The purpose of this guide, or more accurately walkthrough, is to show our newer players and those without years of experience playing city building games, how to effectively get your city started. I intend to show you common pitfalls and how to avoid them and how to better plan your city to be able to keep up with the increasing demands of your CIMs.

This guide will take you from a virgin map through to the 6th Milestone, at which point all of the important stuff is unlocked and you should have a tonne of cash to be able to build your dream city.

Enjoy! :-)

if you're not after something massively in-depth and just want a quick overview then perhaps you should check out Grapplehoeker's Guide instead. He doesn't waffle nearly as much as I do :-D

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=422074590

For the purposes of this walkthrough, we're going to need a map. Thankfully, the kind and thoughtful people at Colossal Order gave us a map editor to make this a fairly painless process :-)

I wanted a flat map with a simple highway ring-road along with rail, sea and air links for later testing. I also included flowing water and all four resources to make sure all bases were covered - again for any future testing.

Here's what I knocked up in about half an hour:


And for those of you wanting to try the same map for your own testing, I've made it available here:

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=418893273

Since this is for illustrative purposes, I have thought long and hard about whether to play with infinite money or not and whether to play with everything unlocked. In the end, I've decided this guide is better served as a walkthrough - as an object of education for us all. I intend to test a whole bunch of things, learn a whole load of things and share a whole load of things along the way.

This looks like a nice place to live:

The very beginning of every game has precisely the same requirements. You need to place a piece of road and you need to zone some residential area. In order for the houses that appear to operate successfully, you're going to need to provide clean water and get rid of the dirty stuff and you're going to need power.

This is what we're presented with at the beginning of the game:



We have a highway connection to get those new arrivals into the city, we have a fresh water supply and we have land. So let's build something!

Yes: we need road. We're going to need to connect to the highway and we're going to need somewhere to live so we have to lay some road that joins to the highway and lay some road that we can add residential zoning to - making sure it all links up.



Now for the water. First we need to check which way the water is flowing:



This allows us to apply the golden rule of water management: place your poo pipe downstream of your water source! You don't want to drink your own faeces after all :-\ then we get everything connected up using the pipe tool.



Finally we need power. More by blind luck that good planning, it seems there's plenty of wind power on this map. Yay! Let's get the turbine down and join everything together with pylons. note that the pylon closest to the residential zoning is close enough to power the houses but not on top of any zoned squares so we don't lose any buildable space.



One quick fast-forward into the future later and we have some houses :-) However, notice that the RCI demand (the three coloured bars) has now completely changed and instead of having full demand for residential (green), we now have significant demand for both industrial (orange) and commercial (blue). Also notice that we're suddenly running a massive deficit - this is because we're paying for a wind turbine, water pumping station and a poo pipe but only have a few families living her to pay taxes for their upkeep. One quick way to alleviate this is to set the budgets to minimum.



Note: the budget sliders are meant to discourage you from fiddling with them too much and are designed to encourage you to use the correct number of buildings. How? Well the designers made 50% budget 25% effective and they made 150% budget 125% effective. That means for every percent you try to save, your efficiency drops at a much higher rate and counter to that, as you increase your budget, you get less bang for your buck.

Reducing the budget is a quick way to remedy the deficit early on but you can be certain that you will be increasing your power budget back to 100% very soon!



Those last two screens are from City Statistics Easy Access by Alakaiser.
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=408613485

So there we have it - our first citizens. but now they're desperate for somewhere to work and for somewhere to shop. Since this map is ultimately intended for a whole load of concept testing, i'm going to start by separating my zones as much as I can - here's the plan:


So just like with the residential zone, we need some roads, water, power and time. Notice how I maximise the space by taking into account the 4 square deep zones off every road. as you drag the roads, there's a really useful guide to show you how deep the zones will be off that road - great thinking from the developers :-)



And continuing to maximise space all the way, we build a few more roads then use the quick zone tool thingy to zone some industrial.



