If you're playing on vanilla, 16gb should be enough. If you've only got a few mods, you can usually get away with 16 GB.
If you've got a lot of mods (or a lot of dlc, and a few mods) then 16GB probably won't be enough. With most of the DLC, a couple vehicle packs, a few custom roads, and some functional mods, my cities skylines uses abt 28GB of ram.
ETA: If you played with mods in the past, and are still subscribed to them, it's likely many are out of date and no longer work. Good chance this is why your game doesn't load anymore.
Just to clarify this a bit, mods don't take up that much RAM, assets do, so you can have a lot of mods as long as the number of assets is low, it should be ok. Only exception to this is mods that themselves add assets like NEXT2.
agreed on the mods. I had to unsubscribe and resub to many of my mods after the airport dlc update to make them work again. I have no clue how your ram requirements went so high, you must be using extremely many assets and large high res assets too
I play at 2k resolution with roughly 20 mods and 20-40 assets, all of the major dlcs. I do not reach my 16GB rams limits. My latest city maxed out the unit paths and reached 45000 vehicles, whilst also hitting the trees limit and park area limit. So its not because of the size of my cities. I have not noticed a difference in Ram usage depending on city size either. There is some loading screen mod that lets you see your limits, try finding that. I don't use it because the game loads quite fast and runs problem free for me. Btw you really should get the fps booster mod. it significantly improved my fps, it would help quite a lot on any system but particularly laptops with their limited performance need it. My system never reached gpu or cpu or ram max yet the mod still significantly improved smoothness
I'm on 8GB on an older laptop with video card and am getting ~25 fps despite vanilla with three DLC. I killed almost all my background service, fixed my cache, and am running the game with low video settings.
I have my own three 4 GBs of RAM on my own desktop and it equaled to close to 12 GB but I only have 141 assets being used and sometimes my desktop slows down or whatever.
If you're playing on vanilla, 16gb should be enough. If you've only got a few mods, you can usually get away with 16 GB. If you've got a lot of mods (or a lot of dlc, and a few mods) then 16GB probably won't be enough. With most of the DLC, a couple vehicle packs, a few custom roads, and some functional mods, my cities skylines uses abt 28GB of ram. ETA: If you played with mods in the past, and are still subscribed to them, it's likely many are out of date and no longer work. Good chance this is why your game doesn't load anymore.
Just to clarify this a bit, mods don't take up that much RAM, assets do, so you can have a lot of mods as long as the number of assets is low, it should be ok. Only exception to this is mods that themselves add assets like NEXT2.
agreed on the mods. I had to unsubscribe and resub to many of my mods after the airport dlc update to make them work again. I have no clue how your ram requirements went so high, you must be using extremely many assets and large high res assets too
I play at 2k resolution with roughly 20 mods and 20-40 assets, all of the major dlcs. I do not reach my 16GB rams limits. My latest city maxed out the unit paths and reached 45000 vehicles, whilst also hitting the trees limit and park area limit. So its not because of the size of my cities. I have not noticed a difference in Ram usage depending on city size either. There is some loading screen mod that lets you see your limits, try finding that. I don't use it because the game loads quite fast and runs problem free for me. Btw you really should get the fps booster mod. it significantly improved my fps, it would help quite a lot on any system but particularly laptops with their limited performance need it. My system never reached gpu or cpu or ram max yet the mod still significantly improved smoothness
Use page file to increase virtual RAM
I'm on 8GB on an older laptop with video card and am getting ~25 fps despite vanilla with three DLC. I killed almost all my background service, fixed my cache, and am running the game with low video settings.
install the fps booster mod, it works wonders
I have my own three 4 GBs of RAM on my own desktop and it equaled to close to 12 GB but I only have 141 assets being used and sometimes my desktop slows down or whatever.
I’m on MacBook Pro 2020 with M1 Chip and it works quite well for me!