Running a Campus as a Business

Strategies to obtain and keep a profitable campus area, backed by math, with faculties to help the whole city. Requires Campus DLC.

Introduction

This guide discusses a spectrum of optimal strategies for implementing campus areas into a city, from a simple way to make huge profits on one low-cost, dense and scalable campus area, to a more general strategy to reap city-wide benefits from many faculties and museums. We suggest that mayors read the section on varsity sports and each of the three sections about particular strategies, consulting the section of definitions where necessary, to better understand Campus and the principles we employ to maximize profit, and to account for how profit is made.

This guide was not written to be introductory. We recommend mayors read this guide[www.lovecitiesskylines.com] from a third party for an overview of the expansion, and/or try the expansion themselves before acting upon the information herein. Mayors may also watch the Campus tutorial videos with Fluxtrance posted on the Cities: Skylines official YouTube channel.

Accessibility tip for auditory learners: Mayors reading this guide on Steam for Windows can right-click anywhere, and copy the page URL into Microsoft Edge, where it can be read aloud. Mac users can use Safari or VoiceOver for similar accommodations.

DOWNSIDE
Before altering a city, please understand this: a mayor must choose between a profitable campus and profitable business sector. One cannot have both! If a mayor chooses to use our methods geared toward maximum campus profit, the businesses in their city will never recover. Only by offering Universal Education can a mayor enjoy the citywide benefits of operational campus areas while also keeping a thriving business sector. Either tax income or a campus area is enough to sustain an entire city, and the Method to Maximize Magnificence is a walkthrough for unlocking all the buildings which contribute to city wellbeing. Run the Universal Education Policy and let go of campus profitability to keep the city balanced. The city's economy will pay for the campus in increased tax income, so long as taxes are set to a reasonable level and the city is not making ludicrous amounts of money elsewhere, such as by public transit, park areas or industry areas. We further discuss the effects of a profitable campus on the rest of the city in a so-named later section.
This paragraph was added because of a community contribution. Thank you, @caseyas435943, for your feedback.

ATTENTION: This guide has not been updated to account for any balance changes or new content released for Cities: Skylines since late 2020. However, the fundamental principles of assessing a building’s value and potency remain largely as they were. The High-Capacity University building introduced with Plazas & Promenades provides the highest capacity of tertiary education for its upkeep cost short of the Hadron Collider monument, but its centralized location — 10,000 students in one building — will require a robust transit network, dense residential surroundings, and/or a high-capacity road system to be fully utilized. We would only recommend mayors place this building after building and filling a vanilla University to over 90% of its 4500 student capacity, which is unlikely to happen at a population under 60,000.

Definitions

Academic year: a 40-week period tracked in the campus area info panel.
Acclaimed: Rep 4.
Administration Building: One of three unique buildings which must be placed to assign a campus area to a type -- Trade School, Liberal Arts College or University.
Campus: [When not followed by "area"] refers to the Campus DLC/expansion and its contents.
Campus area: An area of a city, with boundaries defined by the Paint Campus Area tool under the Districts and Special Areas menu, which requires one administration building to operate -- either the administration building of a Trade School, Liberal Arts College, or University.
Cim: A citizen or tourist in a city.
Colossal Order (CO): The developer of Cities: Skylines.
Efficacy: Strength, effectiveness, potency. (Of a museum) boost to city attractiveness and tourist count. (Of a faculty) power of miscellaneous citywide boost. (Of a campus area) money earned per student, minus campus upkeep and damage to tax income
Faculty: [when not preceded by HTB] One of nine unique buildings which are unlocked by defining and growing a campus area. At maximum reputation, each campus area unlocks three faculties which can only be placed or operate in the campus area which unlocks them
HTB Faculty: The faculty building from the High Tech Buildings DLC.
k: thousand, or *10^3, or *1,000.
Liberal Arts College: The second type of campus, containing the faculties of School of Education (unlocked at Reputation level 1), School of Environmental Studies (Rep 3), and School of Economics (Rep 5).
Money [₡]: The currency in Cities: Skylines -- it would be incorrect to say dollars. The symbol ₡ is borrowed from the Costa Rican Colon.
Prestigious: Rep 5.
Prize pot: The money awarded for winning a match in football, or in a varsity sports arena operating off-campus. For on-campus winnings, see "Trophy"
Recognized: Rep 2.
Renowned: Rep 3.
Reputation (Rep): The metric of a campus area which determines how much tuition students pay to attend if the administration building is operating and the Universal Education campus policy is disabled.
Scalable: Effective at high city populations.
Tertiary: Third. Tertiary education means college/university education.
Tooltip: The pane which appears above a building or network in the build menu when the mayor is hovering over that building/network with their mouse (PC) or has navigated to it with their controller (console).
Trade School: The first type of campus area, unlocked first, with cheapest buildings. Faculties are the Police Academy (Rep 1), School of Tourism and Travel (Rep 3), and School of Engineering (Rep 5).
Trophy: A prize awarded to a varsity sports team which plays home games on-campus at the end of the academic year if that team won more games than it lost. Trophies include a cash prize given to the campus and a campus attractiveness bonus which lingers for two academic years after the trophy is awarded.
University [when not preceded by "vanilla"]: the third type of campus area, last to unlock and most expensive. Faculties are the School of Law, School of Medicine, and School of Science
Unrecognized: Rep 1.
Vanilla University: The (single building) University in the left-most Education tab.

