
Concept and Inspiration
Before we started working on the pack, we had to agree on a style to use. As some of you who either are from or have visited Germany in the past might know - there is no such thing as a “German” style. The whole country is a patchwork of different landscapes, regions, dialects, and various local styles of architecture. You will see lots of brick being used in the north, while the south offers many of their typical half-timbered houses - though this is a general rule.

Visual Inspiration
Thus, the visual style was born, and we knew what the goal was. In the next step, we gathered an array of different examples for each of the buildings we knew we wanted to cover - from service buildings to signatures and zones.
Creation of the Pack
Creation of the Pack: Planning stage and asset production Despite the limited knowledge about how to prepare and create content for Cities: Skylines II back then, planning for the region packs essentially started back in early 2020. However, we were provided with very detailed early documentation and guidelines by Colossal Order, and based on these, we were able to develop our production workflows. Based on the provided technical documentation, we had to adjust our workflow from the established Cities: Skylines workflows by quite a bit. Among the differences in the sequel were much higher limits in terms of model complexity as well as a switch to square 4096x4096 textures. There were also some changes that needed adjustments regarding our UV mapping techniques. As we had no access to the actual game back then, we used different tools and engines to get a better grasp of how assets and materials look and behave in a PBR environment. One of these tools is Twinmotion, a UnrealEngine-based visualization software.


Creation of the Pack: Work in the Editor
Once we finally got access to the editor, it was time to import the assets and start propping. As most of our assets were already finished beforehand, we started with an initial quality control. So, all the assets were imported and checked, and potential issues were screenshotted for later fixing. The work in the editor was streamlined to increase efficiency. As the German pack heavily relies on color maps for the main facades to achieve more variety, setting up these color variations and making sure they look great in-game was the first step. We saved finalized color variations as hex codes to copy-paste them to other assets quickly.
Example of various assets with their colormaps as hex codes.
The next step was propping all assets. For this, we once again placed between 10 and 20 assets and propped them all at the same time. The final step was then to duplicate L1 and L3 to L2 and L4, just like how it is done in the base game, to create a fully functional set.
Pack Content
Zone Types
The German pack comes with two zones: a medium-density zone and a mixed-density zone. The medium density zone is based on the previously described dense “Gründerzeit” districts that can be found around the city centers of pretty much every German city. The height of these buildings can usually be a good indicator of the size of the city they can be found in, or with bigger cities, they become an indicator of how far they are from the city center. Most smaller German towns have three-story tall buildings, while medium-sized cities are usually filled with four-story tall buildings, with buildings in the inner cities sometimes up to five floors tall. In contrast, in Berlin, you can find these five-story buildings that are up to 10 km from the center. To incorporate this, our buildings start with three floors at Level 1 and then gain floors at Level 3 and Level 5.


Signatures
The German Pack contains 3 signature buildings, all of which are commercial.


Services
We put a focus on service buildings that both fit the “Gründerzeit” setting and offer basic services. Each of the service buildings comes with at least two interesting upgrades. The pack contains these service buildings:- Firehouse and Fire Station
- Police Station and Police Headquarters
- Elementary School, High School
- Train Station







Closing Remarks
Planning for the Region Packs began in 2020, shortly after we got the confirmation that Cities: Skylines II was in development. We aimed to deliver custom content crafted by experienced community members for everyone to enjoy in Cities: Skylines II. We’re thrilled and glad that this work is finally accessible for players and fans to use. We hope the entire Cities: Skylines community enjoys the outcome of this project. As the German team, we’re excited to continue creating more content for Cities: Skylines II! Thank you for reading, and please share any feedback or questions in this thread or on the PDX forums. You can also find us on the Cities: Skylines Modding Discord and PDXMods. Modding Discord - https://discord.gg/ExfdGrYvS4 Armesto PDXMods - https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/authors/AArmesto Feindbold PDXMods - https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/authors/Feindbold Titan PDXMods - https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/authors/_Titann_Showcase: Final Assets









