Citystate II update for 27 January 2022

NEW

• Prisons: increase security and civil rights when not overcrowded. Can be upgraded to a second stage. By default 0.075% of the population is in a prison, this rate (shown in population stats) increases with lower economic freedom and higher income inequality.
• Gulag: Generates revenue based on the number of prisoners, decreases civil rights.
• Rehab Center: More expensive than prisons but gives a civil rights bonus.
• Summary of policies: displays total effects from all active policies (in the legislation panel)
• Inflation breakdown now displayed in budget panel too
• Overhaul of UI panels
• 2 new 4x4 parks
• Chinese Localization!

BALANCING

Stabilizing the economic system so crisis are more manageable:

• Education has a greater impact on the industry. Inflation has a lesser impact on the industry. Unemployment and demands have a lesser impact on inflation.
• Participation rate can now range from 40 to 82.5% so as to stabilize the unemployment rate. The level of education has now a stronger effect on the participation rate (higher education => higher participation rate => higher unemployment), useful to make transitioning economies easier to deal with.
• Increase tax income from residential buildings, decrease tax income from businesses (so sudden changes of the unemployment rate has a lesser effect on budget income)
• Added an extra equation to help stabilize a bit the total tax income from businesses when the unemployment rate is high (not realistic but making it easier to handle economic crisis)

Abandonment mechanics:

• In bigger cities, buildings were too rarely being abandonned. Speed of decay increased.
• Commercial and Industrial buildings can now also decay because of insufficient land value, power or water shortages.
• Decay for insuficiant land value only happens if the value is less than half of the 'desired value' (colored in red in the census tool).
• Census tool was showing "Ducks have infested the building!" for some abandonned businesses. The true decay reason should now be displayed.
• Note: An abandonned building will get rebuilt if there is enough demand, enough power and enough water.

Other changes:

• Buying currency and printing money has less impact on the exchange rate
• Increased effect of education on the social ladder (+33%)
• Immigration: Increased Airport Capacity. Decreased civil rights score wanted by migrants.
• Maximum property tax is now 10%. Effect on approval rate and land value decreased.
• Changed the GDP per capita computation to be more realistic
• Changed the inequality index computation to be more realistic

BUG FIXES

• Singapore achievement could not be unlocked.
• Parks could be built underwater
• Building a coal power plant was unlocking the legislation panel
• Residential buildings stage 5 and 6 had troubles spawning on custom density lots
• Requirements to unlock special buildings could never turn back red
• In bigger cities traffic data was taking too long to update (should be 8x faster)
• Optimized traffic pathfinding

Next update should come out by the end of March.
The economic system is pretty much working as intended at this point, you can expect much less changes in the future.
The level of difficulty is now more progressive and will not change much aymore but I might add new starting settings if difficulty is still an issue.

Spotted a bug? Please, send me an email!