Preparing the City

Make a plan for what sort of campus area to design, then turn off or delete all stadiums, vanilla Universities, HTB Faculties, Modern Technology Institutes, and custom assets which offer tertiary education. Public libraries can also go, since they will siphon tuition fees from cims lucky enough to become highly educated. The argument for keeping libraries is that visiting citizens who are too old for elementary or high school have a chance to become well educated and decide to attend university, but it is more likely with the Education Boost policy implemented that tuition revenue will drop with public libraries operating, unless mayors run the Dropouts mod. This is done so that campus areas do not have to compete for students with other institutions of higher learning, and likewise so the optional Aquatics Center does not compete for playtime with other stadiums.

For cities operating with blimp transport (Mass Transit DLC), the Education Blimps policy should be off citywide. The policy makes cims graduate faster from all education institutions as a function of how many blimps are in the sky. Faster graduation means overall less tuition revenue.

All Campus buildings should be placed on roads with fire engine access for fire safety, since the game does not allow fire engines to travel on pedestrian paths. There are two alternatives. First, with the Natural Disasters DLC, a fire helicopter depot building placed nearby along with a water source (lake or river) is usually enough to stop buildings placed on pathways from burning to the ground. However, the helicopter depot's enormous upkeep cost makes it unappealing unless mayors are also choosing to run park areas nearby with off-road attractions, at which point the depot can pull double duty. The other option we condone is to use a mod to disable fires. It is fair if mayors maintain a firefighter presence in the city because it reduces the agent count of fire engines actively operating and stops the burning of buildings on pedestrian pathways without forcing mayors to resort to expensive aerial firefighting behind the paywall of the Natural Disasters DLC.

For-Profit Education, and the Effects of a Successful Campus on Tax Income

We generally use the For-Profit Education city policy throughout our cities. In our tests, this policy reduced education building upkeep, including Campus upkeep, by 50% of the base upkeep. That is, the upkeep effects of Education Boost and For-Profit Education are calculated separate from one-another. Education Boost increases the costs of all education buildings by 25%, and running both policies in tandem will result in education buildings costing 75% of base. Faculties also operating with Visiting Scholars cost 75% * 1.25, or slightly less than 100% of base cost. The downside to the For-Profit Education policy is a relative 10% drop in residential happiness (e.g. from 70% to 63%), which also hurts tourism. The knock-on effects of running policies which hurt happiness are difficult to evaluate. If mayors can provide additional insights, we encourage them to write us.

On a higher level, simply making significant amounts of money with ultra-successful special areas, including campus areas, will crush city tax income down to 1/4 of default. This mechanic is well-hidden and took several playthroughs and multiple sources to uncover. Please observe the plots of city population, city budget (expenses) and taxation over time. The first takes place in a small city without a campus area, while the second takes place in a similarly designed, larger city with a campus area. For these images, the fluctuating orange line represents taxation (tax income), while the puce line represents population. Consider that without a campus area taxation scales with, and stays far above, population.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1299801398647562504/F1840E94C8A957CB3A2C098124C1D41085484C46/?imw=256&&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

And with a campus area...
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1299801398647561479/CFB662DE08AD9D43F4C446CB8007A5D5F021DFA2/?imw=256&&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

