Cities: Skylines - Help/Tips Thread

This thread is were we can discuss and trade secrets about the game. I am personally loving the game but a few things have confounded me. Couple things:

• Basic Hydro Power Tips please. I just don't get the concept as my dams just don't work and I'm just confused on what I should be doing. I got one dam to work but all the sudden it stopped letting water through, thus didn't have enough power, dried out the river bed, pumps had no access to water, so within a matter of 3 minutes my whole city was without utilities and I didn't know what happened. I play around with my budget percentages and I think that's what caused this problem...leading to my next question...
• Anyone know the effects of adjusting the budget percentages? Power and water I think I understand but what happens in regards to the other categories I'm not entirely sure of. I know it says how many vehicles are available for the departments but is that it, it doesn't effect the range or anything?
• Is the max tax percentage 13% before everyone freaks out? I can't seem to go above 13% with most and 14% in regards to Industrial.

And some tips that I find very useful:

• Focus on the Industrial districts to minimize Industrial demands but also increases taxes. Specifically agriculture and forest industries have no pollution so you can build residential right near them which is nice. I'm not sure if there is any other purpose for resources but they are very effective in regards to districts and industrial.
• The relocation button is EXTREMELY useful, I use it quite often to make sure areas are covered in regards to schools, police, fire dep., etc.
• Felt really dumb but I could figure out how to turn a overpass when editing the highway, right click with rotate the overpass or hold and you can turn it anyway you want. As I said, dumb, but I fought with this for 30 minutes as I didn't know why I could only place an overpass one certain way.
• This is my own personal taste but, don't go crazy when there is demand for certain zones. My first map I would place way to many of "x" zone and it would lead to many terrible things. Place a zone or two to see how that affects the demand and go from there. De-zone if you have to, won't have any long-term problems if you.
• POLICIES are hella expensive!!! If you aren't making money and not sure why, check the budget page and see if you have any policies in place sapping your money. Just one policy can cost several thousand in expenses (even early on in a new game) and can drain your money and not realize it (which happened to me). You can also set specific policies with districts if you really want to micromanage (which I do).

@nightriff said:

Raising the budget for utilities increases their output, raising the education budget increases each school's capacity and raising the garbage, fire and police budgets increases the number of service vehicles. As far as I can tell, higher budgets do not increase range; this seems to be entirely dependent on how efficient your road hierarchy is.

You can make mad bank by focusing your industry on forestry (if you have the trees for it) and keeping the industrial tax rate at 13%. When you can afford it pop the residential tax rate down to 10% or lower and it'll stimulate some fledgling lumberjacks to move into your quaint logging community. If all goes well you should have a cool couple hundred thousand just in time for high density zones to be unlocked.

Agreed about policies. The first instinct is to mash the power and water rate limiters along with smoke detectors, but that will absolutely kill your income. I've noticed it seems more cost-effective to run the power at 120%+ capacity when I start bumping against my limit.

I slowly emptied and relocated my dumps across the highway to an industrial expansion, moving all the town's pollution away from the town itself.

@nightriff: I have a Dam and it works well, but I'm not too informed on how exactly they work, as I've only read some comments on a thread about 'em. Some people say that if your dam is too close to where a river splits, the water simply goes down the other river. There's also a chance the dam might be too high and the water behind it can't get to the top, and apparently they need water to be pretty high on the reservoir side to work. Pumps are said to drain water flow (so the dams will generate less power) and drainage / purification plants will add to the flow (increasing power), but I haven't tested it.

My pumps are miles up-stream (with purification drainage down-stream of the dam), and my dam is located near the end of a river (shortly before a wide body of water where I could place a port for cargo/cruise ship lanes). The only thing I've ever had to do is rebuild the bridge up-stream of it since it kept getting flooded.

Plan your roads well. I tend to abuse roundabouts and highway exchanges - try and make a direct entrance/exit to your industrial zone so trucks don't clog up your main city roads.

When you start rolling in money, make a few bus stations (depending on city size) and a ton of metro stations. My city has like 10~ metros around it, if not more (about 5-6 tiles filled, but all 9 unlocked), and it cuts down on so much traffic. There are just giant piles of people waiting in the metro stations. Having them by an airport or cruise ship port is also incredibly useful, as I don't think any driving traffic comes from those two areas in my map - at the very least it's super light.

Alternatively, you can make pure bus lanes. Like, make a road network not connected to any of your main roads, and put a bus station (and fire station!) on it, with paths connecting to streets near the bus stops. That way people can take buses across your city but the buses won't go into actual traffic. I've only read about it (my city is pretty much set at this point - probably going to start a new one) but it seems like a ingenious idea that I really want to try out.

Also - PATHS! They're located in your 'Decoration' selections with parks and trees, but they can be absolutely essential to a city. Say a residential road goes up to but doesn't connect to an office road - put a path between them and quite a few people will walk the short distance instead of drive all the way around. I tend to go a little crazy with paths and make sure pretty much every road has easy access to a metro station or bus stop (or at least a road leading to one).

