The biggest drawback of the 2015 city builder Cities: Skylines was the number of map tiles players could build. The buildable space on the map was a grid of 5 x 5 tiles (25 tiles in total), of which players could only unlock a total of 9 tiles on which to build their cities.

Only nine! At least at first.

Modders soon removed this restriction, allowing cities to be built on all tiles (9x9) on the map.

Cities: Cities: Skylines 2 was announced today (opens in a new tab), and it looks like modders can step aside: the Cities: Cities: Skylines 2 map allows you to unlock a whopping 150 map tiles. Of course, the size of the tiles is unknown, so they may be smaller than the originals. However, it still seems certain that it will greatly increase the amount of space available for building without having to install mods.

This information comes from the Xbox Achievements list for Cities: Skylines 2, which was also (perhaps coincidentally) released today, including Xboxachievements (opens in new tab) and Trueachievements (opens in new tab). Several sites show a full list of 40 achievements that add 1,000 points to the gamerscore.

One of the achievements, "Everything the Light Touches," awards 50 points for unlocking 150 map tiles in a single city. From the name of the achievement, it would seem that the entire map is covered, and from the amount of points awarded, it would be like a late-game cheevo. Rest assured, if there are more map tiles in an area that cannot be built on, the mods will find a way to unlock them as well.

Among other achievements, there are many routine achievements: building airports, creating districts, various numbers of citizens and happiness levels, unlocking all buildings in the game, etc. But there are a few more interesting ones:

"Things Are Not Looking Up" - Experience a rat outbreak. 'The Size of a Golf Ball' - hail a hailstorm. 'You Stalker Bastard - Follow the life path of a citizen from childhood to old age

Boy, Rat, Hail? A rat problem may be an event if your city has sanitation problems, garbage buildup, or sewage problems. More classic disasters, such as tornadoes and forest fires, also show up as achievements.

As for tracing a citizen's "life path" from childhood to old age, well, we've been there (opens in new tab). But it might be interesting to try it again in Cities: Cities: Skylines 2. Here's the full list of achievements (opens in new tab).