Cities Skylines Common Mistakes to Avoid

Cities Skylines Common Mistakes to Avoid by left2die

After a week of watching stremers and youtubers struggle witch certain aspects of the game, I decided to write a short guide to help people avoid those mistakes. NOTE: Like most of you, I don’t have the game yet. I’m writing this purely from my experience playing SimCity 4 and Cities in Motion.

1. Road system

It’s important that you design your road system correctly from the start, otherwise you’ll have terrible traffic problems once your city grows bigger. You should always use fractal road design. This means that small roads lead to medium ones, medium ones lead to large ones, and large ones lead to highways. Also, the larger the road the less intersections it should have. What you’ll end up with is a branched up system that looks a bit like a tree. Place your residential zones along smaller roads, while commercial and industrial should be near larger roads.

Here’s a good example of an American suburb: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Suburbia_by_David_Shankbone.jpg

More about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_roads

2. Public transit

The game provide three types of public transit: buses, subway and heavy rail. I’ll focus on buses since that’s what we’ll be using the most, and is also the one you can screw up the most easily.

We know two basic types of bus routes – line and circular. They both have their ups and downs.

• Line routes – These allow travel in both directions, but cover smaller area. In most cases you’ll want to use these, especially in high density areas. Subways and railways should always be line routes.
• Circular routes – These are basically one-way routes, but can cover larger area. Because of their one-way nature you should only use these for very short routes or for low density areas, otherwise avoid them.
• Hybrid – You can also use a hybrid of the above two. For example, a line route goes through downtown, but then becomes circular once it reaches suburbs.

Needless to say you should always try to cross different routes with one another and have them share certain stations. Just take look at your local public transit map to see how it’s done. =)

3. Services

I noticed many people having problems with garbage and death care, so let’s try to solve this.

• Garbage – People tend to treat garbage the same way as they did in SimCity 4 – build a long road leading as far away from the city as possible and build a dump. However, this isn’t SimCity 4, garbage truck aren’t just visual, they’re real, and they need to be able to easily collect garbage. Preferably place them on the main arteries going through your industrial areas and spread them out so that they can serve different parts of your city.
• Death care – Similar rules apply to death care. The way some people treat cemeteries as if they were garbage dumps makes me cringe and wonder if they have ever visited such a place. Cemeteries are NOT garbage dumps! In fact I believe they have a similar happiness effect as parks (at least that how it was in SimCity 4) so placing them inside your city is a good thing. You should make your cemeteries and crematoriums accessible to your citizens, especially older ones which you can spot with the help of the “population” data view. Preferably place them on the main arteries going through your residential areas and spread them out so that they can serve different parts of your city.

I hope this helps!