Cities: Skylines 2 introduces changes to the economy that require players to manage and balance it more carefully. This guide will help you navigate this new economic challenge and provide strategies for success.


In this screenshot, we encounter a saturated commercial area with too many furniture stores. This situation can occur if you recklessly zone commercial lots all at once. These stores may have spawned due to a heavy local logging industry.

Since wood doesn't need to be imported, the simulation probably evaluated that furniture stores would see the most profit, and spawned a bunch of them.

To gain control over your city's economy, it's essential to understand how production works.
If you have an excess of something, check the production chain to see if you can convert it into a more valuable resource.

For example, I produce a surplus of grain:


If I click on grain, I can see that grain can turn into petrol:


But if I scroll down to look at petrol, it seems I import a lot of it:


So ideally, I should zone new industry and/or demolish companies until I find one that creates petrol from grain. That business should then thrive in my city.

Exporting raw materials like grain may not be profitable. However, setting up a production chain (like above) to produce higher-value products can benefit your city's companies and help them level up. The production chain should be somewhat automatic, but if it doesn't happen, you'll need to influence it.

You can also see a basic summary of this in your infoview.

You can further influence which industries appear in your city by using taxation and subsidies effectively. For instance, if you want to promote the automobile industry, you can subsidize automobiles to attract those companies to your city.



This will encourage automobile companies to spawn in your new developments, which will, in turn, create a domino effect, boosting demand for automobile manufacturing components. Eventually, you can tax automobiles once the resulting industries have been established.

To expedite the domino effect, you'd probably want to look at what materials are necessary for automobile production, and subsidize all of those as well.

Another hands-off approach would be to avoid designating entire zones for commercial or industrial purposes all at once. This helps prevent the risk of oversaturating the area with businesses of the same type, as illustrated by our friend's experience with the furniture stores. Zone a little, wait for the simulation to balance out, zone a little, wait for it to balance out.

In the commercial info-view (displayed here), you'll notice that the ground exhibits a green gradient in areas with a high customer density. This is primarily a concern when planning high-density commercial zones and affects low-density commercial zoning to a lesser degree.

In general, it's advisable to avoid an excess of commercial zones without providing adequate residential access.

Now, regarding household consumers, specific demographics have preferences for particular resources. For example, teenagers tend to favor electronics, while the elderly often seek financial services. (Source.[forum.paradoxplaza.com].) Still, households need enough money and wellness to go shopping. You may notice that if you raise taxes, or you drop your police, healthcare, and education budgets, that your businesses will eventually complain of no customers. This is because your citizens are in poor spirits and poor health, and can start to miss too much work - leading to poor wealth.

However, again, please remember that households are not the sole consumers of resources. For instance, office zoning consumes furniture and paper.

You may find that commercial demand is constantly pushing you to zone commercial purposes. In general, you do not need to let the RCI graph control you. It can be ignored for the most part!

Commercial demand will increase when citizens needs are not being met, when industry needs local distributors, or when there is a lot of unemployment. (Source[forum.paradoxplaza.com])


You can click on the RCI graph to show a list of, rather poorly described, reasons as to why there is or is not demand. There are multiple ways to address these issues, and zoning more commercial doesn't need to be the one you go with.

I have this supermarket that complains about not enough customers.
It sells "Food" but I also have a lot of fast food companies nearby. Fast food is a different resource, but perhaps it's competing with our supermarket.


Now, if I check the production tab, I see that food can be consumed by more than just cim consumers, it can also be used by other retail outlets, and converted into "Meals" or "Lodging":


I have two electronic shops next to this supermarket, so lets demolish one until I get a company that produces Meals or Lodging. (To make this easier, I can subsidize Meals or Lodging to increase the chance they appear.)

There we go! This Donut Shop will utilize food and sell meals.


Now, the big question... will it solve our problem?

And...

After like 20 seconds, the supermarket no longer complains!

Managing your city's economy in Cities: Skylines 2 now requires some attention to detail for the best results. Use taxation, subsidies, and the production chain effectively to create a thriving and balanced city.

⚠️ Remember that profit drives all businesses, and they will reinvest profits to level up the building, which creates less burden on water/electric, higher salaries for employees, and requires higher education positions to be filled. Travel costs eat into profits now, so you ideally never want to import or export as shipping costs a lot.

So, as an overarching strategy, periodically check the resources that are being imported, and try to minimize that.

Hope this helped!

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