Cheesing Cities Skylines: How to Build High Population Cities in the Vanilla Game

Many of the scenarios and unlockable buildings in Cities require you to hit large populations, without mods, and a lot of the guides out there about high population cities include... mods. Here's some tips for doing it without mods, without going crazy.

Introduction

This guide is very much a work in progress so you'll just have to go with the flow as I flesh it out, but feel free to post questions / remarks as I go along.

This guide is basically meant to help you get past what is often a sticking point for Cities players, which is getting past the 80,000 mark and well into the big 250k cities. It's pretty common to have it be easy breezy cover girl for a long time and then suddenly it's death waves, a zillion icons about very bad things, and trucks lined up for three tiles in a row. Oh and queue lines of fifty trains.

This is about how to get past all those things.

A Tale of Four Cities

Rather than bore you with an introduction, I know you have places to be, cities to build, and scandalous things on the internet to fap to. Thus, I'll start with my favorite tip for dealing with high population cities.

Make four cities

Usually, a map is served by two highways, with the end of each of your two highways leading to some made up cities on the horizon, like Las Cruz.

With TWO highways terminating in FOUR directions, you have FOUR city connections. If you've ever played in the map editor you're familiar with this and know that four is the limit (and also the suggested number).

The most common way to play is to make your city the nexus of all four connections.

It makes sense, but it makes a high pop city extremely challenging.

Making it easier

Start your city with just one highway connection by clipping its connection with all others. On most maps you start with an offramp from a highway that heads to the horizon in either direction--demolish the highway to one side of the exit so that only ONE city connection functions.

Does this screw anything up?

Nope! Your city will have no problems importing everything it needs from a single city connection.

Why do this?

The reason you do this is to make the game a lot easier to manage. You're probably reading this guide because you're able to manage a city that goes up to 80,000 people or so when everything goes to hell.

The game slows down, and after it slows down, you start running into city-wide commerce problems: Not enough raw materials, not enough goods to sell, not enough buyers for products, dead bodies, etc.

So instead, build your city up to 80,000 people, spend a little while making sure everything is good to go indefinitely (profitable, relying on recycling/crematoriums so you won't have graveyards and landfills filling up in your absence) and then...

Build a second city with the second highway connection!

Then create a new city with the second highway connection. Create a nice exit, create a nice district around it, extend the highway, create another exit far enough away, wash/rinse/repeat.

You need to resist a very strong urge.

Don't connect city one to city two.

It's all you want to do, I know, The mere thought of Fish Sticks enterprises in District One being unable to provide fish sticks to anyone in District Seven is worse than that nightmare where you went to school without your makeup, there were clowns, you were also naked, and your teeth fell out. Stop taking so much melatonin before bed. Consider some light reading.

Instead, enjoy the fact that City One is going to keep on ticking just fine, because you already balanced all of its needs regarding traffic, commercial sales, and industrial production, and that you're only balancing the needs of City Two.

Repeat with cities three and four

Now, when you encounter warning symbols like "not enough customers," "not enough workers," "not enough products to sell," and "not enough buyers for products," you'll know that City 1, 2, 3, or 4 in particular needs a little more industry or a little more commercial or a little more uneducated residential. You don't have to worry about a slight imbalance in zoning, or a traffic jam somewhere, screwing up an entire 150k pop city. Your problems are isolated to City One, City Two, City Three, or City Four.

Balancing 80,000 pop mini-cities is much easier than restoring the balance of a 200,000 pop city flying off the rails. We all know that feeling: You built too much commercial. Or too much industry. Or there's a traffic jam of hearses. And then somehow one bad exit drags your city into a death spiral.

Not connecting everything to everywhere makes me feel sad

FINE. If you absolutely MUST connect the cities, then start by ONLY allowing residents and tourists to move between the cities. Allowing residents to move around freely causes the least chaos. It's the balance between commercial and industrial that causes the most trouble, and you can skip it entirely by keeping four separate commercial/industrial pairs, each with their own external city connection.

