Colossal Order is too small to sustain such a project and it would be a poor use of their time and money. IIRC they only have a about a dozen coders, whereas Unity can spread the costs of engine development across their hundreds of thousands of users. And Unity Pro subscriptions for a dozen developers come to US$24,000, which isn't even enough to pay the salary of a single engine developer! While there are some aspects of Unity that are a less than perfect fit with the city-builder genre (a C:S city is really stretching the concept of a Scene to the limit), Unity's new DOTS platform is specifically focused on data-heavy simulations such as C:S and is now mature enough to be used in upcoming GSGs such as Gilded Destiny and Grey Eminence. So C:S2 will probably be able gain access to new technologies that improve performance without increasing their engine costs.
The hints earlier in this thread that C:S2 may be moving to hexagons might be preparation for that, since all three DOTS strategy games that I have seen use hexagonal tiles. That might be coincidence, in which case it tells us nothing about C:S2, but maybe the regularity of the grid somehow helps with memory location, or was a more reliable choice in DOTS' early stages. It's rather wild speculation though, so take this paragraph with a large pinch of salt.
C:S1 has astonishingly reasonable graphical requirements for what it's trying to do. I run it on an APU (integrated GPU) and it looks great as far as I am concerned. But I agree that it's likely that we will see a significant uplift in graphical requirements. I've been looking into buying a second-hand dGPU, but I guess that I'll now wait until I know what C:S2 needs.
