5 Top Things Players Ignore But Shouldn't in Cities Skylines!

would you like to know how to build better cities in vanilla and modded city skylines and would you like to know the five things that most people miss when they're building their cities so you don't make the same mistakes if so stick around for my five top tips for building better cities in city skylines so my first tip involves something that a lot of people do at the start of the game so they get their brand new map they've got their entrance off the highway and they will do something along these lines okay so you put some roads down you get the basics of your city up you get your water you get the electricity and then people tend to do this well we want our industry over here away from all of our residential we want our residential over here so they'll fill in a load of residential and then they might say we'll just put some commercial down here along the main road and there we go anything okay that's fine if we get into your first targets things will build things will work it won't be too bad but then what happens as they expand their city they keep this mindset going and i've seen huge swathes of city that have been built that have industry forever going in one direction residential forever going in one direction and commercial forever going perhaps always along the main road which is is sort of good um but always in another direction and then what happens you are on a bad slope to a bad city why is that we're taking this not too fantastic start to a city we need to think we need to think we're going to talk about a lot about using our brains thinking when we're building a city so what is going to happen here well the people that live in the residential zones they want to shop now the shops aren't too far away that is not too bad but then where are the shops going to get their goods from but they're going to get them from over here from the industry so the industry's going to have to come through this roundabout over here deliver and go back again also where are where are residents gonna work well they need to come and work over here in our industry so they're gonna be traveling through this roundabout over here traveling back again and immediately we're starting to get a bottleneck through this roundabout here and we're going to get a lot of crossover of traffic and then you extrapolate that forward into the future where you've got a big load of industry here maybe a big load of residential that's spread over here you're starting to put residential down the river your commercials going down the road and suddenly everybody in your residential is traveling all the way over here to your industry all of your massive industry that you've built over here is now traveling all the way over here to your commercial and things are getting very very difficult with the traffic so that is something to keep in mind from when you start your cities small to when you expand them bigger build better cities there's nothing wrong as i said is starting off a city this way but once you start expanding you get more squares available to you don't be afraid to rip things out and make them better and of course as you get more options available to you as you expand your city offices become available places for educated citizens to go and work nice and nearby they can walk to those a nice buffer from the noise of the highway as well put your commercial in the middle as well that can also be good yes you're gonna get some trucks possibly dropping off some good but little commercial hot spots like that people can walk to them a lot better rather than having commercial maybe spread out over here we'll have the commercial next to the industry because the goods can be taken right there but now our residential people have to travel all the way over here for work and for commercial so thinking again about where people travel and making good use of the different zones that you have available to you this is a very small tip when starting out this will work for modded and vanilla but let's dive a little bit deeper with our next tip number four and at number four we have better transport options let me ask you do you use all of the transport options available in your city well you might be saying yes i've got trains yes i've got buses yes i've got those sort of items set up in my city where they're needed but do you use all the transport options what other transport options are available to you don't forget walkability and bike ability as well now these things are very important because your citizens will walk and they will bike a long long long way to get to where they need to go and the more people that are walking and biking the less people are driving and perhaps clogging up your transport lines in your city for those of you that follow my new tealand series here which is the city we're using for our examples in one episode we had somebody jump on their bike and bike from our very busy airport here all the way down this road all the way past this area i can't covered where they went i think it was down here all the way through here and they biked all the way over to the other end of the city even though there are transit options available they wanted to bike all that way so don't forget walkability and bike ability also while we're on this one think about your transport options as tiers so whereas you want as much walkability and bike ability as possible in your city you start off by putting bus routes into your city and then when you find a particular route that is getting overloaded could you upgrade that maybe to a trolley bus maybe to a tram that has higher capacity vehicles and then really if you're seeing people that want to travel a very long distance now you're getting into your metro your trains maybe your boats and your monorail so view these as different tiers as people want to travel more on your lines think about upgrading them to higher capacity lines now if you're playing in vanilla non-modded mode of course you have your pavement path and you have your bicycle path and if you're playing modded you may want to download paths such as this the pnb pavement plus you have that with trees and without trees and that is pavement and pedestrians bicycles all in one little uh network that you can place down they get their own separate lanes and then on to number three and particularly this is for those that play with mods because we are going to be talking about mods so again we're going to mention using our brain we want to think how we can make better decisions with our transport options that we've been now using in a better way after point number four and one mod that really helps with this is the commuter destination mod so what does this mod do for you well let's have a look at our transport tab and we'll go into one of our lines here we're going to check out our metro lines i've got a line here that's got 1 684 weekly passengers half