Finish each independent city before connecting it to others

If city 1, city 2, and city 3 each have balanced commercial/industrial ratios, then connecting them all probably will still satisfy the game's internal buy/sell ratio. But but but: All of the businesses can conceivably start ordering products from much further away, and then the stupid outside cities start clogging your highways with their own city to city traffic. Save the game before you connect your highway to make sure everything doesn't go to hell.

Conclusion about four cities

If you are already doing just fine with 80k pop cities, then this is the only tip you need to know. Quit this guide and go have fun. But more details follow!

Roads, Roads, and More Roads

Avoid Mass Transit

For all of you cities skylines players who play this game to relish in your socialist civil engineering fantasy where nobody has to drive anywhere, that strategy comes at a steep cost. In real life, the cost would be the votes of Republicans fearful of people who don't look like them infiltrating their communities, but cities skylines doesn't simulate Republicans, but instead a fleet of eager beaver metro passengers who don't feel like riding a bus is below their social status.

You can tell this game is made by Europeans.

The real cost of mass transit is processing power. The game simulates traffic really fast. Passengers, not so much. As soon as you build a successful bus/metro/train system, the 3X speed will sloooooooooooooow down to 1x speed. That's why your 30k pop city with a great tram network runs like a 150k city.

When you are first learning how to manage high population cities, a slow game is a pain. Death waves, "not enough products to sell" warnings, and "not enough raw materials" will cause your cities to crash and burn at an agonizingly slow pace, and it's easy to get frustrated and lose patience. Slow motion car wrecks are only fun on YouTube.

So stick to the basics of roads. Build a highway that can serve a community of 80-100,000. Build five or six exits along it. Build up the neighborhood connected to each exit to about 12,000, and then build up the next exit. Ignore transit for now and enjoy the speed it brings to the game.

Learn to build the diverging diamond and DCMI or download mine

In the unmodded game, the fastest service interchange is the DCMI's, the older sister of the diverging diamond. An intersection of two interstates is called a "system interchange", whereas an interchange that allows people to get on arterial/collector/local roads is a "service interchange". Service interchances are what you normally call highway exits.

The real life diverging diamond has two signaled (street lights) intersections where the cars temporarily drive on the wrong side of the road.

Instead of having the oneway roads bridging your interstate intersect (as most of the diverging diamonds on the workshop do it) the DCMI just has them physically fly over one another.

It's not easy to build (though fun to learn if you enjoy traffic) but becomes easy with practice.

Reason to use my workshop version of the DCMI

Unfortunately, the intersections on the workshop tilt toward cloning the real life diverging diamonds and DCMIs and lose a lot of their efficiency in the process. The game doesn't charge you much for a few flyovers, so it's much better to have a higher maintenance service interchange than it is to deal with a realistic looking, clogged exit.

Also the one I built allows you to plot the interchange on top of an existing highway. You don't even have to pay maintenance for the existing highway, or deal with the nightmare of "terrain not level". It may not be pretty, but it's built to be a workhorse. Find it here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1526514926

Yes you can and should use DCMIs right away

If you're like me you hate the fact that you're starting the game with terrible highway exits you know will just end up getting clogged and replaced later. To deal with that, I made a two-way road version of the DCMI exit, so you can skip to using it when you first found the city.

WARNING: Maybe wait to build it until after your taxes bring you into the black. It's easy to go bankrupt before the 5k population mark because you're usually spending more than you're taking in.

Orient Your DCMI properly

The lanes leading to the neighborhoods your DCMI services are the lanes that flyover themselves. The lanes serving all of the other traffic (leading up and down the main highway) do not crisscross.

Then add a roundabout of some kind on each side... or three

I love blackwidow's spiral highway exit. It is beautiful and also churns a hell of a lot of traffic. Replace its three two lane roads with six lane exits. There are thousands of exits on the workshop, and I haven't tried them all, but I can always rely on this one to keep up with each side of the DCMI interchange. I regularly use two of them for each exit, so I'll have a DCMI supporting a 12k pair of spiral exits.

