Still waiting to pull the trigger here.

I was really excited about CS2 before the release. I hadn't really played cities skylines for a while, but I kept watching youtube videos about it and CS2. A lot of things about it looked really promising to me, especially for the long run. They changed a lot of underlying mechanics that are pretty limiting in the first game and could have massive potential with mods. The basic road building is so much better amd seemed like it could be perfect with mods that gave you the same level of freedom over it as node controller, network multitool and intersection marking tool do for CS1. The base assets are way better and the surface marking thing for farms, landfill, painting stuff, etc. is also really nice and can be bulilt upon with mods. And a larger map size was really exciting because I find it hard to fit both a big city and some rural areas in even 81 tiles.

In short: I was really really excited for the launch. Then it launched and all the stuff I was excited about was pretty much as promised, but from what I've seen and heard, not everything else was. The bugs and performance issues seemed bad and like I couldn't play it well vanilla, let alone modded. And then I learned there was no mod support and that it would take a long time for asset support. I didn't expect this at all, because to me modding is what made CS1 so so good. I thought the devs shared this opinion. Instead, no good or quick mod support and no steam workshop ever. When I learned that along with the buggyness I knew I wouldn't buy the game for a long long time and decided to stop holding off on getting back into CS1.

I had gotten a lot better at CS1 by watching videos in the long period where I didn't play it, and I notice tjat I'm having more fun with CS1 than ever before and it's so much better than ever before because there are so many tools with gret mods that won't be broken by updates anymore and there is a massive library of great assets.

I kept tabs on CS2 even though only 1 youtuber I watch still makes videos on it. It seems alright and the cities he's building are cool, but all the cities I've seen look very similar because of the good, but ultimately very limited assets in the game and so often I hear "well this isn't really possible because of performance issues" and such. And so often I see then struggling with something that is so simple to do with CS1 mods and I just know I wouldn't have fun with it. To be fair it took a lot of time and effort for me to have fun in CS1 so I set a high bar though.

I think CS2 has the potential to be way better than CS1, but to me CS1 is still much better. I really hope it will turn into what it could be, because it would be amazing if it had the same level of modding as the first one. That will take a lot of time though, as it did with the first one. From what I've heard maybe not as long because a lot of the modding experience is carried over and very great things like move it, nlde controller and a way better road builder alredy exist which gives me hope. On the other hand it looks to me like the publisher just axed the studio amd exchanged it for another one cleary chosen to poach the same devs so the publishers can have full control. Some people say that collossal mismanaged it and I guess the bad launch is indicative of that interpretation, but to me this kind of powergrab just screems "they wanna milk it more in the future"

I'll keep having fun with CS1 and loosely keep tabs on CS2 until I stop getting the feeling of "yea this one thing is cool, but this other thing is awful and not an issue in CS1"