Cities Skylines Beginner Tips

Cities Skylines Beginner Tips by Annahsbananas

Hey everyone.

So I bought this game yesterday and I’m loving it. After unlocking everything the game has so far I wanted to give out some advice because I know I had some brief growing pains:

1. Start with baby steps. This isn’t Sim City. You cannot lay out a massive road system first and then build up your city. Create small roads first with a spattering of resi and commercial and industry.

Massive layouts occur after you have the money for it. Lots of money (don’t worry you can upgrade the current roads you had already laid down)

1. Watch out for the water, electricity and trash needs. The trash needs creeps up fast early in the game. Lay a couple of windmills fair distance away from your residential. This game loves green alternatives for power. Residential happy = city growth
2. Keep your water pumps and water treatments in the right order. If your river is going down stream keep your water treatment plants southbound and your water pumps north bound. You can have a water pump right next to a water treatment plant…just make sure the current is in the right direction. As soon as you can get a water treatment upgrade, bulldoze the older ones and replace it for the newer ones…less pollution
3. Keep residential a fair distance away from commercial and corporations. Commercial and Corps creates a lot of noise. A lot of noise will piss off your residents and they will literally get sick of the noise.
4. Parks, parks, and some more parks. They aren’t expensive and they will do wonders for residential, commercial, and yes even industrial happiness. This promotes city growth. Happy residents = more money
5. The roads are the most important asset of your city. As soon as you can upgrade roads in the resi and commercial areas to wide lane tree lined roads. This will open up your road for traffic and nullifies the traffic noise.

Analyze your roads carefully. Look at the areas that create traffic jams and plan accordingly. I have underpasses and over passes and over over passes in my industrial section. Intersections in industrial sections will kill you. Industry provides the goods to your commercials and outside “NPC cities” and those goods in your commercial district provides for the residents. If you cannot get your goods out in time, your industry will go abandoned, your commercial will suffer and your residential growth will stop which leads me to:

1. Railroads. Railroads in the industry section will KILL your traffic flow. I have 7 industrial train depot and I realized my trucks were going no where because I had 20 trains in the area at any given time. The railroad gate on the roads were constantly down. Have your railroads lift above the ground immediately until you merge it back on the tracks outside of your town. This will unblock all truck traffic. Play around with the train track heights. You can make it look beautiful and very effective.
2. Buses. Buses are great but too much can be bad. If you put too many buses out there it defeats the purpose of having there in the first place. Play with the balance and make sure you have spots in good areas of high traffic…but not too many
3. Metro. This is where it’s at. You can have as many as you want and it wont affect traffic because it’s underground. However, it is very expensive laying the undergrown tracks. But it’s worth the investment. Go crazy with this one. I did. In the residential and commercial/corporate areas, my traffic is virtually non existent because I have a liberal supply of metro stations.
4. Schools are a bit different in this game. Schools will give you three levels of education. Each level of education is ideally suited for specific jobs. Mostly industry (generic) are the first two lvls, commercial kinda the same with a couple 3rd lvl education, and corporation is mostly lvl 2 and 3 education. This is also a balance because too many colleges and not enough elementary schools will yield all highly educated people….don’t be like Tobias McGuire…a citizen in my city who is Highly Educated and working at a trash incinerator plant.
5. Save often
6. Before you lay a dam save the game first. There is some spillage when you lay the dam and if you have building somewhat near the dam, they will go bye bye. The spillage will settle in a couple of minutes and you’ll be good to go.
7. Make sure your funeral and medical facilities are adequate. Don’t wanna bulldoze an entire building because of one corpse stinking up the place.

Hope this helps anyone!

one last thing: if you’re a steam user make sure you shift tab your steam message away….it’s hiding your bull dozer icon :)