A few pipes and pylons later and as if by magic, buildings begin to appear. We'll just assume the builders arrived by helicopter and flew in all their materials since we have no roads yet :-\



One thing I've noticed whilst laying this industrial zone is that already I have power symbols flashing over a few bulidings. This tells me that we're already below capacity for power. Let's check the facts:



And indeed, our demand has reached capacity. Note what I said earlier about the budget sliders: 50% budget gives you 25% efficiency and a standard wind turbine generates 8MW of power in good wind. We're getting 2MW. Now we could try to perfectly balance things by increasing the slider incrementally but the addition of industrial means taxes will flow in much quicker when we resume so for now, I'm going to stick the wind turbine back to 100% efficiency and leave the water where it is.

It's all good and well having a nice industrial estate to work at but right now, nobody can get to work. Let's build a nice road running down the banks of the river and see if people will get off their backsides and go to work.



And indeed we can see people streaming into our little village from the highway now and finally the first person goes to work.



It's worth noting the level of simulation going on here. This dude is one of your CIMs. His name is Charles Scott. He has a "life", a job, a house and needs. When simulating the need for a job, he actually leaves his house, gets in his car, drives to work, parks his car and walks into his place of work.



We can also see that by the time Charles actual gets to work, we are already turning a profit. You can see from the Statistics screen how quickly the taxes come in and because we've been careful with the spending, we are already running a surplus. :-)

We have people and they have somewhere to work. Great. The RCI demand indicator is showing us that there's a large demand for commercial zones. This is because Charles now has a wage and wants somewhere to spend his money.

I'm going to repeat the same process for laying roads and zones, get some power lines and water pipes laid and build a connecting road for our commercial zone.

I lay a nice town square around which to build some shops. I make each side of the square precisely 3 large guide segments long for reasons that will become clear later on and then lay a straight connecting road to allow people access to their new shopping district.

Excellent - we have the beginnings of a city with the main three zones accounted for, people moved in with jobs and places to shop.



Our first delivery trucks arrive with raw materials for our factories but oh noes! It seems that our lovely industrial park is severely lacking for workers! This is partially because now everyone has got to work yet so things haven't entirely settled down yet but mostly, judging by the RCI indicators, because we need more people.



Let's get some more residential laid and ... oh wait a minute!



We're totally out of cash :-D Well there you go, that's the initial budget spent completely. I'm glad to have looked after the budget and made sure we're running a surplus now!

And this is why I call this section the balancing act. We have to balance the amount of residential, commercial and industrial and we have to balance the budget. The best possible tactic early on is to do things bit by bit. Don't go mad on your zoning. Zone a bit, watch the results. React. Zone some more.

How the balancing works

There is a reason I chose this initial layout early on and its because it best allows me to illustrate who needs what and why. To begin with, things are quite simple since we aren't using districts and specialising our industry. Specialised industry can produce raw materials which we will have to deal with later but for now our raw materials are all imported by delivery trucks via our highway link.

Industry - Industry uses raw materials to make saleable goods. It needs someone to sell these goods to otherwise the business will eventually close. After all, they need to make a profit, right? Industry will also try to export goods, especially if you are not meeting their needs through commercial zoning. They also require workers to do the actual work and make stuff.

Commercial - Commercial uses saleable goods and sells them to its customers. Some of these goods can be imported, but again it's only in limited quantities so the vast majority of the goods sold by the commercial districts come from the industrial district via delivery trucks. if a commercial property cannot sell its goods, it will eventually close. They also need to make a profit and they also need workers to serve customers and to man the store.

