The original Cities: Skylines just got a politics mod, giving you a new way to paint the map

While the second Cities: Skylines game is slowly recovering following the departure of its creators, the original game is more than thriving due to its incredibly talented and active modding community. Now, that game received a major new fan-made mod called Politics & Elections that does exactly as its name implies.

The mod enables your citizens, and may there be many of them in every town you make, to vote in relatively free elections to support parties that eventually merge into coalitions. These coalitions and political powerhouses then force certain policy changes that you'll have to make, with the citizens themselves dynamically reacting to their own circumstances. If you raise taxes too high, don't be surprised if a liberal political movement gains power and makes you reduce it. Polluting the air too much? The people want those green policies enacted ASAP. You get the point.

Parties are fully customizable, so you can roleplay to your heart's content or reenact real-world political systems.

You can easily gerrymander your cities now. Image via JChad

As per the mod's Steam Workshop description, "citizens care about high taxes, poor health, unemployment, [and] high crime," while certain situations might cause your population to swing left or right, such as deficits pushing them toward right-leaning, spending-conscious parties. It's an incredibly detailed mod mechanically and does its best to bring parliamentary democracy to Cities: Skylines, a game that otherwise has you as its sole, somewhat benevolent, and borderline omnipotent dictator that decides who gets to keep their home and who's being bulldozed in favor of a statue that'll increase property values.

So far, neither the original game nor its sequel has ever received a proper political system. Sure, citizens can react to all sorts of policies, like high taxes, too many dead bodies not being taken care of, trash all over the place, that sort of thing. But they don't really engage in policy and force you to make certain decisions, especially since you can just bulldoze any dissidents and send them to the ether or wherever else Cities citizens emerge from.

In fact, there aren't many games that have this sort of mechanic at all. Tropico comes to mind, and while it does its job rather well, it sort of leads you into roleplaying as one specific kind of politician, i.e., a tropical dictator that is more or less kindhearted.

One game captivated me a few years ago precisely with this premise. It was called Urban Empire and promised to deliver on exactly the detailed and complex politics of managing a city or larger administrative unit. It didn't turn out so great, but it had a lot of interesting concepts that unfortunately didn't spill over to other games.

But perhaps mods like these will give some developer an idea and start them down that path.

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