I am hopeful for this. Playing it on day one, I reported a garbage management bug on the official forum: only to be told it was "by design", and yet still game-breaking.
The performance woes got all the press, but the game was fundamentally broken. It was nearly impossible to lose. Too many services for a small city? Here's free "government subsidies" that you also can't shut off when your city is successful. Don't have garbage service? No problem, a neighboring city you have no control over is gonna handle your trash -- for free.
I hope this is finally a step in the right direction, but I'll never understand why it took a year to listen to day 1 issues. If the game had been released Early Access the response would have been better all around. Performance issues need to take second place: if the game isn't fun, I don't care how it performs.
I decided to test it even though I'm done with the game. On my 110k pop city I ran it for 2 hours and simulation speed pre patch was 1.2 and is now .06 - 0.8
The performance is back to where it was pre optimization patches.
I was just watching CityPlannerPlays stream where he was trying the new patch out, and oh boy has the game changed totally. It actually looked like a fun challenge instead of the money printing simulator that it was before.
Ok it doesn't have bikes but walking and public transport are so over tuned its impossible to actually have traffic issues. If you don't want to make a car centric city you can easily not make one.