Residential - Residential are your buildings that provide a home for your CIMs. CIMs who are not children (or University students later on) require a job. in the early game, your CIMs will take jobs at either a factory or at a shop. If you're placing services, each service will have a small number of jobs associated with it that will also need to be filled and so a few CIMs will take those jobs too. Someone has to drive the ambulance ;-) Your working-age CIMs are not just employees though, they are also customers. Since they're now employed, they have a wage and they'll want somewhere to spend that wage. That will be the shops. All at your CIMs will at some point want to go shopping and this will feed the entire economy. They buy goods from the shops; the shops buy more goods from the factories; the factories make more goods and everyone still has a job. In the famous words of Bill Clinton: it's the economy, stupid. :-)

So when you have more people move into your city, they'll need somewhere to work. If you zone too much industry and they all work in factories then your factories are going to quickly run out of places to sell goods to. if you zone too much commercial then your shops will run out of goods. if you zone too much of both and it grows, your industry will run out of employees and your shops will run out of customers. ii say it that way round because it seems that people prefer to work in shops than work in factories. I will test this later.

Your Budget - this is a lot more simple in principal because it's just a very visible figure and easy to manage. Unless you have a large cash surplus, you'll want to be running a budget surplus. Always keep your weekly income in the green and don't overspend. There are loans to help you out of a tight spot but they're best avoided or used when you really, really need them. in this early stage of the game, every penny counts and a careless overspend can literally ruin you to the point of no return. Look after it!

Recap

Raw materials come from outside your city to your industrial estates. Your factories make them into finished goods which are transported via truck to the commercial district. Some goods also get exported out of your city. CIMs travel to both of these places to work. CIMs will travel to the shops to buy stuff. Note that I've used a thicker line to indicate this is more people! Your CIMs will commute to their own place of work - some will work in factories and some will work in shops. However ALL of your CIMs will want to shop. In addition to this, every zone will require services - more and more as the game progresses. These services will need access to some or all of your zones depending on the service.
This flow of people and goods is vital when considering your transport infrastructures. But more on that later, we have a city to build, right?

Time to fast-forward the clock to generate some cash and get the rest of this residential laid :-)

But before I can lay the next road ... Yay first milestone! We are now officially a hamlet and get access to some new stuff. We also get another twenty grand in cash. Woop!



We've now got access to the tax screen (yay mo' monies), loans (should we ever need them) and our first three services: health, garbage and education. Health increases happiness and access to it increases land value and ultimately decreases the death rate. Garbage is a necessity - if you go without garbage collection, everyone will eventually leave your city and you'll have a load of abandoned buildings. Education is a magical mystery tour that I intend to more fully explore but needless to say, it educates your CIMs and makes them less dumb. The Elementary School you get access to here educated children so that when they become adults they are classed as "Educated" and can fill jobs requiring educated people. So far, we don't have an y educated jobs to fill so it's not an issue.

Something that's really important to understand here is that once you get access to services, your people will very quickly begin to demand them. Because I'm mean and looking after the pennies in this early part of the game, I'm not going to place any services until I see people asking for them, however I will keep a close eye on the garbage because that can very quickly pile up and cause problems so the first garbage sign I see will trigger me placing a rubbish dump as soon as possible.

Onwards with the balancing act.

After laying a few more roads ready for the new residential zoning, I quickly notice something is not right with the world ...



Our demand for power is way higher than our supply! Well, that's easily solved. I can't be bothered placing wind turbines every few minutes and I'm not trying to make some kind of eco-city so coal is the answer: the power behind the industrial revolution is good enough for me! My first shiny coal plant :-)



But what's that in the background? A bin symbol? Looks like people are starting to demand bins now we have access to them. How very dare they! Sadly, we've got NO cash left since I just spent it all on a fancy coal power plant. Time to watch my citizens move in to my new residential zone with time on fast-forward until I've got the four grand in the bank I need to build a garbage dump. This won't take long because thanks to careful management, we're generating over a grand a week. They're really not happy about the bin lorry service round here.



Right. Four grand in the bank - time to place that garbage dump. Since this is a fledgling hamlet and my garbage trucks are going to need access to all areas, I'm just gonna bang it in the middle of the map - notice my green lines cover all roads on my map so everywhere has coverage for garbage.



