Cities: Skylines 2 promises an improved city-building sim that lets you follow every last citizen and watch their life events

Cities: Skylines 2 aims to improve on the previous city-building game with a massive simulation upgrade that gives life to every single citizen in your city and lets you go full surveillance state on their major life events.

In Cities: Skylines 2, everyone in your city has their own "lifepath," as the devs explain in a new blog. "They grow up, go to school, and find work. They spend their free time at home, in the parks and other attractions, or go shopping in the city’s commercial buildings. They might get sick or become unemployed, and, if they are happy, they will stay in the city and eventually grow old and die of old age."

The previous game - and most other city builders - only simulated individuals in pretty abstract terms. Here, you can look at each individual citizen to see how happy they are about a wide array of factors, ranging from their wealth and access to city services to how reliable their mail service is.

You can also choose to 'follow' any individual citizen, and once you've done so you'll get access to a "lifepath journal" that tracks their lives from that moment on, giving you updates on events like "graduating from a school, finding a spouse, landing a new job, and moving to a new home or away from the city." You'll also get access to that individual's feed on Chirper - the game's still-a-better-name-than-X fake Twitter feed.

Chirper's gotten a much bigger upgrade for the sequel, too, and the new system aims to give you better insights into how your citizens actually feel about your city. As citizens post about the things they like and dislike in your city, the number of likes a given post gets will give you an idea of how seriously to take the feedback. That might serve as a nice little to-do list for city improvements.

But perhaps this is the most important detail: your citizens can now own pets, which means you'll now get to dogs wandering the streets with their owners. Pets are purely cosmetic, but they will make zooming in on your city streets at least 60% cuter.

Cities: Skylines 2 is even simulating layoffs and homelessness.