Love Cities: Skylines

Campus is Cities: Skylines’ eighth expansion, and gives us a complete overhaul of the higher education system. It brings together ideas introduced in Parklife, Industries and Match Day DLCs and applies them to the university system in the game. It adds a lot of well-designed new assets and lets us build beautiful, functional campuses to…

How do we make a city feel like a real place? How can we make it feel alive – like it exists independently of us? I am far from an expert. Some of the images that go up on Reddit are little short of extraordinary. But a lot of those realistic-looking cities depend on vast…

In Cities: Skylines, land value is one of the factors that let buildings upgrade to their highest levels. Without high enough value, the city won’t be able to earn the big bucks that come from residential taxes. At worst, buildings won’t spawn at all in an undesirable place. If you’ve zoned a new residential area…

In Cities: Skylines, every city is unique. The geography, size of your districts, mix of commercial and industrial areas, available outside connections and a hundred other factors will determine the right traffic management solution for each part of the city. That said, the general principles always apply. There’s optimal strategies that can help you keep…

Biking arrived to Cities: Skylines in After Dark, the game’s first expansion. Suddenly, residents would hop onto a bike and ride the pavements and newly-added bike lanes. The pedestrian path got a bike-only counterpart, too – from which we can build huge networks fast, direct cycle highways. Bikes add visual life to the city and…

Getting your cargo on rails is one of the best ways of fixing your traffic problems. Combine a good rail cargo system with an efficient public transport network and your roads will flow smoothly and serenely. Rail freight works pretty similarly to passenger transport. If it shortens the journey, cargo will (like a person) find…

I love Cities: Skylines’ public transport. Especially how satisfying it is to link up different types. Good public transit is vital for the health of most cities. Use the right mix and you can make extremely efficient systems that keep most private cars off the roads. Here I’ll quickly look at each type of public…

Compatibility: This article talks about zoned industries in the game and doesn’t cover the supply chain added with the Industries DLC. In Cities: Skylines, there is a real supply chain. The game models the movement of goods from one place to another, rather than simulating it in an abstract way. So logs produced by your…

  Better traffic management: a pedestrian-friendly neighbourhood. In a typical Cities: Skylines city, managing traffic is usually your biggest challenge. With a badly-designed system, people and goods can’t get to where they’re going, causing widespread abandonment; and potentially, the death of your once-flourishing settlement. At the start, you haven’t got the money to lay down…

The dream! Hundreds of tourists pouring into the city from the airport or harbour, about to catch the train into the centre, ready to spend their money. I love building a city that thrives on tourism. There’s just something about the idea of hundreds of eager visitors stepping off the plane, train or ship and…