> If I ask the game to spit out more detail and graphics than can be physically supported by today's technology, I guess I don't necessarily see this as a design fault.

To be clear: I had to turn the quality down to much worse than I recall Cities Skylines 1 looking in order to get worse performance than Cities Skylines 1.

The major complaint here is not "I cannot max the settings on my mediocre hardware", but rather "I cannot mediocre the settings on my max hardware"; the performance is bad at any level, but my hardware, while not top-of-the-line, should be able to run a game like this at 4K playable, or at 1080p while looking awesome and running great. Instead, I get 1080p with a mix of medium/low settings in order to get it looking pretty okay in most aspects.

> Why should they limit the highest possible graphics settings only to existing technology?

This assumes Cities Skylines 2 is using some next gen graphics technology when in practice it is a Unity game without any cutting edge graphics. Another comment mentioned they are doing 10k+ draw calls per frame - it's just poorly optimized.

Sticking with Unity probably killed them. They might as well have deved another engine.

How does developing another engine help at all? It is very likely its graphics are so under-optimized because they spent most of their time on the simulation aspect, which is more than challenging enough. Dyson Sphere Program is a game with lots of stuff going on at a time, the engine isn't the issue. Cities Skylines 2 is just a very complex game.

As a city builder it has not just dynamic geometry (which makes graphics optimization more challenging) and lots going on on screen like DSP, but also a complex agent based simulation of a city, its transportation, its economy, and individual agent AIs. It is far more complex than most games despite not being graphically intensive. And do note that as far as cities builders go, it's also one of the most ambitious graphically. My personal opinion is they deserve some slack as long as the game continues to improve.

If it were doing a ton of compute-shader simulation on GPU to actually increase the fidelity of the simulation that would be one thing, but having a badly implemented graphics pipeline isn't that.

this is a trope that is spit out by the developers of every poorly optimized sim in recorded history.

Yes, scalability towards the future is good -- but not at the detriment of player performance now.

If the player base doesn't stick around during our current dark-times medieval technology stack, there won't be a player base when we have whatever future tech makes it playable -- see the problem?

Somewhat yes, I didn't try it yet, but a few things don't add up then:

Why enable those heavy, performance crippling post processing filters by default?

From what I can find in this comment section, and I guess this has to be taken with a grain of salt, performance doesn't scale. It seems we max out at 50fps on a beefy 13th gen Intel with the fastest GPU available, but then there's a couple comments with mid-range hardware where performance is nearly identical.

To shoot from the hip on this one. It sounds like it could be limited by a single thread. Clock rates between mid and high end CPU's are significantly different but core count is. Thus if a single thread is holding up the works, that would explain the stagnant performance profile despite potential overall performance.