This is not to say that creating a successful campus area is pointless. To the contrary, tax income per capita, most notably commercial income, shrinks as cities grow, since the agent system has fewer and fewer trips to distribute per building. Meanwhile, every cim enrolled pays the same tuition, so a city full of sub-campuses where a campus building is near to every residence scales better than a city relying on tax income alone. If city income were included on the graphs above, it would be evident that a city with a profitable campus makes more money than a city without one. To put numbers to them, the city without a campus area had income fluctuating between ₡15k and ₡25k higher than expenses, while the city with an optimized, low-cost campus area, despite the lack of tax income, had ₡25k to ₡50k income per week higher than expenses, and also had an aquatics center which counted toward the expenses but whose income, delivered only 48 weeks, was not included in weekly income. That is to say, the numbers look better when a city has a campus area making money, and the numbers are better than they look, though notably creating a profitable city does not necessitate a campus area, nor a stadium, at reasonable populations. We have not tested and cannot claim that a profitable campus area scales well to city populations over 300k using mods to spread over more than nine tiles. Beyond that size, tax income is the most understood and reliable income source, and profitable campus areas will hamper that income. Mayors who test whether the enormous tuition fees of a Rep 5 campus scale relatively well with population when the campus is distributed throughout the city such the trip a cim would need to make to the nearest campus building is short, should write us to share their findings. We will also conduct similar tests in the coming weeks, subject to our availability.

School of Tourism and Travel, and other faculties which increase tax income
The School of Tourism and Travel is a unique faculty from the Trade School tab, and thus requires a trade school to operate. Operating the building significantly increases commercial tax income in a vacuum, but remember: if operating a highly profitable campus area, taxation suffers across the board. For this reason, we recommend faculties which increase tax income (primarily the School of Tourism and Travel as it has the largest effect, but also the School of Engineering, School of Economics and School of Science) only when playing with the Universal Education campus area policy and without other profitable special areas (park areas which charge admission, campus areas which charge tuition, or any industry areas). Even profitable public transport hurts tax income to some degree, so we recommend mayors test the long-term effects of free public transport in cities with these faculties. Income for all areas affected by faculties is dependent on agent trips, so the shortest possible distance between customer/buyer and seller is ideal for seller tax income. Also, expect some income falloff per capita at high populations as the simulation runs out of agents. In summary, mayors must choose between huge tuition revenue and sustainable tax income; faculties do not make for both. At high populations (213k+), however, faculties probably pay for themselves in increased tax income, just from the sheer number of zoned buildings they boost. Mayors should simply understand that income-boosting faculties are way less effective when non-tax city income is plentiful than when it is zero. The prize pot for matches won in city stadiums and varsity sports arenas built outside of campus areas is the only income source which appears not to diminish tax income, since it is not reported by the Economy Panel as relatively high income for the week when the match winner is determined.

UPDATE: In extreme cases, a profitable campus can cause commercial buildings to become abandoned due to lack of sales. Thanks to a community member, caseyas435943, for this insight. We cannot yet comment on whether industrial buildings are also at risk of abandonment, but once again, mayors whom this problem impacts need only declare Universal Education for the problem to be reversed.

Master Table: Every Campus Building and its Powers

This section is under construction while we finalize it and translate it from its original format to BBCode or imagery. Mayors willing and able to lend their expertise and/or time in this endeavor are encouraged to write us. For now, please see our draft on this external site[1drv.ms].

This section is not required reading. Its purpose is to provide mathematical justifications for the building choices in later strategy sections.

Campus Attractiveness

In the Parklife expansion, placing multiple instances of the same building in the same park area will yield diminishing returns in area attractiveness, and therefore it is best (for attractiveness) for park areas to have diversity of buildings, starting with those buildings offering more attractiveness for the same upkeep money, and those buildings offering a lot of attractiveness in general, since a single instance will be more attractive without loss. For example, the first Park Chess Board might increase park area attractiveness by 50, while the second does so by 40 more and the third by 33 more. This is part of why BloodyPenguin's Parkify mod is not built into the base game: some of the parks (the dog park for example) are as good as the park area attractions unlocked at high park area levels and offer mayors diversity in what to build, so the vanilla parks make park area level progression too easy.
Campus areas operate differently. We sent a message to Colossal Order many months ago to argue the balancing of this expansion, but they held firm. Each Campus building increases campus attractiveness by a set amount, not stated on that building's tooltip. Only varsity sports are variable, based on wins minus losses. The table has details on every trade school building and every faculty from each type of campus area, but each type of campus has equivalent buildings with two exceptions. Every unique faculty has a different effect, and trade school buildings are the cheapest. Roughly, Liberal Arts College buildings cost 33% more and University buildings cost 73% more. In each type of campus area, a club is unlocked at Rep 1. This is the best club for that campus area since it offers the same amount of campus attractiveness as the clubs unlocked later while costing less. Every club increases campus attractiveness by 75, so 24 of them increase campus attractiveness by 1,800. There is no diminishing return for placing multiple instances of the same building. Thus the calculation to optimize campus attractiveness is simply finding the cheapest way to reach the desired attractiveness (generally 1,800), while also fulfilling other campus needs. Any campus attractiveness over 1,800 has no benefit.

