Cities: Skylines has been making waves, selling big and garnering a lot of great feedback after releasing in early March. However, some gamers have found themselves in need of a bit of help when it comes to tackling some of the more advanced techniques for building a successful city.
First up, if you wanted to learn how to make use of the asset editor there’s a neat tutorial that Biffa2001 has for putting together your own customized assets. One thing worth keeping in mind is that depending on which way you drag directional assets is the direction that the asset will face. You can check out the video below.
Biffa2001 has a complete playlist for many of the different tools and options available in Cities: Skylines, including a look at the game’s map editor, which is the first video in the playlist that you can check out below.
Keep in mind that editing maps enables you to choose how the terrain will look when it’s time to make your own city. You can alter everything from the height maps of the terrain; use sculpting tool to raise and lower mountains, add in forests, ship paths, roadways, airways, and even utilize the water tool so you can have a city spread across a watery sea, Dubai-style.
If you’ve had any kind of familiarity with the Far Cry map maker then you’ll be right at home with the editing tools in Cities: Skylines.
Another useful piece of video help comes from YouTuber Strictoaster. He has a series of videos that showcases to gamers how to design more advanced roadways, freeways, farms and city infrastructures.
If you want a look at how to design complex, advanced road designs for your city, Strictoaster has a neat video that clocks in at just over 10 minutes showing how to do road conversions, creating avenues from freeways and expanding your roads to include some artistically roundabout designs. You can check it out below.
If also need to check out his guide for making basic roads, or you need a little help with a few other features in the game, such as designing a functioning and thorough railroad system, Strictoaster also has a few videos to help you with that stuff as well.
In a short video series you can see how to utilize some of the more advanced features in Cities: Skylines for transportation with the playlist below.
Speaking of transportation and roadways… that brings us to another important aspect of Cities: Skylines… artificial intelligence.
Apparently the AI got a wee bit slapped with the derp stick in the noggin and they have some issues with complex roads. If you watched the video above and have a really cool roadway setup in your city, but you find that the AI are acting quite petarded, you may need to make a few alterations. Steejo does a fantastic job of explaining how some of the AI routines work and why they sometimes make the decisions that they do when getting on or off the freeway or how they ride the main roads.
You can check out the video below to get a bit of help when it comes to the traffic AI.
Now there have been some basic guides out there for zoning in Cities: Skylines – how to put down the roads, power stations and civilian housing – but maybe you’re looking for a bit more help on more advanced ways to build your city without screwing everything up?
Well, a lot of the zoning boils down to economic management. So how do you manage your economy so you can zone your city properly and get the biggest dollar return on your city design? Well, N3RDVINE Gaming has a breakdown on how to monitor, manipulate and maximize the potential from your citizens, as well as how to get corners and bolster profitability for your city. It’s a quick video so you won’t have to worry about spending a lot of time listening to accounting jargon. You can check it out below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=MJv7-PZcT0s
Cities: Skylines is available right now, exclusively for PC. The game is racking up all kinds of overwhelmingly positive feedback for its user-friendly design, modding capabilities, Steam Workshop integration and offline single-player options. You can learn more about the game by paying a visit to the official website or you can scoop up a copy if you haven’t already by visiting the Steam store page.