Right, time to sort out the budget now we've bought an expensive power plant, a garbage dump and we've got no cash left and while we're at it, we can get on with setting higher taxes to fleece the people! Moar monies!

No time for that, the next milestone has appeared! We are now officially a Worth Village and have access to a load more stuff. And another twenty Gs in the bank ;-)




We get our first chance to branch out and buy more land at this stage although we hardly need it yet. We also get access to a load of new features. We get to use districts, policies, more loans, industry specialisations and services policies. We get access to new services too: fire, police and some unique buildings. Not sure why they're services but hey - I'm sure Colossal Order have their reasons. The industry specialisations we get access to at this stage are forestry and agriculture. The policies are Power Usage, Water Usage and Smoke Detector Distribution. And last but not least, we get access to a bunch of specific decorations: some statues, plazas and that kind of thing. Please understand that if you're new to the game, these unique buildings will not be unlocked - you will have to achieve the individual requirements for each one. you can see that I haven't unlocked the Plaza of the Dead - because I don't like to use cemeteries and I use a mod which automatically empties them when I do so I will probably never get that unless I specifically try for it. Let's talk more about these new features.

Policies - Policies allow you to more specifically control certain features and bonuses for your city. A full list of policies is available in the Cities Skylines Wiki HERE[www.skylineswiki.com] but for now, we have access to three of them. They cut down on power usage, water usage and fire frequency respectively. Each of them costs five cents per building and whilst the fire is reduced by some mythical number, the two utilities are reduced by 15% in their consumption. Taking power as an example, in order to gain 15% efficiency from your power stations, you'd need to run them at nearly 18% increase budget. Since I have no way of knowing how many buildings you have, I certainly can't be bothered to count them and there's another easy way, you can always save your game, activate a policy and then look in the budget panel to see how much your budget increases by. Divide this by 5 and that's your number of buildings - more importantly the total of your policy spend is the key figure to determining if you're getting a good deal or not. If that number is less than 18% of your total power budget then it's a win. Later on in the game, this is often worked out in multiples of power stations - is the total money spent on the policy better value than another plant at thousands of credits capital expenditure and then thousands more against your budget. These kid of policies becomes more and more viable as you get more and more higher density buildings and the more highly specialised industries. Since your cost is always per building and your consumption per building goes up massively with the higher density stuff then at some point the values cross over and you activate the policy. But there's something even better to allow you to take advantage of these policies earlier: districts.



Districts - Districts are great. Not only are they great for the organised and ordered people out there who like to divide their city into neat areas, give them names and love them from afar (you know who you are), but they also allow you to do some very special tricks. First and foremost, you can apply any policies at a district level rather than at a city level. This means that if you have a district with Farming Specialisation, for example, something you can do at this milestone, you can help to offset the buffed water consumption from farms. Farms use 25% more water than your average industrial building so it's much more economically viable to apply a water saving policy to your farming district.

You create a district by using the District Tool and using one of the brushes to "paint" your district.


Once your district is set, you can then click on the (randomly generated) name to open the district panel. At the moment, you can access the same district policies as you have city policies. You can also rename your district here if you so desire.



Industry Specialisation - Specialisations rely on natural resources. A full explanation of natural resources and industry specialisations is available on the Cities Skylines Wiki HERE[www.skylineswiki.com] but for now, we have access to two of them: farming and chopping wood. Both of these are renewable, meaning that you could create districts containing them now and they would last you the entire game - whilst being dependant on a resource for their placement, their resource never runs out. Each of them gives a tax bonus, they make more money basically and they also look nice and add variation to your map. Each of them also has a downside to offset like a greater consumption of utilities and a greater production of waste, for example. Each industry specialisation will generate raw materials relevant to the resources they're using to give to factories and will also produce some processed resources and finished goods to sell to shops.

