Cheesing the Alpine Villages Scenario AKA How to Beat Alpine Villages in Cities Skylines

Those Sparkly Unicorn Villages don't come easy, unless you can figure out how to publicly transport 500,000 people!

The TLDR Version

The TLDR version: Unlock metro as fast as possible, and skip ahead to the section below, "after you unlock metro," and read about using pods to force new high density residential districts to all use metro lines to get to school and shopping.

If you want every single tip I can think of, then start from the beginning.

First, Some Perspective

The first time I tried Alpine Villages, I went bankrupt around week twenty, and lost.

The second time I played, I focused on growing the city (and its tax base) instead of trying to minmax anything else for fifty weeks, and developed a bus and metro network after each became available.

By week 90, I had a population of 9,000, with 2,000 passengers a week on transit, meaning I had effectively won the game since I was on track to get another 600,000 passengers over the next 300 weeks.

This is not to just toot my own horn, though maybe I should, because I slayed that runway, but more to say that if you are racing against the clock all the way to week 350 trying to eke out all those passengers, You Are Doing It Wrong.

As the title of the guide suggests, however, this isn't about how to do it "right." Sparkling Unicorn Parks aren't just handed out to people who "do the right thing." They are for people who TAKE WHAT THEY WANT AND WILL ABUSE ANY GAME MECHANIC TO DO IT.

With this in mind, we are now ready to cheese.

Quit Min-Maxing and Grow Your City

Winning the game becomes possible when you open up the two Game Enders, which are Metro and University. They unlock at 5,500 people. Until then, you're playing for peanuts, so focus on getting that population (and that budget) before all else.

Use the existing layout

Changing the layout of the towns requires a budget. Which you don't have. Don't relocate buildings, or neighborhoods or roads. Just sprawl the existing neighborhoods with surrounding grids of roads.

Terminate roads with dead ends

As you expand each neighborhood, it's tempting to have everything be a fully formed grid, but this will make bus routes a pain later. Buses can't do U-turns in a road unless the road dead ends. So include dead-ends in your neighborhoods. If you build with grids, the edges of your grids should have "prongs." (Sidenote: If you generally find yourself failing at traffic and dead bodies, your lack of "prongs" in your city planning in general isn't helping.)

Put the high school in a place that will accommodate bus traffic

Your high school is a good initial source of transit users before the University, so build your road network in a way that will allow for several different bus routes to get there and turn around. More on buses later.

Don't be a socialist

I have several 200k+ cities with a weekly income of $4,000, and several 40k population cities with a weekly income of $40,000. Level three residential with poor services is a cash cow, and buildings rise to level three unless they are on fire.

When you're playing for fun, this doesn't matter, because the Karl Marx players spend hours debating where to put the 10,000th elementary school while the measly 4k a week grows to 20 million. But since you're playing for time, you are also playing for money, which means the bare minimum in fire/trash/medical that you can get away with.

To the extent you minmax, minmax the budget. Low population cities have high residential demand regardless of how horrible they are, so the quicker you can finance new roads and the bare essentials of power and water, the better. Most of my minmaxing involved dropping the power budget with the construction of each new power plant, and then slowly bringing it back to 100% as demand increases.

I left a lot of other "seemingly essential" things like fire and police in the toilet, because, again, people move into low pop cities no matter what. The minimum number of fire trucks to keep the place from burning down is fine.

Charge for bus tickets

You heard that right. See above. Your mission is to hit the population for metro as fast as possible. Losing $1500 a week giving away bus tickets in the early game is not how to win.

Elementary schools

Don't go nuts, but these are not a bad investment, as they will cause your residential to level up (wooo!) and they don't generate any "agents" because citizens teleport to and from elementary school. (More on "agents" later.)

After You Unlock Buses

Somewhere around the 3,000 mark you unlock buses.

Go ahead and build the bus depot, pause the game, and build an efficient bus network.

I don't know what an efficient bus network is. That's why I'm here.

There are far better guides on How To Bus that you could probably google, but to some extent they tend toward something besides gaming the mechanics of Alpine Villages. So here's a basic bus line:

• Pick a few block's worth of houses that your particular bus route will serve.
  
• Create a couple stops (i.e. 4-8ish) in that residential area.
  
• Add a stop within walking distance of the high school
  
• Add 1-3 stops in a commercial zone, or an industrial zone, or both
  
• You're done.

The Most Common Problem With Bus Routes

If the buses fill up before they leave the residential neighborhood, then you're trying to serve too many houses with one bus. Split it into two routes. Even on low density, a bus only makes a few stops in a residential neighborhood before it fills up.

