I'm enjoying it too. It's fairly similar to the previous one, and have encountered a few simulation bugs, but I'm happy with it. I'm able to run it okay at 4K.
If I played the old one and enjoyed it, what's the pitch for the new one? e.g. why is it better? On the surface it kinda just looks like the previous one, but I haven't dug into it
I've played a lot of CS1 (and recently, lots of CS2), here are the biggest improvements for me:
- The simulation is much deeper than before, not basically just statistics on a page
- The game plays slightly harder, more management needed in order to have a proper budget. But like in the first, that disappears once you have 100/200K citizens, as it's hard to fuck up the budget at that stage.
- The control of roads is a lot better, compared to vanilla CS1. Nowhere near modded CS1, but it'll easily get there with some time, the foundation of CS2 is a lot stronger and easier to extend
- Able to build bigger cities will less lag compared to CS1. I'm sure this will improve even more in the future. Going ECS I'm sure made a huge difference in simulation performance.
The roads/transportation networks are better (baked into the engine more deeply now, such for roundabouts and multi-modal transportation) and the map is much bigger. But honestly CS:1 mods did a "good enough" job at addressing those shortcomings anyway, and CS:2 is missing a lot of the DLC stuff that the first one added. It's got a pretty minimal selection of buildings at this point.
I'd wait a few months/years if I were you. Personally I feel like CS:2 was more of an architectural rewrite (as in the simulation engine) was awesome future potential, but gameplay-wise, modded and DLCed CS:1 just has a lot more actual content.
I still enjoyed CS:2 a lot though, if only because it's been a hot minute since the first game, and I forgot how much I loved this genre.