Greg Recommends City Skylines

Website: STEAM / Paradox Interactive

As of the writing of this article (October 2017) Paradox Interactive's "City Skylines" is the best city builder on the market. It's basically Sim City except bigger and better in all the ways that matter. It's a relaxing "go at your own pace" ginormous sandbox of opportunity that layers a multitude of systems on top of each other to create a city building experience that keeps it simple enough for beginners but with enough depth and mechanics to keep the expert city builders occupied for hundreds of hours.

Image from the Steam Community

Anyone who has played a Sim City game will immediately be familiar with the 'zoning' system whereby you designate what types of buildings can be built in different parts of your city. You start out every city by laying road down off a preexisting highway into whatever layout you like and then designate different zones (residential, commercial, and industrial to start). Virtual citizens will then start flocking to your tiny town and start building houses and businesses for themselves. The amount of each type of building as well as their location relative to each other matters. Residents will need jobs to work at and shops to frequent and the various industrial and commercial businesses will require workers to run. You need to keep a balance so that your city can keep growing. Keep on eye on the RCI panel to see what type of buildings are needed.

As mayor you're responsible for providing your citizens with basic utilities and so you'll also start off by laying down some water pipes underground and then connect them to a clean source of water for drinking and somewhere else (hopefully down river) to dump your water waste. (Don't worry, you'll eventually unlock more environmentally friendly ways to dispose of your raw sewage). You'll also need to provide electricity via a power plant (cost effective but makes lots of pollution) or wind turbines (expensive but eco-friendly). More options are unlocked later.

As your town grows you'll begin to reach population milestones that unlock more features for you to play with. You'll be 'plopping' down schools, parks, police stations, fire stations, clinics, and public transport buildings that will increase the value of your land so the buildings on it will upgrade themselves while also preventing danger and injury to your little people.

All of this is pretty standard and almost a direct copy and paste job from previous Sim City games. Where City Skylines surpasses Sim City in the basics is in its pathing logic, customization, and logical infrastructure. In Skylines your little people actually live and work in specific buildings while in Sim City your sims take the first vacant building / working spot they can find on their commute to and from work. In Skylines the traffic has always made sense while in Sim City the traffic only kind of makes sense after years of patching to try and fix what was originally a nightmare. In Skylines the relationship between residential / commercial / industry matter, you need to have a good balance to thrive while in Sim City your sims will be happy to live in a city with no stores, no schools, and no jobs.

A traffic solution I build myself!

As your town grows and becomes a city you'll run into problems with traffic. This is normal as the types of roads you had access to at the start weren't designed to accommodate the vast amounts of people who now want to live in your community. The question (and the fun) in this game is 'what are you going to do about it?' How are you going to fix the traffic problems?

Skylines gives you some powerful options for dealing with traffic. You can increase the number of lanes, you can make a road one-way only, you can build ramps and tunnels, but most importantly, you can place roads pretty much however you need to without the game telling you 'you can't do that' or auto-snapping your roads to where it 'thinks' they should go (like a certain other city builder series). There also options for mass-transit (buses, trains, ferries, metro, etc). You can even place or remove individual stop lights and stop signs at specific intersections if you want to really micro-manage traffic flow throughout your city and it will make a huge difference when you do.

Here's a story from my own city. At the entrance at the edge of the map I had a super busy four way intersection. North connected to the highway. South went into the downtown. East went to my farms. West went to my lumber industry. Everyone coming in and going out had to compete with heavy freight traffic wanting to go east, west, and north. Everyone had to stop at the lights and there was always a lineup on all four sides. At first I replaced the four - way with a roundabout so there would be no stoplights. This worked for a while but the traffic didn't flow as nicely as I wanted it to and lineups still happened. I did some brain storming and thought about real life overpasses and then tried to build one myself. It took a little trial and error but I eventually did it, I built my own overpass so now the traffic flows smoothly from every direction, no more stopping, no more slowing, it was a very satisfying feeling when I had finally gotten it to work.

As your city keeps growing it will become beneficial for you to separate it into different sectors. This is easily done from the HUD and costs you nothing to do. Sectors are areas of your city that follow specific rules that affect what your little people can and can not do, how much they pay, and how much they produce. You may want to put pollution restrictions on an industrial zone but also give them permission to double their production by cutting corners on safety. You may want to make an especially high value part of your city pay higher taxes and restrict pets and freight trucks to keep it as desirable as possible. I was especially pleased with the sector option that made large commercial buildings double their sales which ended up doubling my income per month in taxes even for my small city.

