No level requirements for buildings. Most buildings are unlocked from the start. If you can afford it, you can build it. Gift buildings and museums still need to be unlocked.
Leveling up will become more important again in the future but for now it’s only for unlocking gifts and regions.
Citizen happiness can now be negative. The old scale was 0 to 5. The new one goes from -6 to +6. The six points are still: shelter, job, safety, basic needs, parks and healthcare. For example, a homeless unemployed person in a city with no parks and bad hospitals scores -6. A housed employed citizen in a green city with good healthcare scores +6. The city-wide index is just the average across all citizens.
Approval points are now just simply the number of citizens with positive happiness. A 1000 habitant city where everyone is happy awards 1000 approval points monthly. A city where everyone is unhappy, no matter how big, awards zero points and the city can’t level up.
New languages: Italian and Portuguese. Both are in beta. Spanish and French graduated from beta to stable.
High-net-worth citizens are pickier about housing. They now require prestige housing like houses and premium condos. They also refuse to move into areas with crime rate. If your city has no prestige housing available they leave town.
Convention Center reworked. It now has a $500k monthly operating cost and no longer spawns a commercial company inside.
Tourist spending simplified. Instead of tracking monthly tourist budgets and distributing them across retail companies, we now use the average number and boost 0.01% per tourist to retail shops city wide.
Casino and racetrack bets are capped at $1M.
Fixed bugs related to car license fees that created cases where car owners weren’t selling their cars despite licenses being absurdly high. This makes building car-free cities viable.
