Best City Starts RANKED! - How to start a city in Cities Skylines (no mods required)

[Music] everybody welcome back i'm yumble and today i'd like to give you several options on how to start your city in terms of the road network and also rank those options in terms of how effective they are or maybe how upgradeable they are there's a bunch of decent ways to start your city and i just want to talk about a few viable ones and give you some options because there's no one right way to do it every city is different and every builder is going to choose their own set of parameters that matter to them let's get into it the first city start option that i'd like to present to you is actually the roundabout start this is a well represented option well recommended by many city builders my favorite thing about it personally is that it's it's actually upgradable to something else so this is a this is a decent way to start a low density area but i would not recommend starting a high density area with this exact uh move let me explain what i'm doing i just started doing it without thinking because it's just i've done it so many times use your road guidelines to find the center of your highway network coming off the highway so this is a four unit gap using the guidelines i can see that so i'm gonna go two units over and then make a guide of any amount going vertically upwards and this gives us a very solid starting point for a centered roundabout i'm actually going to go seven by seven so i'm going to do a seven unit i'm using the curved road tool now seven units over with our one-way road seven units down seven units down seven units over it's gonna be the same the whole way around i'll end up calling this a seven by seven roundabout and this is good because it's big enough to handle a bunch of traffic yet small enough to not waste too much space in your new city nice and the next thing that i would have you do is connect your highway to it i don't think it's going to let us use this node without anarchy so i'm going to get as close to the node as i can and we're going to do that the same on both sides i'm using the freeform road tool and the two-lane one-way road just like we built the roundabout with and i'm actually going to once again go as close to the node without it without it uh going sour there there we go so this one is vanilla viable you can do this without any mods another another way to possibly stop the roundabout from breaking because what i've just done probably broke the roundabout a little bit um actually i'm fine with that that's pretty good if you brace the roundabout with vertical and horizontal roads sometimes you'll get better results but i am comfortable with that it's probably a slightly imperfect roundabout but it's okay all roundabouts are perfect in their own special way right and at this point you probably don't have highways unlocked yet so i would go for two-lane one-way road and just downgrade the highway segments as you can just so uh especially if it's this very vanilla city start here the road uh the the lane math works out perfectly where you've got two lanes coming in to two lanes and two lanes going away now from here the obvious move would be to connect some roads to it so you can use small roads you can use bigger roads maybe a four lane road coming off of this might be fine and to keep things simple maybe you just go off in the in either direction so west and east and maybe even south as well so a good reason to use this is that it's simple it's easy it's it's you can do it right at the beginning without mods without anything fancy and you can build your your houses right off this side or the houses right off this side or your industry can be on one side your residential can be on the other and when i say building it off the side of course i just mean building some collector roads just roads to collect traffic to to get them into the city but maybe you build a few of these how far apart are these maybe 12 units or so 13 units it doesn't really matter this is not about perfection this is just about concepts so maybe this becomes your residential area or your shopping area or maybe the shopping area is more towards the middle and then maybe there's some sort of industrial square over here and you and you put your industry just off the highway that would work totally fine until you unlock high density zoning and the moment you start zoning high density on this the roundabout is gonna have a lot of trouble which brings me into my second point a reason that i like this is because you can demolish it with the bulldozer and then build something more substantial so it's very easy to get your city up and running this way and start making money but eventually you may find that you need a four-way lighted intersection or you may find that you need to bring the highway into the city for this to work correctly and you need an interchange in the middle but this is a good starting point and it's highly upgradable and i'd recommend it for that reason the second city start that i'd like to show you i would call it the arterial transition if you remember i said the roundabout is upgradable and when i say upgradable i mean effectively deletable but you can use the pieces that you've already built off of it so even if you built a city of 20 000 and the roundabout breaks down you can always remove it and then do something else something maybe like this i would say that this is more of a parallel to the roundabout start but what i would do to accomplish this is take your four lane road remember how i showed you how to measure to the middle with two units we already did it so for now what i'm gonna do is actually delete the existing highway connection and i'm gonna bring this arterial arterial meaning the artery of the city so this is like a central road that all other roads will come back to i'm going to bring that up right next to these so maybe within within a couple units of it not not right up to it there but maybe we'll back it off by like five or six units maybe even seven units let's see if this works so this is exactly not exactly it's four or five units away from the highway but that's okay we're gonna take our one-way our two-lane one-way road and we're gonna use the freeform road tool and we're gonna approximate an angle off of this we're gonna approximate whatever 90 degrees down is of course you can see there it says 142.9 but if we use the other road guidelines from this network we can click and then add a little connection there so we're essentially converting the highway connection into an arterial connection so free-form road tool down and then connect it at the highway and make sure to get your roads the right direction so turn that one that way the incoming road this is a bit of a thing i don't have a way to overcome this for