Cheesing the Floodlands scenario, AKA How to beat floodlands in Cities Skylines

Considered the hardest scenario in the conquest to obtain the Sparkly Unicorn Park, this scenario doesn't need to be hard at all with a little bit of... cheese!

An introduction

The first time I tried Floodlands was kind of a disaster, and when I first beat it, the water was lapping at the base of my citizens' homes and I was a few dollars above bankruptcy.

For the sake of writing this guide, I played the first tile again (so I could take screenshots) and escaped the first tile with a lot of time to spare. How?

The same way in my other Cities Skylines guides: Through cheese. Although Floodlands kinda forces you into it.

Build your road framework and water system

Pause the game when it starts and while you do this, of course.

Pretty important thing number one: Use dirt roads!

You know what isn't in your budget? Decent roads. Use dirt ones. The option to lay down a dirt road doesn't appear until you lay down a single small bit of regular road, but after that, lay down a dirt grid.

Power and water

Stick a water tower in the middle of where your residential zoning will be.

"But the residents don't like the noise!"

Well before they get sick of the noise, they'll be in a watery grave. Stick the water town in the middle of the residential district.

"But why?"

WE'RE GETTING THERE I PROMISE JUST DO IT JESUS CHRIST

Stick the sewer kinda in the middle of the map, see the screenshots. It'll drain downhill toward the basin. Sewer outlets don't actually need shorelines, they can dump anywhere you want. Which is what you want here--money spent running a water pipe to the other side of the map is wasted.

Keep the game paused.

Now for the cheese

It's all about power

Zoom in on the screenshot below to see how I've zone everything.

But more importantly, look at how I've run powerlines to criss-cross the road network and get power to everything in the residential zone.

When there's only one place that has power, building is very slow, and will usually start at one point, and slowly grow outward from that point. When you run power lines aplenty, houses spring up everywhere, like this:



As you can see, the added power lines causes tons of houses to pop in at once.

Before you unpause to run the game, slash your budget

Don't forget to turn power and water down to 50% before you start day 1 of the game. This will save you gobs of money. Push the budget up when power and water run low around 700 people.

Getting to the second milestone

Once you hit the 480 mark, three buildings unlock:

• Landfill
  
• Medical clinic
  
• Elementary school

For residential, medical clinics and elementary schools are basically "happiness bombs". People move into the places next to them even quicker than they do to tiles that already have power and water.

Thus, stick one of each in a place that hasn't seen enough development yet. When I played, the side on my right was looking a little sparse, so I threw in the most reliable happiness bomb, the elementary school.

The neighborhood on the left was pretty developed but had an empty patch, so I stuck a medical clinic there. I also tossed in a road by the elementary school just to connect up the two parallel roads, because all of the illuminated green sections of roadway I think are desirable for new residents.

Things to avoid

The reason Floodlands seems hard is because it requires you to play against what normally makes sense. Normally, you stick the medical clinic and elementary school in the middle of the map. You put the water tower away from the homes. This is efficient and reduces noise complaints.

But in a race to get the population to the 950 mark, those things don't make sense anymore. Instead, you exploit the game mechanic that causes residents to build homes that already have existing power or are close to an existing service building.

Subsequent tiles

The next tile plays very similarly to the first, and is much easier, so it doesn't need a guide. The moment terrain modification becomes available (which is shortly after you acquire the second tile) you can see very easily where the highest ground is.

Use the infopanel terrain view!

The infopanel terrain view will let you see, at a glance, where all the high ground is. Keep it on while you build a road network top down.

Build your subsequent stuff on the high ground, and bulldoze everything that floods so you aren't paying maintenance on it.

You eventually get the ability to terraform, but this is really just a waste of time. Focus on growing the city into the third tile, which has more than enough high ground to finish the scenario.

If you are having trouble building up a city population fast, it is because you are providing too many services. Elementary schools, high schools, and bus routes are cheap and can bring an entire map's residential level up to three (along with a few cheap parks). Treat the remaining services as things to provide at a bare minimum, and you'll be flush with enough cash to zone more jobs and more residences.

Ignore traffic concerns

The game is over before the city becomes big enough to have traffic problems, so your road system can be as stupid as you want, in favor of building on the high ground.

Conclusion

I do check the comments if you have questions, and if this is part of your larger journey toward the best monument in the game, the sparkly unicorn park, then check out my other guides on how to cheese the other disaster scenarios. Thanks!

[Zomein102]

doesnt work because the water goes up too fast or mabye it worked before and is broken now

[bustedclutch]

3/3
You can save scrub it a little bit when it comes time to place the elementary school--there seems to be quite a bit of chance in terms of the impact of the elementary school, and what location is best--I would save it again at the population level where the school unlocks, and experiment with a couple different placements for the school and perhaps the clinic (or try not placing one, etc.).

It's pretty normal to give this one five to ten shots before getting the magic right. But as I said earlier, challenges in older games are not guaranteed to work, and if you're fifteen tries in and it's just annoying, I wouldn't be above downloading some slightly cheaper assets online. Good luck and if anything works please post what you found!

[bustedclutch]

2/3

You can also reduce the road maintenance budget to zero--I never quite figured out whether that actually did anything, (as in, I'm not sure if the road maintenance budget affects anything besides the specific road maintenance buildings that are unlocked later on) but maybe you or someone in the comments can confirm.

I did very slowly eke up my water and sewer budget as people moved in, basically to keep it just functional. I started it at fifty percent and slowly pushed the slider upward.

One more tip would be to place the sewer outlet so close in that it's part of the city (though not overlapping with the water tower). I believe the sewer outlet, like the water tower, is treated as an "electrified object" and attracts new residents (even though it's something they'll immediately complain about living next to). This should give you at least two "electrified blocks" on your grid.

[bustedclutch]

@kittyfluff82 Keeping the game paused, I would build a smaller version of what's depicted in the guide, save it, create a slightly larger version, save that, and then run both to see if either one works better. Because the challenge is essentially a cash crisis, you're looking for a weird sweet spot in terms of dirt road volume. A better guide might have actually measured out precisely how much dirt road to put down.

The game has been updated a number of times since this guide came out, so who knows whether the exact same method works (I've seen challenges in other games break completely--Borderlands Presequel became softlocked for me and many others after a physics change). I know since the guide was published that different, and perhaps cheaper, roads were patched into the game. I think they also added an alternative to the water tower. My second thought would be to experiment with the alternative new tiny roads to see if any of them bring in more people for less dollars[...]

[KittyFluff82]

I got up to 700 people and then whoosh! It's all over. That, and I can't slash my budget, because there's not enough water and the sewage system doesn't work after slashing the budget.

[bustedclutch]

I'm glad it was helpful Grangee!

[Grangee]

This worked great! It took some trial and error, saving often and reverting when things went wrong (I think some RNG is involved in the spawning of buildings), but it was a great framework to start with. Thanks!

[Erimos83]

Haven't gotten this to work for me yet, but this is easily the funniest guide I've ever seen, and I love it, great job.

[JP]

Maybe this did work in past but water goes up so fast that even first milestone don't trigger. How am i supposed to fit thousands of people on one tiny street in 1/64 of tile corner without highway connection?

[Ritsuka]

Does not work