of those are tourists which is fantastic so if we click on this little magnifying glass here and we're going to go down to one of our stops that is filled with a lot of people which is the biggest one probably this one here yep 380 odds there we go and we get this little box that pops up on the screen that tells you how many passengers waiting and if we zoom out it will show you where all these passengers want to go there we go so if we look over here we have this little symbol that's now being put above these buildings i believe this is the same symbol for the walk-in uh little setup that you can do within the game but it's been used in this mod and if we just move over here look we can see a lot of those people are wanting to come over to this area and the larger the square the more people are coming over here so with this sort of information you can now make better decisions about where you want your transport lines to go and you can click on here go through the stops see how many people are waiting there we go so 461 at this metro stop in here which is our main hub and a lot of those are coming over to this other island so you may say well maybe we'll set up a boat that goes across there or some other transport option but the commuter destination mod fantastic mod for making good decisions something else you can do and you don't really need mods for this but you need access to the steam workshop is to download some different capacity models for your transport options now we're looking at the option here of the metro and as you can see all of these vehicles have 150 in there in fact we don't really need this many trains on here most of them are not even half filled but let's say this line was over subscribed lots of people wanting to travel well we could then download an asset that has a larger car and we have one here the ride sydney metro 5 car and if we go over to this really big line here where i've used it we can see that these vehicles hold 750 passengers so that is really going to help when you're moving lots of people around to areas that are very popular in your city and of course you can do this with your buses your monorail your ferries anything in the game you can download a larger asset to use wow there's a lot of people using that metro station down there coming to our bus hub that is what i like to see fantastic there are also other mods available that allow you to change the capacity of vehicles already in the game advanced vehicle options i think being one of those if you would like to do it that way but yeah that is another option to help you move your people around in your city in a better way so now number two is use proper road hierarchy and lane mathematics so very simply what do we mean by road hierarchy i've just laid some roads here to have a look at so we've got our highway roads at the top going in each direction of course and that would be your main arterial roads that you would have going through your city they would be the fastest road they would carry the most traffic then you have your collectors these can be of various sizes the larger sort of collector roads that we have in the game the six-lane road they can also be used as an arterial as well from time to time but if we think of these as collectors i pretend i tend not pretend i tend to use the four-lane roads as collectors they will collect you could say the cars the traffic from the arterial road and bring it through to our next set of roads which is your local streets and your local streets the smaller two lane roads come in all different shapes and sizes with trees without with bike lanes all the rest of those ones but these are the ones where people live these are the ones where people drive on have their houses on maybe go shopping on so when you're laying out your cities when you're thinking of planning you want to think of the roads as going from larger to smaller or perhaps you're building at the start of your city with smaller roads then you want to collect a connect to other areas you will use your road collectors and then eventually they will hook up to your arterials your highway so we've got a good example over here and as you can see we have the highway that runs from east to west across our city here and when we come off of our highway into this residential area we have a roundabout in this example and then we have our collectors and i've used actually a different road as a collector it's got four lanes but it's a very small road but it's the same it's got four lanes and that goes east to west again and also goes up to the north here and then coming off of these collectors we have these smaller local roads which is where people live what else do you notice about these roads well also the larger the road as we said the faster they go the more traffic they are made to carry but also the smaller amount of connections will be on the larger road so the arterial here i mean it goes all the way from over here all the way through here all the way up here it takes in a huge amount of this part of the city it has one connection over here one connection over here and i think there's one over here as well a little connection but that is it three connections on this big area then you have a look at our collectors that are coming off of the road here this one this one and this one and they've got more connections so this one's got one got two and then it heads off to an unpopulated area we'll go north it's got one connection there one connection there one there and then it dead ends at our nice uh transit hub and this one here one connection one connection one connection and then it sort of meets up with this other collector over here but then we get to our smaller roads our local streets and they've got connections every block so we've got the normal sort of size block here uh 10u long and yeah connection connection connection all over the place and that's okay because there's a small amount of traffic coming through here so what is the benefit of building in this way well let's just take a look at this area so maple height i'm pretty sure that covers all of this area how many people do we have in here so three and a half thousand people not too big not too bad but look at the traffic there is no traffic at all in here because there's not many people using these roads only the people that live on them are using these roads and then the collectors are bringing people to the highways then they can shoot off to their destination we also have good use of transport options in here as well also in this area we've made good use of our zoning so you can see where our residents all reside you can see where the shops are we've got little nodes of shops some are down are larger collector roads some are in the middle here with our local roads and then we've also used offices so we've got little clutches of office zones popped here and there for people to work in there's some over here as well just