real limits to the simulation are the hardware limitations on the platform running the game."

Read the full deep dive into Traffic AI in Colossal Order's latest Cities: Skylines 2 feature highlight here, which also talks about random traffic accidents, parking preferences of citizens based on age, roundabout behavior, traffic-related infoviews, service vehicle improvements, and traffic management between multiple cities.

The next developer update will be about public and cargo transportation options of the city builder. Don't forget to read last week's deep dive about roads as well.

Cities: Skylines 2 is coming out on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 on October 24, 2023. It will also arrive at Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass on day one.