Using an industry specialisation is a simple as creating a district around some industrial zoning and then selecting the industry you want from the zoning tool. Then wait a moment and your specialised industry will start to grow.



We have very little demand for industry right now but here's a quick example of some farming specialisation.



And some forestry specialisation. Notice that because we have no trees, there aren't actually any forestry buildings per se - nothing creating raw materials - only finished goods.



There also seems to be evidence that farming and forestry industry specialisations can be used to clean up polluted land, as noted here by simonmd
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=413415569

If, however, you're feel you're doing just fine thank-you-very-much then you can also choose to ignore all this completely. You can get a long way in this game without ever using a district, a specialisation or a policy.

Right, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted by that milestone? Ahh, I know: budgets and taxes. We bought a power plant and a garbage dump and we have access to taxes so there's a whole load of stuff we can do to maximise our weekly income and balance the books.

We're now generating a massive power surplus so we can knock back on the power budget somewhat. It looks like we're currently generating 48MW and we only need 14MW. Let's aim for roughly 50% efficiency - about 75% on the budget panel should do it and give us some headroom to grow whilst saving us a few quid in the process. I'm not going to touch the garbage collection as that needs a whole load of investigation in a later test. and if that gets on top of you, it's really hard to catch up and can cause sickness and so on and and ... well you get the picture. It's not worth the bother.

]


24MW - much better. That'll last us for the next phase.

What about taxes? 13% seems to be the magic number. It is the maximum level at which you get nobody complaining about tax early on. I'm gonna set all my relevant tax sliders to 13% for now and come back to it later. And if you think about it, 13% is almost 50% more than 9% when it comes to revenue. Not bad for simply moving a slider.



Now lets get back to making this city. We have all three zones covered and need to play the balancing game of zoning appropriately whilst keeping an eye on services. At some point, we will have to give in to demands for the new fire and police services we unlocked at the last milestone. Fires happen and they destroy buildings. A burning building cannot pay taxes, let alone a destroyed building. Other than that, meh. Let 'em burn. Seriously, fire is not a big deal in this game. It doesn't spread and doesn't cause many problems that I can notice so I leave it out early on. Later on, you'll need fire to get your service coverage up on your buildings to allow them to level up. Fire is especially important to industry for levelling up. Police we'll need sooner, although I've run 50%+ crime rate for years to get some unlocks and whatnot and nobody seemed to care early on. They complain a lot though and your map is covered in little pictures of criminals. Again, you'll need it to level up, increasing both happiness and land value around them.

You've seen the process, so I won't bore you with the details - I'll go ahead and make stuff for a bit and just fill you in on the important stuff.

And before you can blink, Milestone 3 arrives. 1300 population, the title of "Tiny Town" and another twenty grand bonus. Woot.




We get a few more unlocks again. We get access to parks and recreation - vital for city beautification and increasing both happiness and land value. We get access to a few more policies; a couple of bans that offset some happiness for a decrease in either garbage production or sickness and a parks buff which "moderately" increases the effectiveness parks have on land value for a 20% increase in their upkeep cost. We'll test that later. And we get some more unique buildings including some shopping malls, more parks and a fancy office building and also access to the high school. It also unlocks the final buttons on the side menu so you can access info about your population previously hidden from you. Not a big deal if you're using the City Statistics Mod but it unlocks nonetheless. Nothing massively game-changing in this unlock then.



Back to building the city - we've built some more housing and still have a little RCI demand for residential and a lot for industrial. We've also just hit our water limit so the water budget is going up to 100%. That will last us ages as that takes the efficiency of the water pump and poo pipe from 25% to 100%. I'll sort the water problem then go on and meet those demands incrementally and see where we get to.

Well the police, or lack of, started to become a real problem really quickly. Everyone was moaning about the lack of police and some were getting pretty serious. When an icon goes red it means fix me, or I leave.



You can also see here, the first indication that we've reached our current power limit, so it's back to 100% for that.

