Hah. It did lose some fps as the city grew. By the time I expanded to a bunch of tiles I was hovering at 50-60 instead of 70-90, but I'm on a VRR display, so I never felt the need to crank it down further. It may get there eventually, but I'm done for the day

The defaults for high are absolutely messed up, and it's entirely possible that some of the settings are straight up bugged. The game doesn't look that much better than CS1 on reasonable settings... but it also doesn't run that much worse, either.

Honestly, I have bigger gripes with some of the interface and with how much micromanagement there is in here. I think the tech issues are both overblown and could have been mitigated with better defaults.

EDIT: In case someone has use for it, what I did was mostly turn off volumetric clouds, turn off Vsync, turn off transparent reflections and drop the settings for Global Illumination and other screen-space effects to not be full res.

Oh, and also, they seem to think SMAA looks better than TAA here. It doesn't. You definitely want to manually change that to TAA and disable DRS, which defaults to extremely gross FSR 1.0. The way this is technically put together by default is super weird.

[–] JustZ 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just bought the game and see their post from today, which matches up with what you're saying. I have high hopes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I saw that they acknowledged the broken settings and provided a slightly confusing explanation about the technical reasons for it.

I genuinely think they should have locked those settings to a lower default until they can patch them. I get what they're trying to do by being transparent, but... yeah, I don't think it worked out for them or the people interested in the game.

I've been playing a bunch, I now have a large city going on and it's still very playable, at the cost of worse lighting and slow-loading textures in close-ups. Honestly, at this point I'm more annoyed by some UI and sim quirks than the performance, but here's hoping they keep improving all of the above.

[–] JustZ 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Also, compared to any other city builder, there really is no competition. Even if the launch was truly botched, the game was unplayable, nobody got about 12 fps, there's not another full feature city builder. Not since SimCity blew it's brains out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Straight up SimCity-likes, I suppose not, but there certainly are lots of games aiming to scratch some of that itch.

Honestly, CS2 is mostly competing with CS1. Or with my endless instinct to go back and play more SimCity 4 again.