OS X cities skylines idiots guide

[madeirabhoy]

figuring this should be like sim city but not getting to grips with it, despite the help.

so i have a grid, and theres a wee bit of water in the bottom corner.

i stick in a road, in a straight line. no matter how long a road i do, it always says 'too short' but puts it in anyway.

and i stick some residential zones in. these seem to be very narrow, is this always the case? if so my city will be more tarmac than anything

and they ask for water, i stick in the water pump, and the water drainage. does the piping have to go in one big circuit? can it cross over? does it need to go under every building or just to the start of them?

and same with electricity.



forgive me if that seems a bit daft, i only played with it for 10 mins and gave up.

 

[UniDoubleU]

This game actually plays a lot differently from the Sim City series. There's more focus on the macro side of your city and your main issue will be traffic and sustainable expansions. Grids don't usually work that well in this game, remember that in real life there's a term "grid-lock", you have almost 100 sq.km. to work with so there's no need to cramped everything together, plus there's more congestion that way anyway. As for water, you need both water pump and sewage, but make sure that the sewage is downstream so your pump won't suck up polluted water and kill your "cims". Your water pipes need to connect to both pumps and sewage, the rest you can make into any shape as long as it covers all buildings under the blue glow i.e. coverage. The pipes carry both sewage and water. As for electricity buildings close together can allow electricity to pass between them, make sure that the wind turbines is connected to those "groups" with electric towers. Residential zones shouldn't be that narrow, I guess your roads might be too close to each other not allowing bigger houses to be build.

Anyway I'm no expert, having "only" played 75 hours lol. There's already quite a few people with over 200 hours. I recommend these excellent guides.

Great starting guide by a Reddit user - vol 1-4 with grid based city - personally this one is probably the best guide for you.
Vol. 1: http://imgur.com/a/LuzAc
Lastest is Vol. 4: http://imgur.com/a/0UKPe

SimNation's series of guides: http://simnation.tv/citiesskylines/guides/cities-skylines-guide-for-existing-city-builder-players/

Excellent in-depth guide to traffic by a traffic engineer: http://imgur.com/a/z1rM1

Have fun!

Feel free to add me up on Steam: bloody_ewe

 

[madeirabhoy]

cheers much appreciated

 

[winged0ne]

The guides that UniDoubleU linked are really good. Also be sure to checkout the subreddit http://www.reddit.com/r/citiesskylines

It takes a bit of time to learn the game. I built about 10 cities, spending about 1-2 hours on each, and then scrapping them to finally build a layout that works well.

 

[Huntn]

Hey, Cities:Skylines is on sale at Steam for a while longer, I just purchased. Nice looking game, very close to Sim city (which I played a lot) however I'm noticing it's quite difficult to get a stable city going that not drowning in debt. Twice after taking a loan, I've resorted to turning money on. Thoughts? Note I'm playing this on PC. Thanks!

 

[maflynn]

I picked this up for giggles, it has a decent learning curve and I am struggling a bit. I found some videos that helped me get going (I'm at a population of 500). I'll continue to research and delve into tutorials and suggestions

I'm still wondering if SimCity 4 (not the 2013 game) may be better for my play style.

 

[maflynn]

I have about 5 hours into the game at this point, I also started and restarted a number of cities. I'm fairly happy with my latest incarnation and I think I almost have the hang of it, at least starting a city. While not huge, I have my city just past a shade north of 2,000 people and I have city laid out for future growth

Edit: I spent the better part of a couple of hours this afternoon just trying to figure out how to resolve my traffic pattern. I had traffic bottled up where the main road enters my city.

I understand in some respects why they don't allow all building types until you get to a certain milestone but it doesn't make sense for rotaries (or round abouts for anyone of non-American persuasion ) I'm at a population level of 3,000 but the rotary has yet been unlocked - I know about mods and that's a possible solution but for now, I'm running w/o any sort of mod for that.

 

[maflynn]

I'm still chugging along with it, thanks to the content manager, I opted for infinite money, just to play around and have fun. I generally can get a city up to 10k now easy enough, though I'm having issues with expanding my city. Particularly using office zones. I started a city and made sure I placed multiple elementary, high schools and a university but at the 10k mark, it still seems premature to start using office zones.

Mass transit seems to be another point of frustration

Overall the game is captivating, not in the same way that I love playing the fallout games, but I do find it can suck me into the game for long stretches. Something that is needed during this lockdown period we find ourselves in.

 

[maflynn]

I'm pretty happy with how things are going, I found that I get the most enjoyment by playing with unlimited funds, while I have a positive cash flow (right now), I wanted to be able to lay my city out in a specific pattern if you can see, its in a hexagon layout - if the game is played as expected (starting off with 70,000) then its hard to do that. Plus I can add as much services as I feel I need ASAP, I'm not playing with all achievements locked, so I did wait until things became available, i.e., didn't create a monorail on day one since its not available.

