Hey everyone, I need help diagnosing what seems like a simulation deadlock in my Cities: Skylines II city.

A few days ago, my city hit 145,000 population, and then everything stopped moving — citizens and vehicles are frozen in place. The simulation doesn’t crash, but the city is stuck: traffic doesn't flow, people don't move, even though the UI remains responsive. When I check Task Manager, my CPU is pegged at 100%, GPU usage around 90%.

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

• Loaded a save from a month earlier when the city was at 110k – everything runs smoothly there.
• Tried bulldozing large residential areas in the 145k save to bring population back down to ~110k — but the simulation is still frozen.

My PC specs:

• CPU: Ryzen 5 7500F
• GPU: RTX 4070 SUPER
• RAM: 64GB DDR5-6000
• SSD: 1TB Gen4 NVMe This system should be more than enough for the game.

I'm suspecting some kind of AI pathfinding deadlock or simulation overflow. I've heard others mention that ~140-150k population can trigger major issues in CS2, especially with bad traffic loops — but even after clearing roads and cutting population, the simulation stays dead.

Has anyone encountered this and successfully recovered the city? Are there any tools, dev console commands, or mods that can "unstick" the simulation?

Would appreciate any tips or insights — I put a lot of time into this city and would love to salvage it if possible.