7 things I Wish I Knew Before Starting Cities Skylines

I have played Cities Skylines on the console for many years and I am still learning more things about this city-building game. Whether you are a new player or a veteran player, these tips will be useful to you. These tips and tricks will work for both PC and console. These are 7 things I wish I knew before starting Cities Skylines.

People I watched for research:

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Thank You For Watching!!!!!!

[SimGamesCorner]

Got more tips? Leave them down in the comments!!!

[eyespyyourspy]

Biggest tip is to always detail. The trees, rocks, bushes, and vegitation is extremely useful for noise pollution.

[nedim_guitar]

Slow down residential zoning, but my residential demand is through the roof, regardless of how much I'm zoning and despite there being a lot of empty green zones 😂

[nedim_guitar]

I agree about the office zones! Why are they blue?? 😂

[MsVeeVee]

I'm playing on console so this was very helpful! I've been learning to adjust my budgets more effectively, boosting my electricity spending instead of spending on a new turbine or reactor. Also, taxes! 12% please 👍

[georgemaragos]

Hi, very good information.
I play on PC, and it took me about 3 to 4 years to develop the skills - and more importantly the style to have traffic most time at 83-86 percent.

The secret is do not connect every road to every other road, some areas like a suburb, so off a highway have a 3 or 4 way intersection, but donot create that new zone and link it to every other area that is left / right / up down to the new intersection you created,

Rail - rail is very important

Commuter, use a simple single railway station - that is your "out of city station" intercity
Then nearby - walking distance, use a multi station / platform railway and use that like a "octopus" to spread throughout your map.
the from each railway station, create a small 4 to 8 stop metro

Do this as a wheel within a wheel, the large outer wheel is the railway line, then the inner wheels are metros.

For example the most simplest is have 4 railway station, far north, far east, far south, far west and middle ( ok it is 5 ) of the map
These people will travel long distance ( 20 -100 miles or 30 to 60 minutesin real life ) via tran
Then around each train station, you set up metros, say 1 to 3 per suburb and a smaller loop, like main road the rail is the highway and the subway is the arterial or local roads.
You can expand it one more step and use busses - but i dont use busses because the are road traffic - the only time i do is say a metro is in one spot, but i have a beach line ( or youhave residential around a mountain ) and a long road, then i just set up a bus from metro and make it run the long road and back

Cargo, set up a separate cargo line - it will join the commuter rail at the edge of the map, but for the main map create a seperate rail line that only connects cargo lines. Also if you have water use a water / cargo station, if you have plenty of ocean and rives, use 3 or 4 cargo ship yards.

Now this is important, each sea cargo, you must create a loop road, and connect a rail cargo station.
Your loop road will need, police, fire, hospital, death care, garbage to function
Now you have full import / export of goods, and also a way to send then internally in your map

So another important thing is donot connect every cargo station on the same line - you will bog down in cargo rail trains, that i do is have say a south line and have 4 to 6 cargo station, that is it, then a north line, and 4 to6 cargo station interconnected, but they donot connect to other areas
Do this for North / South East / West

You only need 1 cargo station to connect to the outside railway line that goes put past the border / spawn area
It is very important, all industry areas as well as large commercial areas have cargo rail, otherwise the go 100% via trucks, this was 90% of cargo is by seaat or train, and the last loop station to shop or industry is via trucks, you will end up using very little trucks

If you have a lot of hills, them this is a good time, to use cable cars, it is the only time i use then and only if i have say residential and no school or large commercial, then i use a cable car just to climb the large hill

With airport you only need one, place a railway or metro next to it and make it non stop to the main railway station, but use common sense if the airport is far north and the main multi rail far south, then use 3 or 4 stops on the way, it is silly to go airport far north, then 1 stop to lower south multi rail, only to have commuters catch 2 train sand metro to go back up north

That is is, but the biggest help is just dont connect every road to every other road, people will find short cuts and avoid highways and they will use 1 and 2 lane roads to travel across the map, I am in australia and at one stage new estates made in 0's to 90's were of main road and fed into many cul-de-sacs, so basically a suburb of 500-2000 houses only have 1 x highway 2 x 4 lane road and the rest is 2 and 1 lane roads to each house - it congests the highway turn of and 4 lane road - but eventually trickles down ( of the highway, just have a before main and and after exit - that breaks main highway turn off by 1/3 rd)


For the train hub senario, you can google search cities skylines wheel within a wheel or hub within hub for sample of what i am trying todescribe
Regards
George

[DownloadeousMaximus]

1. It is bug riddled
2. Most mechanics do not function as intended
3. You need 200+ code mods to play it the way you’d like
4. You need 10000+ assets to build the “city of your dreams”
5. After 50000 residents your dream city because a fps crawl.
6. You finally break your dream city with an update and your save is toast
7. You move to CS2 thinking things will be different 😂

[arkaikk]

This was so helpful. I definitely have a simcity mindset starting out. Now i'm dealing with major gridlock.