Speaking of monorail - I'm still struggling with mass transit, it just doesn't seem to be working for me, i.e., ridership is low. I'm at a point where its diminishing returns, the first section of the city (foreground), has a number of bus routes, where most of the ridership is about 130 to 150, the subway, is barely being used (low 30s). To that point, the second section (in the background), doesn't even have any mass transit. I'm working on the third quadrant now, though that's out of range of the screen shot. I'm at about 32,000 sims and traffic isn't a huge problem yet.

Its an odd game, where I get a higher level of enjoyment out of the fallout series, but yet I find myself playing this game for hours, it has the ability to suck me in and keep me engaged.

 

[simonmet]

I liked some aspects of this game, but hated others. Some things are done very well (PT lines for instance), others very badly. Some of the game design choices confound me: like locking road types to the progression system; or disallowing achievements when using visual or construction-only mods. Graphics are quite poor by modern standards; unless you use lots of mods and custom assets, which add considerably to the hardware requirements.

Ultimately I found it way too fiddly. Mods are simultaneously required (and encouraged by the developer) to improve the experience, but can introduce bugs; and frequently break your saved cities when the game is updated—until the mod itself is updated. They also started to spam way too many overpriced DLCs. Even with its current 50% off sale, the game costs about $100 to buy everything. It should be half that. They offer 75% off the base game to try to get you in and hooked enough to buy the DLCs, but I’ve never seen discounts greater than 50% on any DLC.

Interesting that the video posted above outlines many of the other frustrations I had with it too. I think a lot of people have a love-hate relationship with CSL—just look at the Steam forums.

 

[maflynn]

I fired up Cities: Skylines and boy is it hard to get back into the game. Other games, you can generally pick up where you left off - maybe some re-learning but the basics are still there - not so for Cities, at least for me.

I'm still trying to get up to speed, though after about and hour of playing, I think I have the hang of much of it. The finer points of building a city are still lost to me, and so I'll be googling and watching YT to get back up to speed

 

[maflynn]

I've started back up with Cities Skylines, as I mentioned in the post above (from February) once you put it down, you forget a bunch of the tricks and shortcuts in making a city. I opted to re-review how to play via youtube. Thanks to that, I started with a nice template and this city is about 2,400 in size. I'll be looking to duplicate this setup shown below to another section to push me into the 5k range I'll probably then look to upgrade the main artery going through the center of the city into a highway for better traffic flow

 

[maflynn]

I changed my design a bit from what we see here. Instead of making whole sale changes to the city in the screen above, I started a new one on a new plot of land that gave me more opportunities to grow. The main issue that was bugging me it the industry section which is the 4x5 grid on the top. It bothered me to see that have the main road all other traffic needing to to go through the small rotary in the center

The changes may not be drastic but having three large roads running through the city allows traffic coming into the city to easily get to any section. This city is poised to grow, I've been changing things over to high density and I'll be filling in the rest of the open section for housing and commerical. I'll be setting up districts in the three main areas with one being an IT centric to allow for large buildings, but first I need to get to a point where I can place a university. I think that's 12,000 people

 

[maflynn]

I think about every 9 months I restart playing Cities and here I am again. One thing that is painfully obvious is that this game has so many options, so many mods and content and in some ways a level of complexity that if you don't keep up with it, its hard to just start a new game.

I struggled starting a brand new city and decided to take a previously saved city and started growing that. So far results aren't too bad, but my struggles have reminded me that this not a came to casually play ever so often.

 

[JMacHack]

A few tips I’ve found while playing:

Traffic is dumb as hell and backs up easily: it will always prefer faster speed roads over shorter or less congested (in fact I don’t think traffic considers congestion at all). You have to really really plan out traffic routes to prevent gridlock.

Cul-de-sac designs are superior for residential areas.

When making intersections, try to make exit ramps before on ramps.

Have commercial zones on the main drag, nearly off the highway, split industrial zone traffic as early as possible (both of these have big trucks which are bad for traffic), and have residential zones furthest from the highway.

Micromanaging intersections goes a long way. Toggle stop signs and stop lights where it makes sense, the game is dumb with them.

Water pipes just have to be connected at any point to pumps or outlets, planning isn’t necessary.

Electricity will flow between close set buildings, only remote stuff needs power lines.

Oddly enough, pedestrians are pretty smart in the game and will choose efficient walking and public transport routes. Since experimenting with footpaths and buses I’ve managed to improve traffic easily. And I’m an idiot.

Speaking of buses, the game assigns a lot to routes, which has made a conga line of buses in my cities. Reducing the budget and micromanaging the routes is essential.

Overall the game is much easier than simcity, you won’t bleed money unless you really **** up like pumping polluted water to your sims. You really don’t have to be a good planner to succeed in the game.

Also look up Timboh’s intersections on the workshop. They’re really cool looking and way better than vanilla intersections or anything you or I could make.

 

[JMacHack]

They also started to spam way too many overpriced DLCs. Even with its current 50% off sale, the game costs about $100 to buy everything. It should be half that. They offer 75% off the base game to try to get you in and hooked enough to buy the DLCs, but I’ve never seen discounts greater than 50% on any DLC.

Agreed, luckily most of the DLC is redundant or terrible so you can skip it. Paradox interactive has a habit of hiding the true cost of the game in dlc.