Strat: "Tunnel Vision" Trade School Tactic

Paint a campus area, place the Trade School Administration Building inside, and rename the campus area to "Tunnel Vision Trade School". This strategy was crafted to squeeze every last tuition dollar out of students while providing them with nothing they can use to better their city. Why? Because the effects of providing students with quality tertiary education are difficult to quantify! And "if you believe in things that you don't understand, then you'll suffer" --Stevie Wonder.
The result of this strategy is ₡21/week tuition per student with minimal campus upkeep, and not much else. That means that 2,000 students, a comfortable number in a city of 30k, generate ₡42,000/week in income while costing as little as ₡1,192/week before policies. Better yet, for every 400 citizens eligible for tertiary education in the city over the first 2,000, a single, ₡200/week building can make ₡8,400/week more. That means 4,000 students make ₡84,000/week while costing ₡2,192/week before policies. Excited yet?

On roads with fire engine access within the trade school area painted earlier, build 24 book clubs and 5 study halls, then give a research grant every year until 16 academic works are generated. Make sure students can get to the campus through local transport. After several academic years, the campus area will level up to Renowned (Rep 5), and every student will pay ₡21/week tuition. Now mayors have a couple of options.

Option 1: do nothing. Add more study halls to keep university availability at about 10% of the city population, more than the city technically needs. If the campus area reaches 1,875 attractiveness or higher, delete one book club. If it runs out of space, replace every three study halls with two auditoriums. These buildings have almost the same student capacity for the money while being much more space-efficient.

Option 2: replace the 24 book clubs with 18 academic statues in residential and commercial neighborhoods, and trade the student capacity bonus of book clubs for the land value bonus of statues. Every time the campus reaches 1900 attractiveness or higher from adding housing, delete one statue. Deleted statues can be replaced with a 5x5 park or plaza to maintain the land value boost if buildings threaten to abandon.

Option the last: exploit a glitch in 1.13.1 f1 Sunset Harbor to reduce upkeep costs even further. Think of this option as creating a marketing campaign over years of offering a great service, and then cancelling that service. In the real world, it would take some time for customers to egress, and if the offending business were a monopoly, customers could not leave. [EXPLOIT REDACTED] It is by this exploit that mayors can achieve the minuscule base upkeep discussed above. Without the exploit, add ₡4,032/week upkeep for 18 instances of Trade School Academic Statue 2, or ₡4,608 for 24 instances of Book Club, where mayors choose student capacity over land value and decreased upkeep.

Strat: "Arts Amplification" Approach

This is our favorite strategy! It takes advantage of the veiled, but not entirely hidden, stat that the faculty called School of Education boosts the student capacity of all education buildings. Yes, all. That means itself, other campus buildings, universities, high schools and elementary schools. With the faculty running, each building's student capacity is boosted by 33% (or 42% with Visiting Scholars!). Mayors can place this faculty as soon as they paint a Liberal Arts campus area and build an administration building inside. Mayors should next build 24 Drama Clubs to affordably ensure they have the 1800 campus attractiveness required to reach Rep 5. Apply Visiting Scholars when it unlocks and, upon reaching Rep 5, replace 16 of the Drama Clubs with 12 instances of Academic Statue 2 in zoned, land value-sensitive areas (residential or commercial neighborhoods), or use the exploit (outlined in a different strategy) to end the need to maintain attractiveness altogether and replace all instances of Drama Club and Academic Statue II with a single, solitary, Liberal Arts Dormitory. With visiting Scholars, the administration building, one dormitory and the School of Education are all a Liberal Arts campus area needs to host 1800 students (requirement for Rep 5).