Trying to fit a single police station in the middle was sadly not an option - it just can't reach all the city, even though we're only a half square in size. Never mind though, since we've been looking after the pennies, they've turned into pounds and we've got loads of cash and a healthy budget. Three police stations it is then :-D I need the coverage to shut people up but I'll drop the budget massively because we're not going to need many police cars actually patrolling.



Clearly, this is horrendously inefficient and nobody in their right mind would actually build like this. there are much cleverer ways of distributing police coverage - joining districts with roads for a start and not building them so far apart in the first place, but since this game is about building an illustrative city, not one optimised from beginning then it doesn't matter.

Having placed the police stations, we've now got lots of RCI demand again - people and businesses obviously like living in a town with lots of police. Since we're trying to be illustrative, I simply buy another plot of land to extend the housing estate naturally. We've only unlocked a single extra piece of land so far so I'll have to make good use of it although the chances of running out of land for industrial and commercial at this stage is small so I go ahead.



For what it's worth, building three police stations, buying more land and laying roads for beginnings of the extension to the housing estate wiped us out of cash. I literally had enough for the exact length of water pipe to finish the job. Glad we have a healthy budget! :-)

I then see my first warning that I have failed in my balancing act! I haven't kept up with the demand for residential zoning quick enough and my shops are complaining of not enough customers. You can see the little icon with a green person and what looks like a small green parcel appear above a shop indicating their lack of enthusiasm for your town planning. Clicking on said shop tells you what you need to know. Once you've opened the detail dialog box, you can hover over the green person icon to find out more info. in this case, they're suggesting we build more houses. Well d'uh. Already on it :-) This applies to any complaint window. if a building complains, click on it then hover over the complaint icon to learn what's wrong and what the solution is. One thing to consider later on is that traffic can cause the same symptoms and so the offered solution isn't always the right one. If I have poor traffic preventing customers from reaching the shops in sufficient numbers then I will get the same message.



Sadly, I didn't fix the problem in time and they left town. Not to worry, someone else will build there in seconds ;-)



Demand for residential is low now but the other two aren't so I need to create some more jobs otherwise my now expanded population is going to do all sorts of nasty things like turn to crime because they won't have a job :-\

At this point, whilst looking into RCI vs population statistics, I noticed an anomaly in the numbers and investigated why. This investigation is available as a separate guide below

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=418467013

That aside, I still have a couple of commercial buildings complaining about a lack of customers and since I have no traffic problems yet, I can only deduce that the balance between shops and customers is about right and should get better as my new arrivals get older and shop more. So since I need jobs but don't want to overload commercial, I'll concentrate on industrial for a short while but only in small increments - keeping an eye on that commercial zone all the time.

Aaaand Boom! There goes Milestone 4 - we're officially a boom town with 2400 population :-)




So what toys this time? Another plot of land to unlock if we need it for a start. We've unlocked the transport service tab, currently just with buses but it's a start. We can now use the Ore Industry specialisation but we won't just yet because it requires educated workers. We've unlocked a couple more policies: recycling for, well, less rubbish in exchange for cash and we can now legalise drugs. Yay. We can do this for a mere 15% increase in the police budget and in exchange we get a drop in crime rate (people probably too stoned to rob someone), we get an increase in tourism (see Amsterdam for details) and an increase in taxes because, presumably we're charging VAT on weed. we also get access to the highways and interchanges, a new fancy off-shore wind turbine which is pants and now we have to think about deathcare.

I'll do a whole load of testing on deathcare another time but there's lot to be learned by the community when it comes to that mechanic and I won't try to address that now. Needless to say, you need to deal with corpses in this game by burying them - we have just unlocked the cemetery - or burning them when you unlock the crematorium later on. treat deathcare like garbage collection. It's a very similar service, which I suspect uses the same algorithms, and it has similar consequences if you fail to take care of it.