for the way that looks and that definitely helps this area a lot and with the fact that these local roads are nice and close together we've got good walkability which is good you can see a train line going off here to another destination we have buses we have easy access to everything and anytime there's a dead-end road i've added a path in we've got another one over here to enable people to walk around so overall that means that there is no traffic in this area so use proper road hierarchy and along with this i would say use proper lane mathematics so again what do i mean by this well let's come down our highway over here and we've got these two lanes coming down i've added in a slip lane so we've added in one extra lane so if we go from here we've got three lanes one goes off and then we have two that carry on and then if we zip on over here we've got uh it comes back up to three again i've actually done bad lane mathematics under there so we're gonna ignore that but where it joins at the other end bad example differ but that's okay and i tell you why because i use my brain and i know that there's not much traffic coming through here so at that point i made a different decision but generally speaking lane mathematics one lane coming on plus two lanes goes to three lanes and it means everybody coming on can have access to their own lane and then normally what i'll also do in here is use traffic manager which we'll come back to and we'll grab our lane connectors and i would give everybody their own lane if you go there you go there and you go there so they can all merge on there we go and then they merge together back down to two lanes again and we can see that works really really well now in vanilla you can do that as well now mostly in vanilla you would perhaps use three lane highways all over the place so then when the road goes off like this go down to a two-lane road and then when it comes back on again all the way at the other end it goes two lanes plus your one back to your three lane highway and even in vanilla that can keep things moving much smoother and then as we're talking about modded cities as well you may want to get some more road options that will help you with this so these are the ones that just come with city skylines around tick this box here we've got a whole load of extra rows that can be added in there we go we'll do the same over here and these come from the vanilla plus plus pack that you can find on the steam workshop i will of course link to all the mods we're talking about in the description below but they add all sorts of extra roads great to help with putting into practice road hierarchy and lane mathematics and one other thing these help with as well is asymmetrical lanes which of course will help with lane mathematics and dedicated turning lanes which are very helpful for keeping traffic moving and with your extra asymmetrical roads you can set up junctions like this where when you enter into the junction there is a lane dedicated for each turn that you want to make into that junction and coming out into these other roads and again that just helps things run really smoothly so don't dismiss dedicated turning lanes as well so at number one is a mod that i know a lot of people use they will install but they don't fully understand it they miss a lot and that is of course the traffic manager mod and as a mod it contains a lot of different tools i've got it up here in my unified ui mod and here we go i'm using the 11.6.1 test version now a lot of them are quality of life tools but ones such as the lane connector where you can literally force cars to go where you want them to go the tool to change the speed limits on roads as well which is absolutely a necessity to me enable for me to enable me to direct the traffic where i want it to go and also the priority signs when we look at roundabouts here with the priority side option turned on you can have give way signs coming into your roundabout something i think is sorely missed from city skylines uh stop signs are okay but they just slow the traffic down too much with a giveaway sign you can see they slow down they're checking whether they can go and then they keep moving just as things work in real life but one of the big things that people miss with this tool so they install the tool at the mod they start using all the tools inside it was if we go into our game options go down to traffic manager and look down here at the simulation accuracy now when you first install this mod this will be set to i think that'll be very low and this will be turned off now you want a i changes or the simulation turned on so that will be added traffic ai for the way all sorts of things work in the game will be changed to the way that traffic manager wants it to work and then you've got the simulation accuracy now depending on how good of a pc that you're using i tend to have this around medium that works quite well for me even though i do have a high spec pc that is plenty for my setup and then go into gameplay and the advanced vehicle ai this will be set to off but you really want this turned on it does a lot of things to help the game work out the best way to have your cars and your vehicles moving through the game dynamic lane selection i also put that up to about 70 other people do different amounts uh that's fine you can sort of fiddle with that as you want but a lot of people miss those two things so i would definitely turn those two on and of course there's all sorts of other tools and tweaks that you can do in here one of my favorite ones is the timed traffic lights let's say you've got two collectors like this meeting together this was super busy you could put a roundabout in but you could put a time traffic light and it's got the quick setup control left click like that and it automatically sets it up it's got a time section for people to cross over everybody gets an option to go and it just does it all automatically for you and will work with the traffic you've got so that is an absolutely invaluable tool and as you get a bit more clever with this tool you could do manual time traffic lights and set them up yourself if you enjoyed these tips and would like to see more check out the playlist on the screen which will take you to my traffic fixing series and also be sure to subscribe so you can see me building cities like this one in new zealand thanks for watching have a great day take care bye

Channel: Biffa Plays Indie Games

Views: 279,233

Keywords: cities skylines how to start, Cities Skylines best mods, Cities Skylines, how to fix traffic cities skylines, cities skylines how to fix traffic, biffa plays, cities: skylines, cities:skylines, cities skylines how to fix your city, biffa2001, city builder, cities skylines traffic, cities skylines traffic fix, cities skylines fix your city, cities skylines 5 tips, cities skylines top 5

Id: cclpV8N4d1g

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021