But aren't Liberal Arts campus areas more expensive to run than trade schools?
Yes. Each Liberal Arts Campus building has a base upkeep cost 33% higher than its Trade School counterpart. Thus, to save on upkeep, it makes sense in cities of over 60k cims, where university students constantly number over 3,600, to open a trade school alongside, and try to keep both campus areas at Rep 5. Remember: the School of Education boosts the student capacity of every Trade School building, too! How much tuition students pay has a far greater impact on mayors' income than the difference in upkeep cost between one type of campus area and another. Also, if a mayor is unwilling or unable to erase upkeep related to maintaining campus attractiveness, then these costs, as well as the costs to maintain two administration buildings, compound. Therefore, if mayors are not in a hurry to build a Trade School faculty such as the School of Tourism and Travel, or to unlock The Technology Museum and produce all 48 Trade School academic works, we recommend running only a Liberal Arts campus area until reaching a city population of 120k, and there is not much harm in running only a Liberal Arts campus area, period.

Why this strategy?
This strategy is overall more scalable than the Tunnel Vision Trade School Tactic because of the boost in student capacity and operating efficiency to all education buildings. After building the School of Education and funding Visiting Scholars, all elementary schools and high schools get a 42% student capacity boost and city average land value is increased (perhaps as a function of these buildings' effective service radius being increased, though their service radius does not change on the education view from the sidebar). Therefore, mayors need run significantly fewer education buildings at every level, reducing overall education upkeep costs without making education inaccessible. Educating all citizens is considered a best practice in Cities: Skylines because better education has significant positive effects on every cim. Cims are more comfortable living in close quarters, increasing the maximum population achievable in a given amount of space. Better-educated cims produce less waste, lowering overall necessary garbage expenses. Highly educated cims can work any job, whereas others can work only up to their level of education. Therefore, having a large uneducated adult population can make it difficult for commercial, office, and even upgraded industry buildings or industry buildings covered by the Industry 4.0 policy, to find qualified workers. Finally, and most importantly to this guide, mayors must provide primary and secondary education to make the majority of their citizens eligible for tertiary education, which is how the city makes a large part of its income -- far more if done right than the combined cost to maintain all education buildings.

Strat: Method to Maximize Magnificence

This method is designed for mayors seeking to unlock all faculties and museums, build them, and use them to greatest effect. The business sense in using campus areas this way is in creating a city which is very attractive to tourists without the expense of a multitude of unique buildings, parks, or park areas. Mayors may also wish to use this method to unlock all Campus buildings so that as their city grows they can utilize the faculties which grow in strength in tandem. This strategy works best with a city population of at least 30k, and will only work if the city musters 1800 university students at the end of an academic year. Mayors wishing to break free from standard campus building strategies by operating with unlimited money or making money elsewhere can employ this strategy to unlock every Campus building.

Paint a campus area, and construct the Trade School Administration Building, the Police Academy, and 24 instances of Book Club. Fund the research grant every academic year. Turn off "Hide Academic Year Reports" in Settings > Gameplay so the game will pause to acknowledge the end of every academic year. If the city can afford to take a loss on the campus for a while, hire all academic staff. Disable all other Campus buildings and buildings of tertiary education so that the city's student body will slowly migrate to the Trade School. With a sufficient student population, the bottleneck to reaching higher Reputation will be academic works. Upon reaching Rep 3, build the School of Tourism and Travel, Rep 4: four instances of Trade School Laboratories, and Rep 5: The School of Engineering and (Museums Tab) The Technology Museum. Then continue to operate the campus until reaching 48 academic works to maximize the efficacy of the museum. Upon reaching 48 academic works, demolish the laboratories, fire the academic staff, disable all Campus buildings, then rinse and repeat with the other campus areas, and their respective clubs, faculties and museums.

This strategy will grant the "Academic Scholar" achievement, and will provide mayors with access to all three museums at maximum efficacy. Mayors wishing to experiment with the citywide powerups granted by running a particular faculty will have all faculties available, but should note that running all faculties across all campus areas only starts to make sense in cities which can sustain nearly 13,000 students at any given time (9 faculties * 1,000 students each * 1.33 or 1.42 from the student capacity boost granted by the School of Education without or with Visiting Scholars applied on the Liberal Arts Campus Area respectively), that is cities with at least 213k citizens. In cities with significantly lower university student populations or where non-Campus buildings of tertiary education are operating, it will be impossible to maintain Rep 5 in all campus areas and therefore to maintain maximum tuition revenue because students in one campus area or another will drop below 1,800. The larger a city, the more (most) faculties will pay for themselves in citywide perks.