Or just use a conventional roundabout.

Build up the exit slowly

Stop prebuilding everything.

Instead build up a district served by each side of the highway exit until it hits capacity. There's no point in prebuilding a huge area only to find out the highest volume service interchange in the game can't handle it. All of the interchanges choke eventually. And there's rarely a pleasant way of fixing an overbuilt district--it's either a nightmare to connect another exit (which inevitably ends up too close to the main exit) or you simply have to bulldoze until the problem goes away.

I prebuilt a district and it's too big. What do I do?

You have to completely lop off a big chunk of the district and glom it onto another nearby district with an arterial or collector roads. Because it's simply not possible to increase the capacity of your interchange, you have to divert the traffic to another interchange, which means disconnecting the district. You can also use policies to reduce the number of cars.

Which is a good way of noting: Most of the policies are really just there to help you fix mistakes or when a particular zone has gone a little out of whack.

Read "How to Traffic"

This guide assumes you've read "How to Traffic," but if you haven't, go read it! It's the best.

There's interstates, arteries, collectors, and local roads. Interstates can only connect to arteries, arteries can only connect to interstates and collectors, collectors can only connect to arteries and locals, and locals can only connect to collectors.

That's principle one. The other two principles:

• Don't build intersections too close together
  
• Don't overload an interchange

As a rule of thumb, if an interstate runs straight across a CS tile, you can fit approximately 2ish high volume exits inside of that tile on that section of interstate.

But if I only build two exits, with two 12k pop districts, there's a lot of vacant land!

For those of you who hate nature, and will not be content until every piece of grass is covered in pavement, worry not!

Remember, you have four super highways each leading to a city connection somewhere. As you build up City 2, 3, and 4, those independent cities and highways will inevitably snake through the tile you're building City 1 in, where you can then build two more exits, and more districts, until the tile is covered in pavement, raising the average temperature, eliminating natural rainfall collection, blighting the landscape, and achieving your primal desire to demonstrate your masculinist control of something by destroying it.

Budgeting and Money

Since you're playing the unmodded game, you have to worry about money, especially if you're playing a scenario where you're limited for time.

Don't be a socialist

I've written this in my other guides, but you can get a city up to level three with a cheap array of buses, parks, and elementary schools, along with the just necessary smattering of firehouses and police stations and crematoriums.

Wait until buildings stop leveling before you throw more services at them.

Stadiums

When the DLC expac stadium first becomes available, it will be pretty expensive to run. The comparative cost of running it will be negligible in a large city, but here's the kicker: The amount of money from game wins increases along with your population, but the expense of running the stadium doesn't.

Your wins are primarily tied to how many people can reach the stadium in time to make a game, which means you want everyone to be able to drive into your stadium as easily as possible. Leaving is a much lesser priority, so make sure people aren't forced to turn left to get into the stadium--make the entrance on the right, and don't subject anyone reaching the stadium to any lights on the way. Metro and train lines directly to the stadium are nice too.

Stadium winnings can prop up terrible economic mismanagement in the late game, which is nice, because often your major cities are a tool to get a lot of your achievements, when you start doing terrible things on purpose, like driving up crime.

Taxes and other errata

I have yet to figure out taxes. I leave them on the default, though I've had to crank them up occasionally because of poor choices.

Budgeting

As many others point out, the efficiency of services is TERRIBLE when the budget is not at 100%. Police stations with 50% budgets will send out 25% of the cars. Same with power and most other things. (Actual transport lines seem to be the exception--doubling a bus routes budget will double its buses, halving it will halve the buses.) Most of the time you're better off building more service buildings than altering the budget.

Exceptions re budgeting

In the early game, when you are playing scenarios, power and money are expensive, and you save money by cranking those down until you run short on power and water.

Death

Real life cities have to deal with real life issues like traffic events. The closest your city will come to that is death waves.

