Blognative601

1. Cities Skylines Best Layout
2. Cities Skylines How To Create Elevated Road
3. Cities Skylines Elevated Highway

In Cities: Skylines, money isn’t too hard to make. Once the city reaches a few tens of thousands – assuming it’s relatively well-managed – you’ll probably be sitting on a few million in the bank and have enough to build pretty much whatever you need.

But in the early games, it can be difficult to balance the books. That’s especially true in your first few cities, when it can be quite easy to accidentally tank by expanding too quickly. Here’s a few tips that I hope will help you out.

Note on compatibility: these tips should apply across all platforms (PC, PS4, Xbox, Switch, Mac) of the unmodded game.

• In Cities Skylines zoning is completely free but the roads are very expensive! So do not go crazy on laying roads. Make sure you take care of your essential first. Constructing roads is very expensive in Cities Skylines, do not attempt to create a grid like this at the start of your game!
• Turn this on to make sure trucks stick to the main road and to the junctions designed to handle high volume. Old Town is another cornerstone policy for reducing traffic. It can have a huge effect in the right place.

Put up your taxes straight away

If you want to use rail pillars, then just put NoPillars on overlap mode and go to town carefully dragging out the roads to create a double deck road. Be aware that you'll need overlap on when you want to make any edits to the upper deck. 327k members in the CitiesSkylines community. A subreddit for the City Builder game developed by Colossal Order, Cities: Skylines.

As soon as you unlock the taxes panel in the UI, head in there and put them up to 12%. Your residents will happily pay that much without complaining, even without better services. That’s a full third more income right out the gate, which makes a big difference. Don’t forget to head in there again when you unlock high density zoning and offices.

If you ever struggle with getting people to move into new areas, you can always put draw a district over it and lower taxes just there with a city policy.

Residential taxes are your biggest source of income

In most cities, the taxes your citizens pay on their homes makes up by far the largest chunk of income. Doing what you need to do to upgrade housing will help you make consistent profits. Once they’ve maxed out at level 5, housing will put millions in the city’s bank account and fund all your investments.

Every city milestone gives you a nice cash boost

Fairly obvious but the game doesn’t actually tell you. Each time you pass a population milestone, you’ll get a nice injection of cash to help you reach the next marker.

Don’t add services until it’s really necessary

It’s tempting to build police stations and other city services as soon as they unlock. But the reality is they unlock a long time before you really need to build them. Crime rates will stay low for a long time – and if push comes to shove you wait until you start seeing residents complain before adding services.

Not all service buildings are good value

When deciding what city services to add, pay careful attention to their weekly upkeep. Although they might affordable to build, if they cost 2,400/week to maintain, they’ll put a big dent in the budget of a small or medium sized city.

Generally, hospitals are overkill. In most cases, a few clinics can easily handle the city’s needs. That is, unless you’ve done like something like put the sewer pipes upriver from the water intakes and poisoned the water supply.

The health buildings that arrived with Green Cities are also inexplicably expensive, which is shame. The sports centre and public pool are great for flavour and really add to the sense of a community, but their upkeep is really high. They improve resident health, but unless you’ve made a mistake, health basically takes care of itself.

Bigger buildings often represent savings over small ones

Police and fire headquarters are overkill for small cities, but as the place grows, it can make sense to close down three police stations and replace them with single headquarters, for example. You’ll save some space and over time the lower upkeep should pay.

The same applies to certain transit buildings. The multi-platform train stations cost more than normal stations but the same maintenance. In exchange you get huge flexibility for your train lines and a free metro station underneath!

Similarly, the cargo hub is expensive but cheaper than a cargo harbour and cargo station next to each other. So as these buildings unlock, it’s often worth investing in them, or replacing your existing infrastructure.

Bridges and tunnels cost a bomb

In-game, the prices of roads and tracks are listed for their default state: running along the road. It’s not that easy to keep track of how much extra it costs when your roads go up or down, but a few other players have done tests to help us out, like this one. They cost a lot!

The best road and transit networks don’t need a lot of bridges and tunnels but it’s often inevitable that to keep improve difficult areas you’ll want to avoid creating intersections at key points.

The main to know is that early on, sticking to ground level will help keep your infrastructure costs in check.

Stick to money-making public transport early on

Trains, particularly, are really hard to make profitable. Actually, I’ve never managed even to break even with my train network. That doesn’t matter much once you’ve built the city up and have cash to spare. But early on, it’s best to stick to services that easy to budget-neutral.

Buses are the obvious answer here. They use the existing road network, so their main additional cost is the depot. The most routes you add, the more the depot cost is lowered per bus.

I’ve done a rundown of all the transit type here.

Mothball buildings you’re not using

All your service buildings have an On/Off toggle, which is really useful if your budget suddenly takes a turn and you need to get back into the black. By turning off things you can do without – police stations, clinics etc – for a while, you can cut your weekly outgoings enough to get things going in the right direction.