[BobbyThatDog]

Heres a tip from me: use small business benefactor and big business benefactor, it can 7x your economy my went from 15, 000 per week to almost 80, 000 per week.

[RDLASLB]

I play PC but still found the information helpful & interesting. Honestly hadn't thought about multiple cargo train depots to help with the distribution of goods and resources within the city.
And I agree: If it's "blue" then it SHOULD BE commercial! lol

[NoobToobJamarMemes]

One thing I've done to speed up emergency services and cargo, is to connect industrial/services to the greater city with underground roads. And don't forget to disallow private vehicles and such from these roads.

Fixing traffic is also a great way to speed up arrival times and decongest traffic. I do this with trams (found in the winter dlc) and busses. Trams take you around the city and busses take you to further away places or to specific places (e.g. my education district). I have an island full of cities, all connected by trams and busses, with the largest city and farthest city being connected by train. I have pretty much no traffic issues.

[unstopology]

If you can do well on console, that's impressive. I play on PC and it's still not easy. The traffic mod is so useful because you can make streets yield or stop which help so much with traffic flow. Anyway, these are great tips for any system. 👏

[kyeush]

Pro tips:
1. You can have a whole district dedicated to industrial zones that doesn’t clog the traffic much. Just connect it directly to the highway and make sure to have high capacity entrance/exit ramps. Have at least one cargo station within the district to lessen export/import trips. Place a metro station and some bus stops to eliminate as many cars. Also, aside from the highway, have a separate road that goes from your industrial complex to your busy districts (with commercial zones) to lessen traffic on the highway.

2. Do not make your city car-centric. Plan the transport hierarchy in your city ahead of time and make it really efficient. I suggest you follow some Cims and see if they can go to their destination relatively quickly. If not, you might want to either revise your design or just add more. Making your city car-centric will cause a lot of headaches in the future!

3. For those that don’t own the game yet, DO NOT BUY from EPIC GAMES! Doing so will still let you play the base game and even let you buy all the DLC’s. BUT you will have no access to mods and assets created by the community. Some of the mods are really useful and thus provide a greater experience throughout playing the game. Some of the greatest mods I know are:
a) TMPE or Traffic Manager - this mod will let you configure lane arrows, speed limits, pedestrian lanes, traffic lights, etc. This one is the most useful when it comes to managing traffic.
b) Move it! - allows you to freely move objects even when it’s already built, to your desired location, and shape/curvature, or whatever.
c) many more mods, just check it out on steam lol. I currently don’t have access to any of the mods because I bought the game from Epic Games. I learnt that the hard way.

[Whiplash-tlmu]

Zone your commercial/industry the same way you zone residential. Have footpaths running parallel to collector roads cutting through your residential, and use a small section of a different one lane road type to give those roads cross walks.

[HamzaPKR]

I like the random zoning placement as it creates an organic feel. I guess if you live in the US perfect zoning is a norm but in most of the world, the housing is not always proportional and equal in size.

[xBloodXGusherx]

Lol the ending..

A SHADE OF BLUE!

Hahaha!

[johnnypenso]

One thing I noticed which caused traffic nightmares was that the buses don't use the bus stops in the 5 lane asymmetric roads. They stop in the driving lane and traffic stops behind them.

[morsecode]

Good info. Liked the quick little rant at the end about office color. I agree. haha

[unstoppable]

I play on PC, yet, this is more helpful than all of the PC tips out there.

[kenhinkle]

Been playing for a while, added the industry pack, “highly recommend it if you like laying out roads and playing with the traffic, ” this was the best first time playing video I’ve seen.. I did not know office space was industrial. Never even really used them but now I think I will incorporate into my city.. going to check out your other videos now.. 👍