Splitting the city up into four cities will help manage your death waves for the same reason it helps you manage everything else. Problems are sectioned off, and hearses don't end up driving to the end of the earth.

Follow some hearses

You will be CONVINCED that the game is broken until you spend thirty minutes watching hearses. Click them, then click the follow button, and then watch as your perception of reality unravels. Or at least your assumption about how traffic works in this game.

You'll notice a few things.

First, you'll notice that the unmodded game actually does a decent job of sending hearses to bodies that are nearby, only occasionally do they venture to the other side of the earth to pick up bodies.

Second, you'll notice that you forgot a few important ways for cars to get places. It's really easy to not notice that some errant one way road has caused cars trying to get between two places to take ridiculous routes.

Third, and most importantly, you'll notice cars often can't turn left into a building, and they can't make U-Turns without a dead end or a six-lane intersection. A lot of people set up their roads like trees, where the roads terminate in long branches. This makes hearse routes take forever, because they end up driving to the end of a branch and all the way back just so they can turn right, because the only way to make the U-turn is to drive to the end of the branch.

STOP CREATING LONG ROADS WITHOUT INTERSECTIONS. STOP MAKING U TURNS A PAIN.

The irony of all the people who cry about deathwaves

Every traffic design manual in the world (probably) (at least in the US) has a boatload of regulations requiring the ability of LARGE FIRETRUCKS to turn around. It's why American suburban roads are so large (and why European roads seem so small). The modern American road system was built after regulations came into being that require easy firetruck U-turns.

Instead of punishing you by burning your buildings down (though the game punishes you this way too) it punishes you be hitting you with dead body abandonment issues, but the cause is the same: Your hearses may be able to get to the neighborhood fast, but going from one stop to another inside the neighborhood takes an eternity. Your hearse departs with ten stops. If it gets stuck in a lot of traffic moving between stops, the building at the end of the line goes abandoned.

Deathwaves measure an aspect of your neighborhood road planning that it's easy to ignore, which is the ability to travel inside of the neighborhood quickly.

The game does not simulate, at all, the desire of residents to visit each other, so the only aspect of the simulation that tests the navigability of residential areas is the routes of the hearses.

Other tips to avoid this problem

Build up neighborhoods and their intersections slowly. The #2 cause of deathwaves is creating overloaded intersections. When an intersection hits capacity, you simply have to stop building. Womp.

Seeding, slow residential development, and so on

There are a lot of advocates for the concept of slowly seeding your residential districts by slowly buidling up piecemeal sectiosn of neighborhoods. The theory is simple, which is that when a bunch of adults move in simultaneously, they will all age and die simultaneously.

I simply don't have the patience for this. I would rather just build twice as many crematoriums for when the deathwave hits. Twice as many hearses go out. Done.

Also, in some ways it is simply bad advice. You can't actually control city population this way. You'll notice that a lot of your residences have 19/26 households, meaning that people can move in anytime there's a boost in happiness. Adding services will level buildings in an entire district, boosting its population quickly. You can't really control these issues, but you can build a neighborhoods with efficient intersections and u-turns.

But seriously, follow some hearses

The only way to understand how they travel is to follow them.

Monuments

A lot of people complain about the monuments, but I like them. Still, it's good to know how they can benefit your city, or ruin it.

The biggest Trojan Horse of them all: The Hadron Collider

All of your citizens become college grads. College grads don't like working in factories. Factories are necessary to build products for the commercial zones. If you enjoy watching your industrial sector go abandoned, followed by your commercial sector, followed by masssive unemployment, build a hadron collider.

Avoiding the hadron collider disaster

If you really must... tilt your city toward offices, and then generic industry. Offices can employ college grads, and high level generic industry will too. Forest and agricultural industrial sectors are doomed with a hadron collider.

Note that if you're going for the Eiffel Tower monument, having a hadron collider will make it almost impossible.

