Cities: Skylines 2 – beginner tips for the best possible start

It’s important to start small. Any Cities: Skylines player will tell you there’s a long and potentially complicated road ahead as you grapple with the intricacies of developing your city. That’s why there’s no shame in keeping it simple. Choose the smallest map and take it slow at first. You can always scale up later. Once in your map, use the tab to check for resources, so you know what you’re working with.

A core tenant of Cities: Skylines 2 is to separate your zones. The likes of residential, commercial, and industrial zones should never mix, unless you want to negatively impact your citizens. For example, industrial zones generate harmful air and noise pollution. Trucks passing through will also cause traffic problems. That’s why you should decide early where to put each zone and stick to it. No one likes to live next to a factory.

Make sure to check the wind directions as well, since air pollution travels along with the wind.

The quickest way to get an early influx of cash is by using roads. By implementing a policy called roadside parking fee, you can charge people for parking, and watch the money roll in. OK, it’s more of a trickle, but it’s better than nothing. You can set up each district with its own bespoke policies, so try the roadside parking policy in one and see how it goes before applying it to more districts.

Producing cheap green energy, such as through wind turbines, and selling it to other cities is another clever way of making money.

For an even quicker source of money, you can try raising taxes. Doing so increases your revenue, but of course, nothing comes for free. The downside is citizen happiness – the higher you raise taxes, the less happy they’ll be. That will grind your city to a standstill as you won’t attract new inhabitants, your population size will stagnate, and new wealth will be harder to generate. It’s recommended to keep your tax rate at 12%, which is the perfect balance between money for you and happiness for them.

Don’t neglect public transport. This is vital to increasing traffic flow through your city and avoiding any nasty traffic jams. Buses are the cheapest tier of public transport, so start with them. Unlike with trains or trams, you don’t need to modify your existing road layout; just place bus stops along your desired route. Later on, you can use bus routes as an indicator for popular areas, then build subways or a train system along those routes, catering to as many people as possible.

Building cargo terminals in your industrial zones helps alleviate traffic issues as well by getting cargo trucks of the road and on to the rails instead.

Paths are an underrated aspect of Cities: Skylines 2. You can use them to link up areas for pedestrians, who will always prefer them to roads. When pedestrians travel by paths, it not only reduces the amount of traffic on roads, but makes people happier and healthier, since they’re not sharing the same space as cars and breathing in all those nasty fumes.

Cities: Skylines 2 contains a faux social network called Chirper. This is a key insight into your citizens’ wants and needs. If there’s a problem, people will write about it on Chirper, letting you identify immediately what area of your city needs fixing. It’s essentially an in-built tips Discord channel allowing you to get to the root of the problem and make improvements fast.