It also works for giving easier access to parks and such - and if you want, you can put down a road, park, then delete the road an connect it with a path. Beware though, police cars won't be able to get to it so there's a good chance crime might pop up. I'm not sure if cops can park nearby and walk to a place, but I don't think they can.

...oh god I've written a wall. I guess I got a bit carried away.

Put your oil/coal, whatever, powerplant near a highway or other neighbor connection. Losing the main power supply for your city is no fun because traffic is bad and the trucks can't reach it.

I might be the luckiest person on the planet, but I haven't messed with tax rates (everything at 9%), have used no policies, my dam works just fine and I'm rolling on cash, even after spending a shitload of money on constructing a subway network for my 12k city. I have very little heavy industry left, with most of it converted to offices, so public transportation + few trucks = good traffic.

My only tip is to make sure you can afford things before buying them, and investing on stuff to increase the levels of your residential/commercial areas. Parks, playgrounds and plazas are definitely not a waste of money.

@ratamero: without industry who supplies the commercial? I guess my real question is who supplies the goods to commercial?

I really want to eliminate heavy industrial but afraid it will effect my commercial buildings.

@seemah: I have no idea (most of the time I have close to no idea of what I'm doing), but even my high-density commercial seems to be doing fine, and I'm even getting more demand for commercial at times. I guess they get goods from the invisible outside world?

@seemah: From what I understand, they just import them if there is no local supply, and somehow that translates into lower tax revenue from commercial.

@renahzor @ratamero: Thanks guys! I'll mess around and remove all heavy industry and see what happens.

@seemah: There was a point in my main city that I removed 100% regular industry and replaced it with offices and it was fine. I only added a bit of industry later on since I had a cargo train yard and felt like it made sense. Since I did that, I've only added offices.

@seemah: I read up on it and apparently heavy industry is only for uneducated workers, while office zones use educated ones, which explains why my industrial zones were full of abandoned buildings before I started re-zoning everything. So I guess when education starts increasing there's no option really, you have to get rid of a lot of heavy industry in favour of offices.

highway. ramps. off ramps. on ramps. mother fuckin. RAMPS

The most widely misunderstood mechanic that get's unfortunate reinforcement when you unlock office zoning is education. Unemployment and total job numbers aren't prominently displayed (check the People info layer) and after unlocking offices you often have a huge industrial demand that lets you build a bunch of upstart dot coms that steal all your factory workers. This doesn't mean the educated won't come back to your industrial jobs, even the purely uneducated ones like the lumber specialization. Lack of workers is always solved by more people, regardless of education, so monitor unemployment before you get spooked away. You can build as much industry as the local commercial goods requirement and export market can support.

That's the strangest hiccup in the socio-economic simulation which is relatively ignorable compared to traffic management. Real world traffic management applies nearly across the board so there are plenty of primers you can find that apply to the game. However one deviation, or maybe exaggeration, from real life is that lighted intersections are awful for keeping traffic moving. When traffic must absolutely keep moving, create a system made of yields. Another caveat is that roundabouts aren't the cureall they often are in real life either.

Experimenting with intersections can quickly tell you which result in lights and which in merges, but the general rules of thumb are:

• 2 lane streets, highways, and highway ramps are always yield based
• Any incoming road into a 4 lane or 6 lane street results in a light
• 1 way Outgoing roads from 4 lane or 6 lane result in a yield

Finally, there is somewhat stringent programming logic that comes into play when assigning turn lanes at intersections. The rule of thumb is that you want as many incoming lanes into an intersection as there are outgoing lanes. if you have less its generally not a problem, but there are some strange assignments when you have more. It is often useful and attractive to upgrade the last node of a street at the intersection to provide a closer to correct number of incoming streets; my favorite example that is much like the suburban roads I grew up on is for a network of of the 4 lane avenues, at the busiest intersections it is often prudent to upgrade it into the 6 lane. That's just the tip of the iceburg compared to some of the weirder stuff you can do to tweak 1-way networks (credit to the originator of that imgur whoever it may be as it is not me).

Naturally supplied dams can be kind of funky as the dam intake needs to be below the water source limit, but neither the water source limit or the dam intake is noted in any useful way. However you can just power your city with your sewage, which is slightly simpler.

Not really a tip but more word of warning:

There's a bug in the game right now where if you build too many parks early on, your city will have 0 commercial demand. Forever. There's no patch to fix it yet but someone did make a mod to try and fix it. Haven't tested it yet.

@aurahack: From what I understand, parks simply provide too much commercial satisfaction. If you lower the number of parks then you should get it back. I usually build 2 parks per "neighborhood" and I've never run into this problem, but it's definitely not permanent, from what I can tell.

Regarding dams: make sure you place them in a location with significant water flow, at as narrow a location as possible. A lot of times the dam will slow the flow enough that the water isn't even moving fast enough to drive the turbine.

@jrad: That's what I understood it as but it just seems weird. Like, why are they getting that satisfaction from parks?