 

[JMacHack]

something else I thought of:

Use districts liberally, it allows a great degree of control over policies. By banning truck traffic for example you can force heavy traffic to other roads.

Also don’t ever use policies like smoke detectors, water/power usage. They cost a ****ton and do little.

If you can afford it: have your power budget, water budget, and trash budget at max. You can comfortably run nearly everything else at 75%. Education and medical budgets balloon fast, and it’s cheaper to build more facilities than increase the budget over 125% or so.

Taxes you can sit comfortably at 11 or 12%, if your land value is high enough (put parks down for a big multiplier). Waterfront property is always higher value but mountain value (unlike sim city) is not.

If you get trouble with “slope too steep” errors, do what the europeans did and use switchbacks.

Industrial districts not on natural resources but zoned for agriculture/ore/oil/forestry will import products to make goods instead of exctracting the resources. Keep these near highways.

Cargo train hubs will bunch traffic up, use longer roads away from your main thoroughfare.

Roundabouts in cities skylines are ass, to make them work correctly you should toggle them to stop signs only on the incoming road, sometimes they’ll use an all-way stop or a traffic light, which defeats the purpose.

Noise pollution will make your population physically sick, take that into account.

Trams cause traffic jams, limit them like buses.

Agriculture/forestry zones cause no pollution, besides noise. It’s safe to put windmills and water towers next to them.

Water physics are weird, if you build a hydro plant watch how high you build it, because the water behind it will rise to that level and flood anything behind it. It will also affect the flow direction of watts, so make sure your sewage isn’t coming back up to your pumps. (Learned this the hard way)

 

[maflynn]

Traffic is dumb as hell and backs up easily: it will always prefer faster speed roads over shorter or less congested (in fact I don’t think traffic considers congestion at all). You have to really really plan out traffic routes to prevent gridlock.

There's a plethora of tools to help with managing traffic. One of the most popular one is Traffic Manager: President Edition. TMPE allows you to turn on or off traffic lights, it allows you to control lane directions. Lane mathematics goes a long way in Cities skylines. What I mean is, having an on ramp to a three lane road, means you need 4 lanes after that on ramp.

Traffic in Cities Skylines is not dumb but the opposite, its incredibly complex, in that much of the design of a city and its success boils down to how well you manage your citiziens going from point a to point b. The use of mass transit systems, roads, and pedestrian walkways all work together to avoid traffic jams.

Rotaries are a big thing in Cities skylines as they can handle traffic a lot better then intersections. I subscribe to a number of Yters and one of them - Biffa Plays Indie Games, dedicates many of his videos to show how bad some cities are with traffic and what he does to fix them. That is subscribers send him their cities (typically huge cities with traffic at a standstill) and he shows you how to fix it.

 

[maflynn]

I've picked this game back up, as a companion to Fallout 76. That is, my play time in FO76 is not what it used to be, so I need another game to keep me going. The good thing about this game, is I can play on my M1 MBP.

Paradox continues to release updates, and player engagement is still very strong

 

[maflynn]

The latest DLC of Cities Skylines introduces a huge shift in the game dynamics.

One of the major functions of the game is managing traffic, it seems once you get close too or at Grand city (population of about 20k) traffic starts being an issue

But now with the Plaza and Promenades you can have sections of the city that are pedestrian only - there is a high cost to marking the distract as pedestrian only, and it on a per square area so the more you have the more you pay. If you play with unlimited funds this isn't really a problem and you can very well avoid traffic once and for all.

I have a city in the mid 30k, and I'm going to convert large swarths as pedestrian only (I like to play with unlimited funds).

 

[maflynn]

I reached a major milestone today that I've not done before, reached the Megalopolis stage which is a city population of 60k

As previously mentioned, I tend to stall out at 30k due to severe traffic woes. Its funny but a lot of the advise for traffic is the use of roundabouts instead of intersections, it was that very thing that kept causing me issues. Instead I opted for stragetic use of collectors that were one-way. This directed the flow of traffic and avoided cross traffic and traffic lights. I also worked at improving lane mathematics, i.e., a two lane road going into another 2 lane road. All of a sudden you have 4 lanes worth of traffic trying to squeeze into 2 lanes. (we see how horrible that can be in RL), so now if ensure everything lines up as best I can. So much so, traffic has been hovering at 70% without any special attention. I'm sure I could drive that up to 80, but Megalopolis was the goal I was after.

I'll start a new city in short order with some design goals that seemed to fall by the wayside on this city.

 

[maflynn]

Doing another play through, Paradox released the last set of DLCs for Cities recently and I picked one of them up. Enjoying the slow progression. I changed things up and instead of racing to each major milestone, I'm slowly focusing on the building process.

I'm taking more attention to how the streets will be laid out, with an eye towards to future, thinking about mass transit from the get go (even though it's yet to be opened up).

Overall, its been providing some nice zen like time playing.

 

[venom600]

I love this game like few others… but I noticed a lot of instability the larger my cities get. At times this city won’t even load and just crashes.