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For players just starting out, however, the amount of control and impact they have over their city can be more than a little overwhelming. This is especially true if they wish to build a city outside of Sandbox mode, as costs can add up remarkably fast and make it impossible to move on if they don’t turn a profit quickly. Because of this, knowing a few tricks to make their city efficient as early as possible can go a long way to making sure new players can get on their feet.
Updated October 6, 2022, by Rowan Heffernan: Cities: Skylines remains one of the better city-building games for anyone looking for a way to build beautiful cities and landscapes or face the challenges of industrial planning, budgeting, and meeting the demands of their citizens. With the continuing releases of new packs centered around gameplay, ambiance, and stylization, there are plenty of reasons for players to keep coming back. As more has been added to Cities: Skylines, so too has the number of things that new players need to be aware of in order to gain their footing. Likewise, these Cities: Skylines tips should help give returning players a quick refresher on what to prioritize before they dive back into the game.
12 Don’t Be Afraid To Play With Mods
One of the many perks of Cities: Skylines is how thorough and vibrant its modding community is. Whether players are looking for more maps than the game provides by default, new community buildings, different vehicle and building styles, or even more creative tools for managing their roads, the modding community will have them covered.
People who are new or unfamiliar with modding need not worry, either, as the steam workshop makes finding, downloading, and using new mods incredibly easy and intuitive to navigate, even for people who have never modded before. Mods can completely change the experience and are a great way to keep Cities: Skylines feeling fresh.
11 Keep Industry Separate From Other Zones
Industrial Zones, especially at the beginning of a new city, will produce pollution by default that reduces the quality of life for anyone living nearby. While it can be tempting to keep things closer together where you can see them all at once, keeping this sector apart from the others will help residents, as well as the player, when expanding later.
Aside from keeping residents happy, this will also help reduce future traffic problems, as trucks will be less likely to pass through highly populated areas on their way to send exports out of the city.
10 Check Resources Early
A lesser-known feature for beginner Cities: Skylines players is the different resources that are spread across the map, which aren’t all visible without specifically checking.
Knowing where these are early on is essential for making sure the city develops efficiently, as it helps the player know where to put different sectors to get the most out of them once they’ve unlocked specialized industry districts. By checking early, players can make sure to set a valuable area aside to develop into a successful business once the time is right.
9 Plan The Layout Carefully
Once a city becomes more developed, it becomes exponentially harder to move things around if the original road system turns out to be impractical on a larger scale. Careful strategizing while designing the city to make sure there are different roads, blocks, and routes cars can take to get to the same districts is essential to have ahead of time. They’ll only become more important as the town gets more populated.
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Preemptive measures can include planning main roads ahead of time, leaving room for different sectors to grow, and making sure buildings that cause a lot of vehicles to pause aren’t on any busy thoroughfares.
8 Prioritize Public Transit
Ask any Cities: Skylines player what one of the biggest challenges in any of their cities is, and traffic is almost guaranteed to come up. Just like in real cities, the major roads in Cities: Skylines almost always become crowded and backed up with cars at some point, even in the most carefully planned layouts.
The longer it’s left unchecked, the harder it becomes to reroute the traffic. One way to mitigate this is by prioritizing bus routes, train stations, and other modes of public transportation early on in the city’s design, as it can dramatically reduce the number of cars on the road.
7 Plan For Road Upgrades
It’s an inevitability in every city: eventually, the starter roads just won’t be large enough to manage the level of traffic the city now hosts. One of the first solutions to this issue is usually upgrading roads to a larger version with more lanes, allowing more cars to drive on them at once.
A great solution with one caveat, however: zoned buildings along that road will usually be demolished when it’s upgraded. In this case, it usually pays to think over which roads you’ll likely upgrade in the future, and leave those areas un-zoned to minimize disruption during future upgrades.
6 Lower Service Budgets At The Beginning
At the beginning of every city, chances are the services in their current form (water, electricity, etc.) are way too powerful for the current scale of the town. As a result, more money ends up being spent at the beginning for a level of service that can’t be properly felt or appreciated by the city in its current state.
Considering how little money players will have to spare while getting their city off the ground, it pays early to lower the budget down to 50% to save costs and slowly raise it as needed.
5 12% Is The Perfect Tax Rate
Taxes are going to become the pillar of any player’s income in Cities: Skylines. However, it can be hard to find the sweet spot where the player will reap the most benefits without driving away potential workers and residents: a delicate balance in every city’s management.
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For this, raising the taxes of each sector type (residential, commercial, and industry at the beginning) to 12% is the best move for players starting out, as this is the highest the tax rate can go before citizens will start complaining.
4 Connect Things With Paths
Once parks are unlocked, players gain access to a new tool in the form of paths - walkways designed purely for foot traffic throughout the city. Citizens will prefer walking along a pathway to sidewalks, driving, or even public transit, so if the player ensures there are pathways connecting people’s homes to their places of work, it can go a long way to minimizing road traffic.
Thus, residents will have an easy and free mode of travel. Not only will it give more modes for residents to travel within the city, but using paths where roads don’t fit is a great way to build a city’s scenery and make it feel unique and alive.
3 Traffic Circles Are Worth It
As irritating as it can be to dig up old roads to replace an intersection with a new traffic circle, there are few better ways to fix an intersection causing traffic.
While the preset traffic circles in the game can be a bit too large and clunky for many players to believe they’ll fit in the city, they can rest assured that custom traffic circles will work just as well while taking up less space. This will give the player far more control over their roads once they’ve learned it.
2 Provide More Than One Route To The Highway
Even if it’s simply making a new branch off of what was once your only Highway exit, creating a convenient alternative route to the highways in and out of the city is essential for any industry district that needs to export resources or products out of the city.
Trucks are often one of, if not the biggest source of traffic problems in Cities: Skylines, and providing industry trucks with a way out that doesn’t take them through more densely populated districts or narrower roads is a must.
1 Use Districts To Your Advantage
One of the most essential tools for control over a town is the ability to create districts with their own individual rules and ordinances that must be followed within it. If a certain area is more at risk for fire, needs a disproportionate amount of uneducated workers, or just isn’t meant to have skyscrapers in it, then District Ordinances will be the player’s friend.
Whether the player’s needs are purely aesthetic, a management preference, or damage control, navigating the pros and cons of each rule they can enact goes a long way toward building a smoother city.
Cities: Skylines is currently available on PC, macOS, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.
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