@jrad: So is the number of "How many MW will be produced" a lie and I should just put dams at the narrowest point regardless of that number? I tried experimenting with a dam again and still couldn't figure it out. It was on the two rivers map and placed it (if you are familiar with that map) at the end of the natural reservoir draining into another river, I just let it run for a half hour to see if it would eventually work itself out and nope, dams and me just can't see to get on the same page.

@zedprime: Thanks for the tips, a lot of helpful stuff in your post.

One way roads playa. They're the key to a smooth, heavy flow.

For stuff like Metro and Bus lines, should I be doing many different but small lines? Or should I be doing big long lines but in fewer quantity?

Trying to highlight Metro or Bus lines to add or move stops is really annoying. I very often have 3 or 4 Metro lines overlapping and I can't target the section I need to add a stop in. So I don't know if I should wipe some lines out or what. If it is better for people to train hop (or if they even will) or that I'm just screwed. Feel like throwing my mouse against the wall haha

By the way, something I just learned before doing this is that you can customize the color of each Bus or Metro line by selecting it while in the Transport Info View panel and clicking on the little Line Color box.

@seikenfreak: I'm still as yet undecided about the bus issue. The more stops you place in any of the public transport routes, the more vehicles get created to run that route, but in my first city I tended to find that bus routes with too many stops on the residential side would always end up with the last residential stop being gummed up with people since the buses were always full from the other stops by the time they got there. For second city, I'm trying much shorter 'shuttle' buses into the metro system and it's looking nicer, but I haven't yet reached the same levels of density and I think generally more people are driving in this city.

People will train hop and otherwise transfer around different forms of transport all the time, which can really be helpful to shuttle people into the metro or train stations. And in my second city I've also learnt from the first: if you want to use trains in any way efficiently, keep your inner city lines separate from the 'regional' lines and just have one 'tourist' station for those. I suspect it's probably a small bug or oversight that tourists coming from the region arrive super frequently on many trains with less than 10 people in, rather than having occasional full train loads...

@nightriff: Two Rivers is actually a pretty horrible map for any dam no matter where you place it because the rivers' flow isn't nearly powerful enough. The issue I had with Two Rivers is I'd put down my water pumps, then my dam downstream from that, and then my sewage disposal. The dam would stop all water flow and then my water pumps would actually reverse the flow of the river, and my sewage disposal would cease to operate.

@aurahack: It's where your virtual little fellas are meeting up to buy drugs.

@kalli said:

This explains everything.

(They've also fixed this in a recent patch.)

@jrad: that's good to know as I've pretty much given up on a dam for the time being. Maybe I've just been unlucky in selecting maps but I've ad zero luck on dams

Maybe there's already a good way to do this, but I feel like 75% of my traffic problems could be solved if I had a quick, effective way to split a 2 way road into 2 parallel 1 way roads in a way that wouldn't allow for U-turns to mess everything up. A simple Y-junction that keeps the left and right sides completely separate is all it would take.

Not sure if it is what you are looking for but I feel like "Ramps" are maybe some kind of secret sauce in this. They are pretty compact, the highest speed, 1 way, and they merge traffic together pretty smoothly. You should be able to use them like Highways but they'd be just one lane. I haven't quite used them like that myself but I don't see why you couldn't. The ramp tool is an elegant, simple solution and has not disappointed me whenever I find a use for it.

One thing I discovered yesterday is that you can reverse the direction of a one way road if you set the road tool to upgrade and then right click on the one way street you want to change the direction of (you have to have the one way street selected as well). No more uneven highways for me!

This was just added in with patch 1.06b.

Use ramps. Drives me nuts seeing people use regular roads to enter/exit freeways.

There's a reason why they don't try to have 6 slow lanes merge into 3 high speed lanes in real life...

@dudeglove: Yes, and I would think also yes. I phase out landfills entirely with incinerators as soon as I can, and while I haven't tried the second bit I would think you could.

Roundabouts. Roundabouts everywhere.

I find the opposite to be true. I used the magical 440 formula to put the bare minimum for water pipes across my cities and have never had a problem as long as I had enough pumps to meet demand.

Yep, although there are special buildings that you only get for filling X landfills and cemeteries I think. Just a thing to keep in mind.

- The reason that industry thrives with more connections to the outside world is that the game factors both raw materials and finished goods. Generic industry needs raw materials imported by highway, rail, or ship, into the city (or supplied by your own specialized industries) in order to produce finished goods. And those finished goods are shuttled over to your commercial districts to be sold. If your industry produces more than your commercial can sell, then the surplus goods are exported by highway, rail, or ship.

- Pollution only spreads a certain radius from industrial zones, and it doesn't leech into water pipes. As long as your water inlet pumps are clear and your residential zones aren't built on polluted ground (which they shouldn't be anyways for traffic and noise reasons), pollution won't be a health factor.

- I wouldn't bother bulldozing abandoned buildings. If you knock down an abandoned building without addressing the reason it was abandoned in the first place (such as not enough workers), it'll just happen again. However, abandoned buildings WILL eventually get re-inhabited if the root problem is fixed (such as more residential zones and/or an easier commute from your existing residential).