The other common problem, though I don't find it happens in Alpine Villages, is for one bus line to be deluged with people trying to get from school to shopping. Which means your bus line is hitting too many places in the commercial district.

Same with industry. Buses with crowding issues have too many stops (or are trying to function as an artery best left to a metro/monorail/train).

Problem 2: Nobody uses my buses

People will use the buses if it takes them where they want to go and roughly follows the path their car would have taken, without too much deviation. This is another symptom of the "too many stops" problem. Like in real life, they don't want a bus that drives all over the damn place. They want 5-10 stops in their neighorhood, and then a straight shot to where they want to go.

Don't build your road network such that it makes it more convenient to drive. If you give people a shortcut to get to high school that allows them to avoid a longer path via the bus, they'll just drive. (Or create a second bus line that uses the shortcut.)

Sidenote: You can win the game without buses if you aggressively play metro.

Problem 3: I have a traffic jam of buses

Don't force all the buses to drop off everyone at the same spot by your high school. All of my bus lines had a different stop very close to the high school, and I avoided overlap of the lines. This keeps your bus network from getting clogged.

But buses are cheap, provide happiness, and pay for themselves

There's a great happiness bonus whenever pretty much any building is within a block or two of at least one bus route. So pausing the game while you accomplish this will cause a huge happiness burst, causing lots of people to move in and lots of building upgrades with no corresponding budget increase, which means more taxes which means more money which means more winning.

After you unlock metro

When you hit metro, it's go time:

• You have high density residential, which means you can create "pods"
  
• You unlocked the University, which is a mass transit fountain of people
  
• You have enough people to build a second high school

Pods

A lot of people ask, "how do I convince my citizens to use transit?" And they often arrive at answers like "giving away free tickets."

Let's clear something up right now kids. You're not a mayor. You are a dictator. Not only are you a dictator, you can literally summon meteors and tornadoes. So you're more like a mythological god. You don't convince or ask anyone to do anything. YOU LEAVE THEM NO OTHER CHOICE.

You do this with pods.

I'm not really sure whether this is exploiting a game mechanic (it is), but in any event, residential zones don't need to be connected to a highway. People just... move into them, wherever they are. And so long as they have power and water, they stay there. So create a few blocks of city streets (the "superblock you see on YouTube and in the workshop works great), hook it up to power and water, and don't connect it to the highway.

Give it one small fire station, one small police department, one elementary school, one graveyard, and one landfill. DO NOT give it a high school. Give it one or two metro stations. Zone it high density residential.

Give it a metro line that connects to a high school and a University. I built my University in the middle of nowhere, beside a metro station and my second high school.

Voila. Your citizens will now only have one way of escaping their residential hell, which is via your metro station.

After they get there, give them some bus lines to take them to shopping and work. Whatever they pick up from IKEA and can't fit on the subway tube is their problem. They knew what they were getting into. (Or did they?)

How big is each pod?

I size them such the small police and fire stations are just enough to serve the entire pod, i.e. turn all the roads green.

Why call them pods?

I think it's a cooler name than "incredibly isolated communities that you can only escape from through services owned by the state". But, you know, you do you.

Fun with pods

I'm surprised more people don't use pods, because they have some great benefits:

• You can create create incredibly popular blimp lines, with thousands of people waiting for a single blimp, because that's the only way to escape
  
• Managing traffic becomes much more predictable, because a pod will never become overloaded with traffic
  
• Pods prevent traffic problems from surprising you throughout the city, as residents are much less likely to bum rush new places with their cars

Don't underestimate the cable car, but don't bother

The ferry and cable car move large numbers of people very fast. The cable car is OP in the same way that trains are... not (I didn't use it here, but for your own sanity on other maps, download some pretty trains off the workshop that hold more than the standard 260 people).

Don't overload the metro lines

Metro lines choke out around 800-1,200 passengers, give or take (a lot). It's easy to fail to notice that your metro line is choked up because it's underground, but you do need to open the metro tab regularly to make sure there aren't overloaded stops, or multiple trains waiting to get into a single station.

You cannot simply add a bunch more subway trains to fix this problem. You have to create new tubes/stations/etc. You can only add so many more trains before the tunnel itself is clogged.

This basically means decently popular subway lines and a decent bus network will win the game.

Thoughts on mechanics

Using pods and the metro to force residents to take public transit to get to high school and University works for a couple different reasons that have to do with how the game works, and why I was able to win the game with a population of 9,000.

My city of 160,000 currently has maybe 6,000 public transit passengers, and I went pretty nuts with public transit there. When my Alpine Villages city was up to 16,000 population, it was churning 3,000 passengers a week. I have a theory as to why.

