People and cargo choose the fastest route to their destination, so put them on rails Always avoid putting residential areas between industry and commerce, or use the Heavy Traffic Ban policy extensively to keep cargo trucks on the roads designed for them. They get them from your industrial areas or imports from outside the city – or both. Your commercial zones need goods to sell.

Make sure your shops can get products from industry or import Focus instead on how they’ll get to work – ideally while leaving the car at home. So you don’t need to plan public transport routes to account for that. They don’t travel within residential areas, say to visit friends. Your cims travel from home to work, or from home to leisure. Cims go to work and play, but don’t visit friends Add a huge influx of people at once, and they’ll begin to die at once. You should aim for steady, even growth every time you build a new development. Make sure you don’t grow residential areas too fast, lest you trigger a death wave. To avoid the death wave, aim for steady, even residential growth Just keep steadily adding to your population and you’ll soon find residential taxes outpace your growing expenses. In the very early stages, balancing your budget is a bit tricky, but by the mid-game you’ll usually be sitting on millions in the bank without breaking a sweat. Beyond the early game, you’ll have piles of itĭon’t worry much about money. If you are buying expansions and DLC and want to support the site (thank you so much!) there are some Humble Bundle links on the About page. I hope you find it useful! If you do, I’d love it if you gave it a share.

The tips in this guide are more like bits of information about many of the game’s core systems to help you get to grips with how they work and apply them in whatever way you like. It’s worth saying this isn’t a walkthrough of how to start a city ‘optimally’.

I’m referring to the vanilla, unmodded game here – which means everything should apply equally across PC, Mac, PS4, Xbox and Linux versions. A lot of the core functionality came in free updates to the game anyway. That said, I’ve tried to talk about general principles and avoid too many expansion-specific tips. This guide is based on the game as of late 2018 with all expansions installed (up to and including Parklife). I know it’s a bit of a beast, which is why I’ve added titles to each tip, so you can skim and get more detail on the ones you find interesting. That’s where guides like this one come in. The game is very accessible, but some systems are pretty deep and the way they interact isn’t always immediately apparent. This guide is full of tips and tricks aimed at beginners but also people who’ve played a bit and want to learn more about the game’s mechanics. It’s an amazing game with a great balance between challenging systems and sandbox gameplay. Just getting started with Cities: Skylines? You’re going to love it.

Cities skylines mods no regional trains