The biggest letdown of them all: The ultimate recycling center

It's expensive, and one of the core components of your waste network is that it's... a network. Having all of the garbage trucks deployed from one hub is a recipe for disaster for places far away from the hub. It also doesn't work well for the design I describe in this guide (though it could certainly serve the entirety of one of your four independent cities if placed well).

At around the 150k mark, it may be useful though. You can plop it in the middle of a high density area, and it basically maxes out the processing power for your other recycling centers, which is their real weakness.

The lady in red: The Eden Project

If you're taking home an attractive stranger from a bar in real life, you don't have the opportunity to save your game, but in Cities Skylines you do, and with the Eden Project, you should.

I don't know why I say "the lady in red" because I'm a gay man, but there's not an equivalent phrase. "Tall, dark and handsome" doesn't really suggest "your city might plunge into disaster and deathwaves, and also you might get chlamydia." In any event, get a prescription of antibiotics and save your game, because with the Eden Project, you don't know what will happen!

The Eden Project increases all of the property values to max, and tends to drag all of the building levels up to max along with it. Sounds like a great thing, right? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

A lot, apparently.

• The city population can easily go up by 50% over the course of fifty weeks, creating an endless series of deathwaves.
  
• The traffic of an additional 50% population boost can overload well functioning interchanges throughout the city, ruining everything.
  
• The massive shift in commercial and industry level can destroy the previous balance of pretty much everything, again ruining everything.
  
• You spent days or weeks building up a beautiful series of parks, and connected services, and all of them are kind of pointless now, and honestly it's hard not to feel a little bit raw about that.
  
• You get chlamydia. Which is as easy to treat as loading a game, so TBH I recommend enjoying your life at this technological stage in human history.

I have an attorney that I work with (I am also an attorney) who sometimes discourages me from bringing in high powered expert witnesesses, with the adage, "You don't need a sledgehammer to kill a fly."

But I like sledgehammers, which probably explains why I like the Eden Project.

It eliminates pollution, which looks ugly. It gives you freedom to build the city more or less how you want, without having to blanket services in awkward places. Also, during occasions when you want to boost population, nothing matches it. (It is a helpful "population bomb" in scenarios like Tornado Country.)

Tips for preventing it from wrecking everything:

• Use it as early as possible. As soon as monuments become available. The negative effects, namely its impact on the balance of the game, are mostly blunted when you use it while the city is relatively small.
  
• Anticipate the deathwaves by building a lot of crematoriums.
  
• Have an emtpy, unzoned district ready for development so you can easily add services/zoning/whatever to accomodate whatever crisis emerges from screwing the internal balance of the city.
  
• Get tested.

The best monument but also the most boring: The Fusion Power Plant

It's more power than you'll probably ever need and it's cheap.

It's also boring AF. Build it!

There is only one warning with the fusion power plant:

Give it a fire station, connect it to nearby water and sewer, and don't build it near industry or forests. You don't need an errant fire or a limited water supply causing the entire city to unwind.

The only momument that's entertaining to watch: The Space Elevator

The space elevator is really basically just another airport. They probably coded it as an airport.

But like airports, the space elevator is enjoyable to watch as you get to see the flurry of tourists coming in.

Like any tourist inlet, be it the harbor or the airport, the space elevator creates tourist traffic.

You don't even go here, Karen.

Tourists slow the game down because they love public transportation, so if you're trying to build a big city quickly, it's quite literally the opposite of what you want. It slows the simulation down to simulate people who don't even live there. If you're trying to build up the population to beat a scenario or hit an achievement, don't bother with tourists, or the space elevator.

Medical center: Boring

The medical center brings everyone to 100% health.

For the budget conscious, this means that with the Eden Project, you can keep your land value at level five without medical service building bonuses like nearby clinics. So if you have both, you can bulldoze all your clinics and save some money.

Snooze.

Doomsday Vault: That monument you also got because you really wanted the sparkly unicorn park

The hardest part, by far, of getting the Vault is getting the Unicorn Park, which requires you to beat all of the Natural Disasters scenarios, and said Unicorn Park is also why I wrote guides for most of the Disasters scenarios (click my username to read them!).