Agents

Every vehicle and person you see moving in the game, while they are moving, is an "agent". If they are inside a building, they're not an agent anymore. They are disappeared into the ether. That's why you sometimes hear about people complaining about the 65k agent limit, because the game will only simulate a maximum of 65,000 vehicles or traveling people.

*Disclaimer: I have zero proof of the below conclusions, but as far as I can tell, this is a loose guess of how it works.*

In order to make the game feel alive at all points in time, the game dumps out a relatively fixed number of agents. Service vehicles, then commercial/industrial vehicles, then residents.

Assuming you don't have a lot of commercial or industrial vehicles on the road, the game will simply churn out residential agents so that whenever you zoom in, the city looks like an anthill of little ants people who you have god-like control over whose needs you're trying to meet.

On large population cities, I suspect more "agent" slots are taken up by the commercial/industrial network. But I'm not sure, I haven't committed to making driving impossible for 160,000 people yet.

That's it for my wild guesses. Back to facts.

Residents don't visit each other

They only go to parks, commercial areas, school, landmarks, and work. They never travel to other residences. The only way they know how to socialize is a series of mostly random encounters with others while shopping. The game is a critique of American society. The game only simulates so much.

Back to pods

Because your residential zones are a fountain of "agents", people that have to travel somewhere, they have nowhere else to go besides the metro station, which they get to very quickly, and their ride to the University/shopping/high school won't take long.

As soon as they make it there, an agent slot frees up, and a new agent is born.

Because pods and metro keep your agents' trips short, I think, though I'm not sure, the mass transit numbers get driven arbitrarily high.

Isolating other places

Like your pods, isolating your school from your commercial/work zones (since these are the other three places residents visit) will drive large numbers of people onto mass transit.

It is neither necessary nor easy to heavily isolate commercial and industrial--they both need a highway connection, and they need to be able to reach each other via trucks, which means roads.

On the other hand...

You will notice that you have the option of buying a tile with a second highway connection. You can pick that up and create a second industrial/commecial complex that's not connected by roads to the one you began with, and link all three with a metro line and a couple residential pods. You'll be racking up transit users in no time!

Inflatable cars

After they get to the metro, citizens don't actually need public transit--they spawn inflatable cars and just drive there. (A bunch of cars exiting a metro station means you aren't giving them decent bus routes when they arrive.)

In any event, don't worry about some terrible after-effect of pod-ifying your neighborhoods. So long as they can metro their escape, they'll get somewhere. But try to make the buses the best option.

Other tips

%#&@ tourists

Reaching the population required to have an airport (or space elevator) while somehow not blasting way past the mass transit goal means something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Like free tickets, tourists are not necessary. The only necessary thing is:

• making it convenient for the citizens in your starting area to use buses
  
• making it mandatory for later arrivals to use the subway to get to the three places they go (school mostly)
  
• making the journey fast so that they despawn and more ants people take their place to also be forced happily use mass transit

Be wary of public transport for industry

The priority order for public transport is this:

1. University
2. High school
3. DISTANT THIRD: Commercial
4. INCREDIBLY DISTANT FOURTH THAT IT'S BARELY WORTH MENTIONING: Industry

The rip on commercial isn't well deserved because you'll notice in your other cities that tons of people take transit to shop. But they also walk around forever and clog intersections and take their sweet time, and on small cities, there isn't a ton of interest in commercial, especially light commercial.

Universities and high schools, however, generate tons of traffic, immediately, even on small cities.

Industry relies very little on transit. For those who have subwayed large cities, you know that even in the largest of cities, metros for large industrial districts aren't popular.

Because metro is expensive to build, put your money where it counts first.

Underbuilding city services

Again, your early game choices of not being Karl Marx are enable you to afford a metro system and a university shortly after they unlock.

When you can give out free tickets

• If you've built a metro system that serves residential, educational, and commercial, AND
  
• you have a University and two high schools,
  
• AND your residential demand has started to deflate such that it isn't making sense to spam new residential pods,

then turn on free tickets. Save the game before you do it and see if you have enough riders to put you on track to win without much more effort.

Actual cheats

You certainly don't need them, but for the especially benighted (and those who simply want way better looking buses and trains) the train and bus assets on the workshop don't prevent you from getting achievements, and they carry more people. This upgraded bus fleet can make route design a little more forgiving.

Final Thoughts

In a way, pods are a cheese. And when you first make a few, they will look like awkward, stupid, lifeless squares or blobs connected only with power lines.