Add to that, we've unlocked a few more buildings - some big shiny stuff you can't get anyways because you won't have met their further requirements. They don't do anything anyway so we'll ignore them for now :-)

I've still got this one dude complaining about a lack of customers:



I have way more residential and industrial than commercial and my RCI demand is highest for commercial also. This guy can go swivel. I think he's just greedy - or maybe he's just the last shop in the street and he sells books. Hasn't he heard of Kindle or Audible? Either way, he's going to get bulldozed and replaced by a nice plaza. That'll fix the problem plot if it's a distance thing and make all the other shopkeepers a little happier :-) See ya!



That's much better - his body is under the fountain by the way :-) Aaaand before you start wondering what plaza that is, it's a custom one. I made it like I made dozens more. I have tonnes for every shape, size and occasion. They're really easy to make; so easy that you could literally need a 3x3 plaza with a fountain and some plants and save, go into the asset editor and make one in a couple of minutes. It's that easy. I'm sure there's guides out there ;-)

Here's where we're at:



Not much has changed fundamentally - just a natural expansion of what we already have. I'll need a cemetery very soon, I imagine. Back to the build: need more commercial now that guy has thrown us off balance. We have a fair bit more residential and industrial - time to build more shops :-)

Things start getting a little more interesting at this point - growth is much more rapid, services are required, there's tonnes of demand... and I've had to start thinking about deathcare.

My first corpse. Aww shucks :-) I choose to place my cemetery next to the rubbish dump. Hopefully nobody will get them mixed up :-\ the green lines don't reach nearly as far but I know hearses will travel for miles - again something else we'll test another time - so the middle will do nicely.


And lo and behold, a hearse arrives to pick up dead person 1.


Since then, I've simply done what the game has asked and responded to demands. More power? More power plants. More water? More water stations. More demand? More zones. You get the idea. However, in order to keep the happiness up, raise land value a little and raise health and stop all those bloody fires, I planted both a health clinic and a fire station. I could have chosen not to but since I'd got loads of money and, much more importantly, the budget surplus to cope, I went ahead any built them anyway to reap the benefits.



I've also added two more (yes, two more!) coal power plants and an extra pumping station and poo pipe.



Oh, and plenty of zoning. oooh, and I bought another plot of land to extend the industrial int eh most logical direction. Here's where we're at so far then:

And another one passes by ... Milestone 5 this time. 5000 residents now and a "Busy Town". this is where we start to get our first glimpse of the bigger and better stuff to come.



So what toys this time? Another 2km square to buy if we wish, some more policies, buildings and, rather excitingly, some new roads. We can also now use the Oil industry specialisation. The oil specialisation help to feed an oil power plant if you have one, preventing you from running out of oil if the trucks can't get to your plant quick enough. Believe me, it's quite frustrating when you have a lot of one type of power plant and suddenly they're all out of fuel! It's not something you'll see coming either. Ore specialisation provides coal for the coal plant too. the new policies are transport policies - there's free public transport which is as it sounds: people get to use public transport for free. No income for you but much greater uptake of your public transport network, keeping cars off your roads. Speaking of roads, we now get to use the full suite of roads available, including all of the decorative ones. Decorative roads slightly reduce noise pollution generated by the traffic using them and slightly increase land value. More importantly, they look nice on your map :-) We also get to use the large versions of Police, Fire and Health.

Oh, and we get some more useless, I mean unique buildings :-)



Progress at milestone 5?



We've another garbage dump because the single one was struggling to cope on its own now we're getting larger with more roads, longer routes and more traffic. Traffic is getting busy in places but there are no queues. Everything's running nice and smoothly, just heavily. Other than that, it's been a bit more expansion via zoning and now we've hit milestone 5, I'm about to build our first school Yes that's right, we've just unlocked the University and i'm gonna build our first school. The reason I'm doing this is because the bigger buildings we've just unlocked and, especially with the next lot of unlocks at milestone 6 (high density zoning and offices etc.), we're going to need educated CIMs. We're half way there at 5000 population, it's another 5000 to get to the next milestone but it's just growth by sprawl at the moment. We're bound to get traffic problems soon, we'll need to upgrade services and build a zillion more power plants and when we get to 8000 CIMs, things will get really interesting and we'll move on to the more challenging tasks of optimising this crazy, inefficient city :-)

Let's get that school built to start educating some of our CIMs ready for the push to high density buildings and offices at the next milestone. I'll stick an elementary school down to get things going and place it with my other residential services to maximise the local happiness bonus.


