One of the biggest shortcomings in 2015's city builder Cities: Skylines was the number of map tiles players were allowed to build on. The buildable space on a map was a grid of 5x5 tiles (25 in total), and of those available tiles players could only unlock a total of nine to build their cities on.
Just nine! At least at first.
Modders were quick to remove that restriction, allowing all of the tiles on the map (which was 9x9) to be built on, for a total of 81 tiles.
Cities: Skylines 2 was announced (opens in new tab) today, and it looks like modders can stand down: The maps in Cities: Skylines 2 will allow you to unlock a whopping 150 map tiles, quite a leap over the original game. Granted, we don't know the size of those tiles, so they may be smaller than in the original. But it still sounds like a hell of a lot more room to build without having to install a mod.
This information comes from the Xbox achievement list for Cities: Skylines 2, which was also released today (perhaps accidentally). Several sites like Xboxachivements (opens in new tab) and Trueachievements (opens in new tab) are displaying the full list of 40 achievements, which combine to award 1,000 points toward your gamerscore.
One of those achievements, "Everything the Light Touches," awards 50 points for unlocking 150 map tiles in a single city. Based on the name of the achievement it sounds to me like that's the entire map, and the amount of points awarded makes it seem like it's a late-game sort of cheevo. Rest assured, if there are more map tiles in an area you can't build on, modders will find a way to unlock those too.
Among the rest of the achievements there are plenty of routine-sounding accomplishments, like for building an airport, creating a district, having various numbers of citizens and happiness ratings, unlocking every building in the game, and things like that. But there are a few more interesting ones:
"Things Are Not Looking Up" - Experience a rat infestation
"The Size of Golf Balls!" - Experience a hailstorm
"You Little Stalker!" - Follow a citizen's lifepath from childhood to old age
Boy, rats and hailstorms? Are we sure this isn't a survival city builder? I guess the rat problem could be an event if you have sanitation issues, trash buildup, or sewage problems in your city, and hail sounds interesting because unlike rain or snow it could do damage to buildings or vehicles. There are also more classic disasters like tornadoes and forest fires shown in the achievements.
As for following a citizens "lifepath" from childhood to old age, well, been there done that (opens in new tab). But it could be fun to do it again in Cities: Skylines 2. Here's the full list of achievements (opens in new tab).