The doomsday vault increases the capacity of shelters, which are only of benefit if you enjoy playing with disasters running. I recommend that you do, because they make the game a lot more entertaining. Except when a meteor hits a bus hub. Boy is that a nightmare on wheels.

The Four Horsemen of City Death

Various warnings will plague your city all at once. If you've split your city into four mini-cities that each don't go over 80k population, they are all easily dispatched.

Not enough buyers for products

Zone more commercial.

Not enough raw materials

This one can get annoying. The game tells you to make sure outside city connections can deliver imports to the (industrial or office) building, and often times you do just that, only to watch the building still go abandoned.

What it really means is the path for the raw materials takes too long. Think of your industry as ordering bananas shipped in an unrefrigerated banana truck.

Whether it's because the route is too long, or the route is short and has too much traffic, is irrelevant.

What's frustrating about industry is that if there's a path, industry will order goods from potentially anywhere. The four cities model heavily cuts down on this problem, because the industry can only order from ONE external city connection, so it is way easier to diagnose problems, and your industry is all heading in the same direction (and thus not intersecting, and thus not creating traffic).

Fixing the "not enough raw materials" problem is often best solved by literally bulldozing faraway options for industry to order goods from and forcing them to get it from something closer. Sometimes I zoom in on an industrial area that I've planned poorly, and I see trucks disappearing. I think those are rotten bananas.

Not enough goods to sell

The tooltip's suggestion for fixing this is to zone more industrial, which you can do.

But to be honest, this is where I start playing with the policies.

INDUSTRIAL SPACE PLANNING AND BIG BUSINESS BENEFACTOR: The misunderstood policies

In all the guides on policies I've seen, I've yet to see people describe what I use these policies to do, and what I think they were put in the game to do. A lot of places describe industrial space planning as a wasted-do-nothing policy, and the commercial benefactor policy as a free money policy you turn on right away.

I actually leave these policies off, and then use them on an as-needed basis to fix my "not enough goods to sell" and "not enough buyers for products" problems. With an 80k city (or a large city broken up into pieces) these policies are a quick and (far easier) fix. Rather than trying to squeeze in more commercial/industrial, you can just increase commercial purchases, or increase nearby industrial production, *in just one nearby district*, to solve either problem. "Not enough buyers" can be nuked by doubling your commercial sales in some nearby areas. "Not enough goods to sell" can be fixed by doubling a nearby district's industrial production.

As people have pointed out, industrial production can still top out at the number of trucks the building can put on the road (two?) which means that in large cities where everything is connected, this policy won't fix anything, because the industrial buildings are already limited. But where the shipping routes are all small, doubling industrial production is an easy fix.

If you followed the advice above, the district of each mini city is only separated by a couple exits, so these policy fixes actually work.

I find it wonderful in both scenarios (where I have limited terraforming ability) and sandbox (where I'm going for aesthetics and don't want to create hideous zoning just to fix a supply/demand problem).

Not enough workers

The tooltips will tell you if it's because they're not educated enough, but it doesn't give you a heads up that educated people don't like getting jobs in the factories.

Usually people deal with this by not educating everyone.

Farming and ore is especially difficult.

I've noticed that when I connect my mini-cities into one big city, that's when my farming and ore districts die. Everyone in the city is able to get to a school somewhere, everyone gets educated, and everyone quits their lame factory job.

Not enough customers

You really have to screw the pooch to get this error, because your people are literally programmed to go shopping.

It usually happens when you build a huge elegant shopping district before you build up any neighborhoods surrounding it.

Unlike many of the "you done wrong" errors in this game, there is no opposite "not enough commercial to residential" error, which really just means you can overload residential all the time.

Commercial usually means traffic and tourists, which slows your game down, which again for the high pop cities isn't what you're going for.

Industrial trains: Don't bother (usually)

There are entire guides and youtube guides and workshop layouts devoted to making it feasible to use a train network to connect all of your industry and commercial zones.

