- Cities Skylines How To Create Elevated Road
- Cities Skylines How To Build Elevated Roads
- Cities Skylines Bridges Over Highways
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. Make sure that the mesh is aligned parallel to z-axis length-wise and to center the mesh to scene origin. If your road has pavement make it 0.3 units high to match built-in roads and set the pavement's level to 0 in y-axis so that the road is slightly sunken.
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
Cities Skylines How To Create Elevated Road
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.
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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Cities Skylines Making Large Cities Guide by Accurina
From what I see, some people struggle after a while when they reach around 80k population or so and they get stuck with no demand for RCI (Residential, commercial, industrial) so I have decided to make a guide to help you make your dream huge city, at the time I posted this the city has already grown to 260k population and rising. Note you should at least have a good/working economy and some money stashed up (preferably somewhere around 20k profit/week, if you try doing this with a brand new city I have no guarantee your city will even live pass the 3rd year.
So here is my city
Here are the steps you need to do to expand your city
1) Set tax relief for High density Buildings
With Tax relief on high density buildings, even with no demand there will be 1 building sprouting up every 5 mins or so, meaning lots of afk time while waiting for them to appear.
2) Lower the education standard
Not going to lie, this step hurt my feelings as I want my citizens to be all miniature Einsteins, but people with lower education levels tend to produce more babies which = positive birth rate= more people = housing demand. Also they can help out in the industry which requires a lot of low/no education level people to run them ( I had industries with 16/16 workers all being university graduates, all over educated for their job, yeah too smart )
probably a link somewhere there ^
Cities Skylines How To Build Elevated Roads
3) CREMATORIUMS
With a huge population, people die, and not one or two, like A LOT OF THEM, basically you NEED to stack like 8 crematoriums next to each other in order for them to pick up the dead bodies to prevent your buildings from becoming abandoned, I had like 50-70 crematoriums all spread out over the city, of course investing in good healthcare is important to prevent your people from dying which helps the problem too. This applies to incineration plants and ( example at the bottom right of the pic or the middle, #Crematorium #Industrialisation)
Actually really morbid
4) Traffic
With a huge city comes with huge responsibilities and I suffered HORRIBLE traffic, basically there were lines of vehicles like 8 blocks long, so in order to fix it what you do is:
FIRST- See where most of the vehicles are going
SECOND- Build Highways/1 way roads, also try to aim for there being at most a T junction on a busy road, cross junctions have massive jams.
THIRD- make sure that there are places for cars to filter out, some vehicles want to reach A while others B so having different routes for them to take helps to reduce jam.
This step is important as it affects EVERYTHING, your industries will suffer lack of materials, lack of goods reaching commercials and most importantly, HEARSES CAN'T REACH DEAD PEOPLE. All of which causes abandoned buildings, or burnt down ones in the case of a fire. Also only use LARGE ROADS, unless it's a tiny outskirts with only offices, LARGE ROADS, important, also all my roads have trees increasing land value thus allowing easy level ups for buildings, sound barriers on highways are important too.
5) Save up before doing the above
By doing this, your income will PLUMMET HARD, since most of my income comes from high density residential, it caused me to make a huge loss in profits, luckily I already had a working industry+commercial and had park boost, fire alarms, education and many more which i could disable, I recommend building your city with those activated as it gives you a sort of 'emergency fund' which you can disable to bring you back into the green should you find yourself in an economic spiral of doom.
I basically left the game on when I was making a huge profit of 20k/week and saved up till I had 3 million or so. To give you an idea how important this step is, when I set all the high density building types and offices to have relief, I was making a loss of 200k/week, yeah. You might want to set only 1 building type with relief at a time.
I used these policies for my city, deactivating smoke, recycling and education when I need money. You can also increase taxes up till around 11% before people start complaining with tax raise on, or 12% without it, its important to see whether they complain about too high taxes as it leads to abandoned buildings.
Cities Skylines Bridges Over Highways
I don't think tourism is that useful for making money, but if your city manages to live off tourism let me know.
Well that's all the tips I can think of for now, I'll try to give more tips after I see what worked, not easy remembering what works as it seems like a natural thing to do.
Additional things
– If you want monuments and such, work towards them early on in the game, later on if you try doing those like oppression centre with 50% unemployment rate of higher, its impossible and your economy will crash and burn.
– Try managing noise pollution as high noise pollution will make people sick
– Do NOT, and I mean DO NOT build dams up stream near your coast if you have important buildings there, it will flood your entire coastline, dams aren't really useful anyway as they make about 30-50 MW while the solar power plant makes 160 MW. Early on in game its simply a huge cash sink and isn't useful compared to large roads/bridges.
– I still have no idea how to fix the lack of raw materials problem, and there's a ship going in circles on land and into the buildings O_O
– So far I'm still getting more population, maybe I'll get up to 1 million XD