If you use them elsewhere and get more used to them, you'll start connecting them with train routes, and instead of blobs, you can size them more or less to fit wherever you need them to (or to the landscape). This will allow you to create much more lifelike cities, you'll be less concerned with the dreaded deathwaves, and you can create more predictable traffic flow from residents going elsewhere.

Cable car to a mountain? Pod. Community served only by blimps? Pod. Ferry network? Pod pod pod.

Eventually, if you get good enough with bus routes, and connecting those bus routes to metro lines, and those metro lines to train stations, then you can connect those pods to highways and people will still use your mass transit anyway. Your roads will be so empty that you can toss in industry and commercial until the offramp is at capacity.

In this way pods can be a fun stepping stone toward creating an efficient transit network that aesthetically looks good--nobody can tell from looking at it that a district isn't connected to the district(s) adjacent to it.

If you want to get good at transit in this game, it's probably better to play a few archipelago maps, because they force exactly this kind of engineering. They force you to stop putting exits too close to each other on the highway, to avoid sprawl, and to get a feel for how many people can be served by any particular off ramp or transit design.

If you want to ace Alpine Villages, play an archipelago map for fun, or play the Island Hopping scenario first (and for which, not coincidentally, I also wrote a guide).

How do I cheese Floodlands?

You don't. You lose a couple times until you hit the population number to get the second tile and then it's cake from there. Someone already wrote a guide, and I don't know of a way of making the first tile any easier.

Just kidding, I do know how to cheese Floodlands

People move in where there is already power or an adjacent building, and existing water service. If you *spread out* your service buildings and place a couple power lines, residents will move in everywhere, rather than just starting in one place and slowly growing outward, like a tumor that you wish were less benign. This creates a high enough population to escape the first tile before the flood hits the edge you're building on.

In other words, you lose if you follow the usual efficient pattern of putting service buildings in one central location.

Isn't that a way to cheese other scenarios with a time limit, including this one?

It is.

How do you beat By the Dam?

See the "Don't be a socialist" section in this guide. Ignore the desire to level up places and just spam more level three neighborhoods. Use some terraforming and floodwalls to totally shut off the waterfall.

If you can explain two scenarios with two paragraphs why did you write War and Peace to deal with Alpine Villages?

For the same reason you obsessively read to here and are spending a hundred hours on getting a virtual sparkly unicorn park: Because we are insane.

[Zomein102]

may 2018 so long

[RM1985]

Can anyone tell me where the train line on this map is?? It would be a great way to bring in tourists, wouldn't it???

[AllSunnyPlays]

Thank you! Ill try not to be a fucking communist!

[JakeJakeJakeJake]

Thank you for this I’ve spent hours trying to do this

[✪✪ Sgt Rakov ✪✪]

So I've managed to barely beat Alpine Villages (with 3 weeks remaining), I had to resort to pod thing for that, however I found full isolation very troubling because garbage trucks and hearses desperately are trying to reach other side of the map instead of working houses next to them. And if they can't pathfind then it just keeps lingering at "Hearses in use: 0/11... 1/11... 0/11... 1/11"
So instead of it I made tiny "districts" on arterials between districts and applied "old town" policy (ban on through traffic). This doesn't get rid of private transport completely but still allows for higher than normal ridership.

[✪✪ Sgt Rakov ✪✪]

Btw Floodland is kinda easy, you just hug the tile edge building one long 8x∞ block, then as soon as you get another tile you demolish/relocate it all and start again from its highest point. Repeat second time on second tile, by third one you should be safe.
And "Fix the traffic" was easy once I realized I'm not supposed to destroy existing districts and THATS why I'm losing population goal.
But "Alpline Villages"? It's HELL. It's unplayable. I don't know how whoever tested it won it. I suppose they didn't use glitches like pods, or any mods, but then how. Maybe it's easier if you use metros, but SMALL ALPINE VILLAGES WITH 9 THOUSAND POPULATION ARENT SUPPOSED TO HAVE 20 SUBWAY STATIONS.

[✪✪ Sgt Rakov ✪✪]

Do you think it is still winnable without cheese like pods and without using metro? I tried but I failed hard, had to resort to metro and pod cheese. I absolutely hate this scenario at this point, it's worst one in game, it forces you to play dirty.

[Massive]

Great read, got it first attempt with this system. Lotta great points in here I never would have thought of. Oh, and yes we're nuts.

[Fart_Gas]

I played the Diomede Islands scenario. I had to use hairpin bends to get the road to the flat area at the top of the island. It was a gruelling game, where my profits were razor-thin.

[Amarsir]

Good writeup. I tried this scenario twice: once population-first and once transport-first. In either case I can't get more than 10% of my population to use public transportation, no matter how convenient the options. I'll have to try the pod cheese and see if that works.