I'm going to throw a turd in the punchbowl:

Don't.

Train networks for commercial and industrial can service about four stations before they become hopelessly clogged.

The reason is simple: A train departing from Station A will leave with goods for ALL OF THE OTHER STATIONS.

If there's only two or three other stations, this isn't a problem. If there's six stations or (God help you) ten stations, you will end up with a fleet of trains all unloading 7% of their goods at each stop, rendering your train network worthless.

Should you ever use trains?

Yes!

When you create isolated "pods" in the city, that is, commercial areas that are not served, at all, by highways connected to industry, you can render them functional by connecting a train line to them from 1-3 industrial areas.

There are also occasions where trains are a quick and dirty way of connecting a harbor to two or three more industrial areas, providing an import path that doesn't clog your highway. They also level up your industry.

The great failure of most new players in this game is connecting everything--they connect all the neighborhoods to all the other neighborhoods, and all the rail stations to all the other rail stations. Making this possible doesn't serve any purpose and will destroy the city. The game does not simulate any economic benefit for every good and service being able to reach everywhere else on the map. But it will certainly punish you for it!

The main benefit of industrial trains

They are fun to watch.

Residential Trains

Residential train networks, on the other hand, can be built to go everywhere.

If you are building a nine tile city, shaped as a square, there is an obvious pattern of train lines, if you have one station in each tile.

You'll have a NW to SE line, a N to S line, a NE to SW line, and your clockwise and counterclockwise perimeter lines serving the outer tiles (basically a. Generally speaking, nobody will have to pass by more than one station or two to get to their destination.

It's easy to screw up train station lines by creating a wonky network of circular lines, or spaghetti noodle paths where people might pass through three or more stations before they get where they're trying to go.

Residential trains are not like metro lines. There's a reason the train stations have EIGHT platforms. It's so you can run multiple lines through them.

Remember that public transport is optional

Under the four cities model, you can easily skip trains entirely, but you'll probably get bored of that and connecting the four cities with a decent rail network will likely be the first thing you do to join the cities together.

Policies

Everything I've read about policies is wrong.

OK maybe not, but there's a lot of words written about how X policies are good and Y policies are bad, or how the policies are all about adding character (that they definitely do).

But largely, they are a way of correcting mistakes. The reason why a lot of policies *seem* bad, like power management, smoke detectors, increased industrial production, is because in a nice well functioning city in boring flat land they are totally unnecessesary and inefficient. But that's why they're there.

They're there for annoying problems, like when there's not enough room to stick a fire station, and everything keeps burning down (smoke detectors). Or when you are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, you don't have enough money to build another power plant, and the city is having brownouts that threaten abandonment and a death spiral (power management to the rescue!). Or some temporary crisis is lowering land values (high tech housing to the rescue). Or the commercial district is overbuilt and doesn't have enough goods to sell (industrial space planning).

These policies are usually terrible and inefficient, but so are a lot of things in this game. Use them when they're needed, and they're awesome.

[nihilco]

Hi @bustedclutch, looking forward to yout first game! :-D

You can rotate and place service buildings freely in CS2, they don't even necessarily have to connect to a road. However, if the 'connection point' of the building is more than 1 zoning cell length away from a road, it won't get serviced nor will it get water, sewage or power.

There is a default small road, an alley, that you can use 'behind' buildings.

Another frustration of mine in CS1 how often (commercial) buildings would have their lay-out in such a way that cars would have to jump over obstacles to get to a parking spot on their property. That seems to have improved a bit in CS2 too.

[bustedclutch]

@nihilco it is on my wish list, and I intend to visit it, though for now I'm tackling a lifelong goal of learning how to program (and make games). I am curious though--can you freely rotate the buildings, such that the "back" of the building faces the road? That for me was a big frustration, in that a lot of buildings in real life are built around having delivery in the back and customer facing stuff in the front. I kinda wish they'd done a spin off where they allowed for you to "zoom in" on a single tile and develop that with more detail.