Varsity Sports

There are two ways to operate a varsity sports arena: inside or outside a campus area. When outside a campus area, varsity sports arenas operate the same as the football stadium, wherein one home game is held in the city about every 11 months, regardless of the number of stadiums, and that home game generates ticket sales. If won, the home game rewards an enormous sum of money proportional to city population. When inside a campus area, the reward pot is forfeited in favor of season trophies which are given based on the mode outcome of home and away games over a 40-week academic year. Trophies earn the campus ₡30,000 the year they are earned -- nowhere near the winning pot for city stadiums and off-campus arenas -- and also boost campus attractiveness by 30 for the following two academic years (80 weeks). On-campus varsity sports arenas do not compete with city stadiums for playtime, but off-campus arenas certainly do, so placing multiple stadiums and off-campus arenas does not make for more matches. We believe Colossal Order intentionally crafted the cooldown between city games to allow cims to enjoy normal lives around match day, as well as to limit the rate at which the prize is awarded.

Varsity sports arenas on-campus each have one home game every 11 months, which is slightly less than one per academic year. Having two arenas on campus, even two for the same sport, will mean more home games, though at the cost of ₡3,000-₡4,000/week per stadium, -8% if mayors make Sponsorship Deals, plus cheerleaders (up to ₡500/week), plus subsidized youth (₡9,000/week if funded), plus Fan Club Support (₡180 per on-campus arena per week if funded), plus Advertisement Campaign (₡200 per on-campus arena per week if funded). Adding all these strains to the city budget seems to increase city tax income, particularly residential, to partially meet the cost -- cims like sports, too. This conclusion was reached while testing with Universal Education, a campus area policy we recommend if campus areas are not producing satisfactory income or cost too much and if there are no other money-making special areas in the city. The policy will reverse the suppression of tax income caused by having a profitable campus as cims feel they are being offered more valuable city services for free. Think Ireland. With Universal Education, the more a mayor invests per week in their campus, the more cims appear to reciprocate with increased tax income. Universal Education may therefore be the only way to keep a thriving campus beyond a certain population (pending further testing) because number of agent trips should not matter.

Campus attractiveness gained is a base 80 per hosted sport (two aquatics centers give 80, but an aquatics center and a basketball arena together grant 160), +5 for every win that year, -5 for every loss that year, + up to 25 for cheerleading, a flat rate not dependent on number of arenas, even though the upkeep cost of cheerleaders is dependent, + 30 for two years per trophy. Hosting two sports mean up to two trophies can be earned in a year and up to four trophies can be active at a time.

When placed inside a campus area, varsity sports arenas are expensive, produce an unreliable amount of attractiveness, make noise, attract traffic, and fail to pay for themselves. In other words, they are a bad investment. However, when placed outside all campus areas, most varsity sports arenas are cheaper to run than the Football Stadium, while matching its value. Consider placing one Aquatics Center in cities without Stadiums or other varsity sports arenas. Costing ₡3,000/week and creating a bubble of noise pollution, this building will attract citizens and tourists every 48 weeks to a public swim meet. Click the Aquatics Center and drag the ticket price slider all the way to the left to charge ₡20 per ticket. This price will encourage more citizens to turn out to cheer for the local swim team, increasing the odds of victory. Ticket sales will account for ~₡23,000 every 48 weeks, and victory will account for ₡100,000 + ₡20,000 for every 10,000 cims in the city over 10,000, rounded down. Together, though the income will be irregular and won't often show in the bottom bar or budget panel, this building will usually pay for itself at a population of 30,000 and will make more and more money as the city grows. Place the Aquatics Center on a quiet road near an arterial, outside all campus areas but near regional transport (metro, monorail, or local train). When the arena operates normally, mayors may notice a spike in reported commercial income for one week out of 48 as this is how ticket sales are counted. The prize pot is not not reported at all.

