Cities Skylines Guide: How to Start (Beginner’s Tips)

Start Small

You see the expansive land before you at the start of the game and your first instinct might be to go nuts with roads. It can be tempting, with the first task before you being to connect the highways to roads. It’s so easy to get crazy with it and populate the city with a bunch of residential, commercial, and industrial areas. This is a really common mistake starting out, you definitely don’t have the economy to think big right now. Start small, maybe with a small square at the start, next to the highway roads. Get plenty of residential, a good industrial space, and commercial in between the two to keep citizens from getting sick. You need money to fund the electricity and water supply for the whole area too, so keep that in mind when budgeting.

Stay Away from Some of the Policies for Awhile

The policies in Cities: Skylines are pretty great to make your city your own and ensure you have a unique experience every time you play. However, they’re incredibly costly. For example, the smoke detectors would be amazing as there are less fires thanks to them, but they instantly will put you in the red if you’re not making tons of money. So to start, lay off of the policies. Or maybe just focus on enabling the energy and water conservation ones.

Fire Houses are SO Tiny

You’ll notice your buildings will burn down a lot. Fire Houses supply only five firemen for an area, so once the fire station is unlocked, you’re already big enough to need those. Start investing in a lot of fire stations, especially if you don’t have the smoke detector policy enabled (because of its aforementioned costliness).

 Public Transportation Is, Like, Important

Traffic is disgusting. It only gets worse as you grow your city and realize you didn’t fill it with roundabouts beforehand. Unless you’re a master civil engineer, you’re going to have some difficulty annihilating traffic within congested areas. Luckily, public transportation exists in Cities: Skylines so you have to make sure to take advantage of bus lines and metro stations. The free transportation policy helps give your citizens an incentive to not take up space with their own cars, too.

Seriously, Don’t Forget About Districts

It’s easy to forget about districts within Cities: Skylines, but always keep them in mind when you’re expanding your city. Want to build more industries? Click the info view at the top left and look for natural resources you can exploit. Build your industry area over forestry, oil, anything that you can use to make a money making district for your city.

Check Unique Buildings Often

Unique buildings are unlocked after certain conditions are met within your city and can boost the hell out of your tourism. You may not even notice you’ve unlocked a new one; the game really needs to do a better job of letting you know. Just check the unique buildings tab often so you’re not missing out on any great new additions. You can only build them once and they’re required for building the games’ ultimate buildings: monuments.