For a more in-depth overview on education at this stage, I've written "A brief overview of education" to help fill in some of those blanks and explain some of the core game mechanics surrounding education.

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=418748662

Now let's keep expanding and see where we get to ...

One thing I notice very quickly is that I'm starting to get more trouble with garbage. I said it was a bit of a pain to manage sometimes ;-) In reality I have, of course, built this city in a very inefficient manner and so even two garbage dumps with a total of 30 trucks working full time can't cope with this small town. Why? Well looking at the statistics, it's not necessarily a capacity. It's definitely being affected by traffic. Traffic is starting to get real heavy, real quick!



Better deal with it before my city dies the slow death of gridlock.

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=418915865

And here's the before and after shots from the first round of traffic fixes.

Before:


After:



All the bin icons have disappeared and people can get to and from their destinations with ease now. That's a result. Just in case you didn't read that guide yet, there is something you MUST learn from it that is essential in building your city:

Originally posted by "Traffic - Understanding and fixing early problems in your city":

So there we have it, we have understood what is going wrong here: our city is being brought to a halt by a mass of export vehicles which leads us to massive conclusion and lesson number 1 when it comes to starting your city:

ALWAYS place your industrial zones next to the highway.

For now, we may continue building...need more zones!

Reaching the final milestone of this test is very much a case of rinse & repeat on the previous rules. But before long, the milestone does indeed appear :-)



Whilst unlocking the remainder of the policies, the most significant addition to your game at this point is that of the High Density buildings and Offices. These bring a whole new dimension to the game and allow you to create true city centres with highrise buildings and offices.

Expansion towards these goals required further implementation of the organic traffic engineering rules to allow for the higher volume of traffic being channelled to the same places. In the residential area, the more astute amongst you will have noticed large gaps in the residential zoning and wondered what they are for. Well here you find out. They were left for the expansion phase where they could be filled with both trunk roads and parks.



Two-lane avenues were placed in between the estates to act as trunk roads then joined together with roundabouts.



The other gaps were then filled with my modular parks system, effectively joining the two sides of the estate for pedestrians and providing a nice land value, recreation and happiness boost.



Once this is done, it's simply a case of repeating the trunk, bough, branch configuration and expanding into the distance.




Ugly, but effective. I also demolished all the small service buildings (except elementary schools) in the residential area and replaced them with the larger ones, centrally located. I also added a couple more elementary schools and spread them evenly. Other than that, it's just build build build to get to the magic 10k CIMs mark.

Commercial required much less expansion but the main square was upgraded to avenues and used as the trunk road for this area. The smaller branches then all come off the trunk road like so:





The convenient gap I'd left in the middle was filled with one of the unique building statue thingimabobs because it looked nice and is a convenient 8x8 size :-)

And as for the industrial area, a second estate was begun with an identical one-way plus roundabout design to expand further. Again it's simple but effective.

If you follow these basic principals of starting a city and getting to the magic 10k mark then you should find by this stage that you have tonnes of money and you have a healthy budget. In this test city, the coffers were overflowing and we were making 8k per week by the time 10k CIMs came to town.



Hopefully by now you have all the money you need and all the knowhow to put it to good use. I hope you've got something useful from this guide and that it will help you to enjoy the game more and to build the city of your dreams without it becoming the city of your nightmares.

The final savegame is available below should anyone care to take a look or play on from here.

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=422136770