When outside a campus area, a Varsity Sports arena is considered a city stadium. As such, it is important that it not compete with other city stadiums for game-time. A game will only be played in the city every 11 months no matter the number of stadiums in the city, so winnings will not grow with more stadiums but upkeep cost will. Further, a city stadium is only attractive to tourists around game time, so having multiple stadiums will never increase city attractiveness or tourist visits. For these reasons, we suggest mayors do not run multiple stadiums in their cities at the same time.

If mayors ignore our primary advice and choose to operate some varsity sports on-campus, we recommend seeking a balance of auxiliary costs to the stadiums themselves, such that nearly every academic year, the campus teams win slightly more than they lose. Beyond that, pounding regional teams further into the dirt provides only a tiny benefit to attractiveness worth about ₡20/week in building upkeep evaded per victory. Home games are easier victories than away games, since cims turn out on mass to cheer. Since ticket sales account for only about ₡500 per week per arena for income, setting the ticket price to ₡20 is an acceptable choice to gain more adoring fans for home games (for off-campus arenas, low ticket prices are highly recommended). Cheerleaders can capitalize on that enthusiasm to sway home games even further in the team's favor. Away games are believed to have a base chance of winning of 30%. Ticket prices, Subsidized Youth, Advertisement Campaign, Come One, Come All, and Cheerleading staff are not believed to influence the odds of victory for away games, but Fan Club Support and Coaching Staff do. Coaching Staff cost more on their own than the combined effects of two moderately successful varsity sports teams on a single campus justify, but coaches cost no more with five different sports than with one sport, making coaches more appealing on campuses where many different sports coexist. Having more home games by placing multiple instances of the same arena is cheaper than Coaching Staff if focused on a single sport, but by focusing on a single sport, mayors lose the attractiveness bonus and potential for trophies of multiple sports. If operating with multiple on-campus arenas, consider spacing the arenas apart and providing regional transport to each (metro, monorail, tram or train), to dilute traffic. This is also a good excuse to bring a campus area to under-served parts of the city.

Final Thoughts and Further Reading

This guide presented a spectrum of strategies for mayors to design viable, profitable campus areas, ranging from a simple way to make a minimalist campus which prints money, to a master plan with three pinnacles of city-wide academic achievement and several faculties which provide excellent boosts in large cities. We hope that mayors will use this guide not as a cookie-cutter model for what steps to take, but as a broad revelation of how they can design campus areas for their own needs, investing in the buildings, grants and policies which will most directly assist their campus in achieving its goals.

This is the first published, written, English, community-made guide focused on the Campus DLC, not counting this excellent, lovingly written and illustrated guide[www.lovecitiesskylines.com] (no affiliation). The Let's Players sharing their strategies about this game on YouTube have not (as of June, 2020) taken the time to analyze what each building does and how it works, with the possible exception of Fluxtrance, who collaborated with Paradox Interactive to release a series of digestible, high-level video tutorials on the Cities: Skylines Official YouTube Channel before the expansion's release. It is because of the dearth of specific information on buildings and optimal strategies that we have created this guide.

We have chosen to highlight the following other guides for mayors desiring to make more money with specialized areas. Making large amounts of money with specialized areas will reduce tax income by up to 75%, and money-making in industry and park areas do not scale well with high city population. In fact, parks and industry areas which are healthy assets at lower populations will become liabilities at high populations because income is based on agent trips and the game cannot run enough of them.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1714242453
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1613881394
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1724763688

Mayors intending to amend this guide are encouraged to share their thoughts below. We regularly review comments and take all reasonable measures to ensure that the guide is accurate, precise, and compliant with its purpose. We are particularly interested in mayors' experiences with the undocumented effects of campus buildings and faculties.

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[Pwner’s Manual]

@caseyas435943 Thank you for writing us. We would be happy to add your comment to the introduction. We will cite you by username unless you tell us you'd prefer to remain anonymous.

[caseyas435943]

This is all true. I set the way you said and I was making 300K a week. But it killed businesses. They were starved for workers and were closing up shop.

You might want to add in a huge downside to this. You'll lose a ton of business. You'll have huge areas of empty builds you'll be to bulldoze.

I don't really see the point in it really. Money rains out of the sky in this game. Once you hit 10K in pop money never stops coming in. My present city is almost 40 million to the good. I can't spend it as fast as I make it.

Make more money in CS why? Money doesn't matter in the least.

Great guild thou. It work just as you said.

[Nakimato]

good one

[Fallove]

thx

[七酱]

get

[Bat]

omega goat