A Beginner’s Guide To Cities Skylines

Let me set the scene. You’ve bought your copy of Cities: Skylines, you’ve had a bit of a play through it and seen how the absolute basics work, but it’s not quite what you were expecting. Being in charge of a city is a little bit more difficult than you thought. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the game! You might just need a little help, so here’s a few tips to help you with our beginner’s guide to Cities Skylines!

Set Up Your Water 

One of the first things you’re going to want to do is set up your water and sewage, you can’t have a city without it. So create a road heading towards the closet body of water and look at the direction of the water. You’re going to want your water intake to be placed ahead of the sewage deposit… for obvious reasons. 

You then want another road (a bit further away from the water) to lay residential areas on and use pipes to run water to them. Don’t worry too much about perfect pipe placement, as long as they have water, they’ll be happy. 

Now you just need to add more pipe routes as you add residential zones, nothing too fancy but it’s important to get it started early on! 

PAUSE

You know when you see a guide and there’s one tip where you go “I wish someone had told me that earlier on!” This is that tip. Whenever you’re mulling over something, making a decision, talking to someone in real life, or just anything that takes you away from actually placing something in the game, PAUSE! 

Sitting still and doing nothing while you only have some things placed in the world is a brilliant way to waste a whole load of money. At the beginning of the game, it’s very normal to be in the negatives for a while as you get going . So, losing even more money isn’t too ideal. 

Just don’t forget to unpause when you’re ready.

Select Your Power Source

Getting your power course up and running is another main utility that’s kind of necessary when you begin the game. Not a lot of residents will be overjoyed by the concept of living without electricity. 

There are two main energy sources to choose from, the Coal Power Plant and the Wind Turbines. To be completely honest, the Power Plant is probably a better choice to begin with. It produces much more power for much less upfront costs. (when you consider how many Turbines you’d need to produce the same amount of power) and you’ll only need to dedicate a small amount of land to it. 

Wind Turbines are something you can add later when you have more disposable money. 

Utilise Those Taxes! 

Once you reach 500 residents in your little town you’ll unlock several new features, services, and buildings. One of the features, thankfully, is taxes! They may suck when you’re the one paying them but charging them must be fun right? 

You would be correct. Pretty much as soon as you start charging taxes, (I’d recommend taking them to about 11/12%) your weekly earnings should definitely be in the positives and will probably start reaching deep into the hundreds. 

After this is around when you can start being more playful by creating more roads for more houses and shops. You can start placing essential buildings such as healthcare centres. You may even feel a little more comforted that if something goes wrong, you’ll have the money to sort it out. 

Do you want to know how you can avoid taxing your city-dwellers completely? Check out our piece on Cities: Skylines NO TAX Living! 

Trust Your Citizens

The No.1 piece of advice anyone can give for this game, especially at the beginning, is to trust in your citizens. They know what they want and what they need! As long as you supply what they want, your town will run fine. 

This really is considerably more important in the beginning, because the temptation to go off on your own and create extensive commercial, residential, and industrial zones, when they’re not even needed, is a great way to exhaust a whole lot of cash! 

Just add what they say they want and it’ll be a smooth road to doing whatever YOU want. 

So there you go! Our beginner’s guide to Cities Skylines to make being a first time mayor that little bit more manageable. 

Will you be using any of these tips in your first game? Were there any you already knew or didn’t know? Better yet, do you have any that you think we’ve missed?! Let us know in the comments or over on our Twitter page! 

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