Five Tips for Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines is just over the horizon, and that means you’re getting ready to dive on in and build your very own city. Well, take a few minutes to read over these tips because it may not be quite as easy as you first anticipated.

1 - Learn the game, do some testing

Let’s be honest here, your first city probably won’t evolve into a metropolis that is bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars (they’re not dollars, but for argument’s sake, they are). Go into your first few cities knowing this, and it will make the production of that city a lot smoother. You want to use this time to learn the game, learn what works best, and how to get started. Don’t worry too much about that one little road that messed up your strict block pattern. Forget about the water pipes not being exactly parallel to one another.

Put simply, just have fun, experiment, and work out the best way to start for you.

2 - Do not expand too quickly

I made this mistake on my first few cities and played it on 3x speed, expanding further and further out, just trying to get to “end game”. Well, it didn’t work out too well and you just end up with a city you don’t really understand, and a lot of infrastructure problems you didn’t prepare for.

Take it slow. There’s a reason why Cities: Skylines operates in a fullscreen borderless window, and allows you to hear the audio of it when the window isn’t active. Just put a few streets up, alt-tab, check your e-mail, pop back in and fix the water issue that has arisen. Simple!

3 - Getting started for real

So once you’ve got the basics down, you’re going to want to get started on a city that you can actually nurture and help flourish. Well, as I stated before, take it slow, and plan out where you want your roads and buildings to go. In line with this, know what sort of a city you want build. Will it be a tightly-packed city in a block formation? Or maybe something slightly more spread out. Whatever you choose, make sure you know early on as it may affect how you build the base of the city.

On top of this, be sure to leave enough room to upgrade your roads, should you need to. Traffic can build up very fast and if you’re stuck on the basic roads and can’t upgrade them due to the important buildings in the area, you may end getting a bit frustrated.

4 - The most expensive option isn’t always the best

As you level up your city by gaining a higher population, you will begin to unlock a lot of new buildings such as High Schools, Incineration plants, and Police Headquarters. Whilst these are all very useful and will be important for you to get at some point, you don’t have to get them as soon as you can. It is often more beneficial to stick to the lower costing buildings and just get more of them to cover your intended areas than upgrade at the first chance you get.

As I keep repeating, take it slow.

5 - Pay attention to your cities needs

As you expand your city, be sure to keep an eye on your starting points too. Just because you’re building a mega-city over in a new area, doesn’t mean the poor town of Old Cherry doesn’t need some love and attention too.

Be sure to zoom out and take stock of the bigger picture often. Some things you can miss can have catastrophic problems for the rest of your cities, for instance, I didn’t realise but my water was becoming polluted. 10 minutes later, 70% of my citizens were ill, and another 15% dead. Sad times for New Haven.

Hopefully these tips will help you get started on your career within Cities: Skylines, and I look forward to seeing some of your creations soon!