Use the budget sliders

In most cases, you can leave budget sliders at 100%. They give diminishing returns: doubling the budget doesn’t double the service effectiveness, for example. So the most value for money comes from leaving them where they are.

But they’re really handy in pinch, and especially early on. For example, putting up the electricity budget will increase your power output without needing to build new generators. That gives you enough time to squeeze past the next population milestone without suffering through blackouts.

Thanks for reading! I hope you found these ideas handy. If there’s anything really good I missed out, let me know. I’d be glad to add it.

I had assumed that a 10x10 grid was best, but it turns out it's not.

Guide to The Optimal Square Grid

Introduction

I always figured that if I was going to build a nice, regular, square grid that of course it should be 10×10: That way each of the blocks is fully zonable and the road length highlight and road guideline circles make it easy to draw.
But it turns out we can do better.

Time for Mathematics

For the 10×10 grid, the calculation is simple: we get 8² zonable tiles in a 10² tile area, for a density of exactly 64%. (Here, and in the rest of the section, we assume a small—2u—road).
For the general case of a square of side 𝓁, the zoneable area is (𝓁-2)²-max(0, 𝓁-10)² -- the area inside the road minus the area in the middle where the zoning doesn't reach -- and the total area is 𝓁².
It's hard for me to grok that quotient in my head, so let's just graph it and see what happens:
That shows that the 'obvious' 10×10 grid is actually only as good as a 15×15 grid:
It also looks like 12u is the best. Can we prove it? Sure, let's go back to Calculus I:

• 0 = d/d𝓁 (𝓁-2)²-(𝓁-10)² / 𝓁²
• 0 = d/d𝓁 ( (𝓁-2)+(𝓁-10) )*( (𝓁-2)-(𝓁-10) ) / 𝓁²
• 0 = d/d𝓁 (2𝓁-12)*8 / 𝓁²
• 0 = d/d𝓁 (16𝓁-96) / 𝓁²
• 0 = ( (16)*𝓁² - (16𝓁-96)*2𝓁 ) / 𝓁⁴
• 0 = (16𝓁 - 32𝓁 + 192) / 𝓁³
• 0 = -16𝓁 + 192
• 𝓁 = 192/16
• 𝓁 = 12

So yes, it's a block length of exactly 12 that gives the best density.
Note: Coincidentally, that's also the maximum segment length for an axis-aligned road in CSL.
How much better? ⅔ of the area (66.66…%) instead of just 64%.
Now, I admit that only about 4% more zoning doesn't sound that exciting. But not only is it more dense, but it's also cheaper.
How's that? Well, you need to pay for the roads. And for the 10×10 blocks, those 64 tiles of zoning need 40u of roads (1.6tiles/u), but with a 12×12 block you get 96 tiles of zoning out of only 48u of roads (2tiles/u). So you're also paying 16% less on the roads to grid the same area with more stuff.
For some concrete numbers, let's compare a 60×60 area (as it divides evenly in a bunch of ways) using a variety of block sizes and the basic small two-lane road:
So if you make a 10×10 grid, you'll spend 50% more than you need to for the area you'll get.
Note: That table also shows that zonable area drops slower than road cost, but don't forget that lower density is also increased cost for any service with a radius of effect.

Conclusion

If you want the densest square grid, make it 12×12 (using small roads).
You'll fit 1⁄24 more RICO in the same space but spend 1⁄6 less on the roads, compared to a 10×10 grid.

Appendix A: Medium or Large Roads

What if you're using a 4u-wide road, like the Medium and Large Roads?
Then the optimal-density square grid is 16×16.
But you pay a heavy density price for the larger roads: only 50% of the area is usable for zoning.

Appendix B: Rectangles

Rectangles, as they get longer and longer, can arbitrarily approach the limit† of 80% density.
The density formula for an α×β block is ((α-2)(β-2) - (α-10)(β-10))/(αβ), assuming both sides are 10-or-longer for simplicity (it's clear that if both are smaller than 10 it's worse than the square, and I don't care what happens for silly things like a 5×50 block).
So there's a surprising amount of choice if you just want to do better than the 10×10 block:
But your choices are far more limited if you want to beat a 12×12 block:
Indeed, if you restrict yourself to integers (so you can draw it with Snap to Road Length), then the only things that beat the best square block are α ∋ {10, 11}, β ∋ {13, 14, 15, ...}.
How much better? Well, 10×16 has a density of 70%, an extra 5% more than the 12-square. Getting up to 75% density takes 10×32, which is more oblong than I personally like for a grid.
Is the extra density worth being less regular? I'll leave that up to you.

Cities Skylines Best Layout

The limit is parallel lines that are infinitely long and never connected, as that way there's never any potentially-zonable area taken up by a cross street. A quick look at the cross-section of such a road shows 4u zoneable on each side and a 2u road, for (4+4)/(4+2+4)=0.8 density.

Appendix C: Real Cities

These are measured from satellite maps, so don't always match the 'canonical' answers. For example, the Portland Bureau of Transportation says its blocks are 200ft (≈7.6u).
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