[nihilco]

Hi bustedclutch. You should try CS2 😁. Despite all its flaws and the complaining community, it seems that traffic does not congest as badly as in CS1. Buildings do still need to be near a road, but if you turn snapping off, you can have roughly a 1 cell gap between road and building, and angle it a little.

[bustedclutch]

To reply to the last two comments, I remember that a lot of the simulation was funny in that the citizens would all willingly and regularly walk for MILES. And if you gave them a bike path, everyone would take the bike, rain or shine, to the end of the earth.

One of the paradigm shifts that got me back into playing CS not too long ago was to build the pedestrian paths and bike paths first, and then build roads around those features. It's not exactly new or a revolution (New Urbanism has been around since... the urban design trends it ostensibly revives!) but definitely fun. One of the strangest oversights of CS for me was that although it's incredibly pedestrian focused in some ways, all buildings MUST face roads, making it much harder to recreate modern developments where the roads are hidden behind buildings with building facades facing the pedestrian network. I assume this got modded out by someone but I haven't checked recently.

[nihilco]

Anyone here still alive? Just throwing in a new and very insightful 'Tuber called Drakkart. See his recent video titled "How Much Can a Cycling Network IMPACT Traffic Flow in Cities Skylines" here:
https://youtu.be/TiWVxvlJ1ys

[Derpderpderp]

Fine job on the guide. The four cities thing is just shy of genius, the very first thing the game has you do is draw a road and from thereon in this behaviour becomes more and more normalised as time passes. So I joined everything to everything exactly as per your guide...

My only useful conclusions after playing the vanilla (switch) version are;

1 most road types are rubbish (because traffic AI) and do nothing but worsen traffic problems. Highways and two lane roads - nothing else is useful. Four and six lane roads are a red herring, because traffic lights, which are terrible. Manage congestion with one way two lane roads.

2 public transport is mostly beaten by good pedestrian access, with many peds encourage to ride their socialist approved bicycles with the socialist encourage biking policy.

Big game, many red herrings. Good, mixed, zoning is king. Everything else follows.

Anyway, kudos on the guide.

[bustedclutch]

@nihilco thanks for doing this research! That was a theory I had but just with own observation, I never took any steps to test it. Also regarding speed slider, it's after you max out the computer's resources, the game speed doesn't change between 1/2/3. I know for me that I can have like 80,000 people before speed slider becomes irrelevant, and 30,000 if I'm building lots of public transportation and cute bus terminals. I used to keep speed slider installed because it could keep the FPS more smooth if I slowed down the game below 100%, but I got tired of the buttery experience and uninstalled it. Perhaps our children's children will have a city builder that doesn't slow down when the city gets big.

[nihilco]

@vaneyk3 you can install mods for that. They unlock 25 or 81 tiles. You can find them on the Steam workshop.

@RealOfficialTurf in a city of roughly 40.000 cims and with 85% traffic flow (despawn disabled, but with Rebalanced Industries installed), I recently removed all public transport lines, mostly buses. I noticed an fps increase (5-10), and all traffic seemed to drive faster all of a sudden. This speed change could also be because I used to have Speed Slider set to 80% which gave an overall realistic traffic speed, but it seemed to 'disable' the speed controls native to the game, not seeing much difference, if any, between 1, 2, or 3-speed. I recently uninstalled Speed Slider, so that could partly explain it too.

[vaneyk3]

Hey fellow gay bro! very interesting guide you wrote! I am new to this game, and I think I did well since I have built a 122000 city. The question is> How I unlock more tiles now? I NEED them to keep expanding it but after reaching 85K seems it wont unlock any more.....Help!!! grin thx bro!

[RealOfficialTurf]

I think the point of this author of avoiding mass transit is because that it takes more overall time walking into a nearest station, waiting for mass transit to arrive, and walking into the destination, than to simply drive straight into the destination. That's probably why the author just said to avoid mass transit altogether and go with cars instead.