Sectors also allow you to customize what specialization your industry will have in that area. Farming (if on fertile ground), forestry, mining, and oil are all options that will produce needed goods for your city as well as a lot of freight traffic to import and export needed materials. It is usually worth thinking through how you will keep your freight traffic smoothly going where it needs to go and away from your busy commuter routes.

You'll also need to set up a garbage disposal system, a 'death care' system, public transport, put down more schools, and experiment with new zoning types (high density residential / commercial and offices). If you have the 'Night Life' DLC then you'll also be wanting to look at the entertainment industry to bring in tourists and the potential for lots of crime.

Underneath the hood of this game there is a lot going on. Your city actually has specific needs that your little people will try to fill. Businesses require workers of varying education levels as well as specific materials to function. Your stores need specific freight of varying types which can be produced by your industries or imported. Your industries require specific materials to make their products. Home and business owners will expand if all their needs are being met so even more people can live and work there. Your little people will drive, bike, walk, and jump between all manner of public transportation to get to work, go to school, go shopping, and go home. Each of these things affects your city and Skylines provides lots of tools to track these analytics. You can see at a glance how effective each of your systems is, and which areas of your city are being overlooked.

As you keep growing things keep changing and the old systems and infrastructure that used to work fine will need to be upgraded, changed, or removed and replaced with something else. The result is an organic city building experience that moves at the pace you set for yourself.

After a while you will start rubbing up against the sides of your portion of the map. That's ok, you're allowed to buy more sections. You can even download a mod that lets you use the entire 5x5 grid to build a massive metropolis provided your CPU can handle it.

Two bus routes and two metro routes combine at the center of town to take everyone where they need to go.

The fun in this game is definitely in the building, the problem solving, and the watching. Planning out how I want my little people to meet their needs and move about smoothly is fun and the Skylines has enough options and more than enough depth to make the planning phase a stimulating endeavor. The robust mechanics ensure that there will always be things to do and problems to solve as well as a multitude of ways to solve them. This game respects you and gives you free reign to use all the tools a real city planner would have and lets you make mistakes so you can learn from them.

The game is also beautiful. It may not be as polished as Sim City (Maxis loved to polish all their stuff) but it still looks great. I sometimes lose track of what I wanted to do just looking at the busy streets and all the traffic flowing like life giving blood through the arteries of a living thing.

screenshot from Jonathan Bolding's review on The Escapist Magazine

It gets better though. The game is fully supported for mods which means the community has put together a very large body of easily added buildings, vehicles, people, utilities, and much much more to grace your city. Simply visit the City Skylines Steam Workshop and start subscribing to whatever content you would like to have access to for free.

The only things I can say that could use improvement in Skylines would be if they had in-game tutorials, campaign or, challenge maps. There are plenty of tutorials online, which are good, and you can download player-made challenge maps, but these tend to be unrealistic.

The game is a bit expensive if you're purchasing the base and all the DLCs at regular price. As is common with Paradox games the base game is always being added to with free features as new DLC is being created while the DLCs themselves still really add a lot to the base and it is worth picking them up if you enjoy the game. Here is a list of the current DLCs and what they do.

After Dark - Adds 'Leisure Specialization' which makes your commercial buildings extra active at night and 'Tourism Specialization' which makes your commercial buildings near the beach a hotbed for tourism.

Snowfall - Adds the option to have a winter city with snow removal being another system to layer on top of your city. Unfortunately there are no changing seasons (yet).

Natural Disasters - Adds the ability to afflict your city with a variety of natural disasters.

Mass Transit - Adds a variety of new mass transit options to get your citizens from point A to point B without clogging your roads.

Green Cities - Adds a bunch of specializations, buildings, vehicles, parks, policies, and scenarios of the eco-friendly variety.

Concerts - Adds the ability to get live performances in your stadium(s) to generate money, traffic problems, and maybe crime.

Cosmetic Packs - There are a variety of packs that add extra buildings from the top of the modding community.

On a final note perfectionists may need to just relax and mentally prepare before playing this game. It is entirely possible to build a perfect city with a perfect grid and a perfect balance of all types of buildings and services. however, I would advice against this and I think that it is far more interesting and freeing to not try and build a perfect grid. Allow yourself to make things unsymmetrical and even (dare I say it) mistakes on purpose. Let your city have some personality. If you try for the perfect grid every time then you'll be frustrated as you run into new options you hadn't considered when you first started building.

City Skylines - Easy to get into, difficult to master, organic, vibrant, deep, mod and community friendly, this is the best city builder in a long time.