vanilla players modded players of course use traffic manager to fix the lane arrows vanilla players this may always be a bit of an issue for you but that's okay that's okay so this essentially converts the highway into an arterial road and like i said this parallels the roundabout start it essentially offers all of the same similar benefits but this is this is an okay way to go if you've done the the arterial in this would become a traffic light which is fine which is a okay from here i might recommend using one-way roads to connect towards the interchange or maybe a slip lane one-way road to get out of the to get off the interchange without hitting this intersection so this would cut into the residential area or your or say your industrial area if you started an industrial area here maybe maybe there's a one-way road that enters into that just like that and then goes straight across distributing traffic as it goes or maybe after a unit or two it becomes a two-way road that's all fine you could do that with the roundabout as well but i would call this the arterial road in adapted from the highway interchange our next method is extremely popular this is bringing the highway into your city basically all skylines maps all the vanilla ones on console on pc etc they start with this highway interchange and it implies that you're supposed to bring this highway into your city so if you follow what what they've set the stage for you can take your one-way the two-lane one-way road and just continue that right into the city and also right out of the city and once you've unlocked highway pieces you can upgrade this to two lane or three lane highway that's totally fine but for our purposes today i want to show you how to get cars off of the highway you could if you're if you're kind of wild you could do something wild and crazy like this i don't know if i'd recommend it i don't even know if it's gonna work yeah you could do that so this is i would call that a rural highway interchange the default game is going to add a bunch of lights here and this tiny little segment and that is not going to work well at all that is a terrible way to exit the highway so i'm going to i'm going to do taxi take c backseas and we're gonna do an interchange i want to teach you how to build a diamond interchange for the for the bring your highway in method so we're gonna go up to i think nine is the standard amount that that works yeah nine is good and we're gonna go across the road and i'm gonna make this wide enough hopefully that we could upgrade it to a three-lane highway eventually let's see if this works let's see if this works the way i intend so a 10-unit crossing on top of the road there an overpass just proof of concept here i'm not going to leave this but just to show you later in the game when you decide to upgrade this to highway if you want to do that you can to you can totally do that if you leave uh enough space in between the pillars for now i'm gonna downgrade that again just for just for reasons so this would be the beginning of our diamond interchange and now we gotta get it back to ground on pc you can actually hit the home button and that'll take you right back to ground um that's fine this is going to look a bit weird but i think it would work just fine so we've got a ramp looks like a maybe a six unit ramp there that's an eight unit ramp beautiful it's not beautiful but it's okay so eight units over and then down to ground and then we can connect that to our already existing um situation so this isn't assuming that maybe you've already got stuff built or maybe you started your city this way this is fantastic that overpass is gorgeous the roads are great but oopsie daisy none of them are connected this is where the diamond interchange comes in so we're going to use our two-lane one-way road our best friend basically and we're going to go to the the top of the overpass so where the pillar is on your overpass that you just built go perpendicular off of that and then connect it to the highway wherever it will let you basically this is going to be a very small diamond because of the nature of how these nodes worked out but that's okay for our purposes it's going to work just fine or if you want to be real crazy in a good way i would just go to maybe the next note over [Music] and then connect that oh man that's okay it's better to extend it than to than to leave it short in this situation so that will work with no anarchy with with no nothing that is totally fine if you want to be real smart maybe maybe make the ramp go down a little bit but the values that i'm choosing are going to be let's do seven units over and then we'll go down to six meters and we'll use the freeform road tool to to finish this off and we'll just connect wherever it will let us in this case it's going to let us go there that looks good so that is how vehicles will get back onto the highway from this network even from this side if this is your residential or industrial they'll come across and they'll make this left turn here to complete the idea to make a what i would call a half diamond totally viable city start do the same thing on the opposite side of the overpass i'm going to go down to 6 meters high i'm going to use the freeform road tool to hopefully hit the same exact spot just for looks just i want it to look the same excellent excellent in this situation it would be real smart to avoid that short little connection there or upgrade the roads later or better yet delete both of these and redraw them would be totally fine like for instance in this situation i would do well to get rid of that entirely and then reconnect it like this and ensure that our ramp is also facing the right direction by right clicking on pc so what that gives us is i would call it a half diamond where cars will get off the highway let's say they make this right turn here and they come in here and now they have the option to either continue on this road presumably you're going to keep building into this area or they can take this right-hand turn and then exit whatever way they want to go if they want to go over to this area they want to go over here and inversely if they want to get back on the highway they're going to take the overpass and make this left to depart onto the highway or from this direction they're going to come and make this right to get onto the highway that doesn't really address vehicles that want to get onto this road and and get on the highway this way so obviously just do the same thing in the other direction pick whatever numbers you want i'm going to happen to use seven seven units down to six meters high seven units down to six meters high and we're going to use the freeform road tool to reconnect it to wherever works here that i think is actually identical four meters yep that's the same so this is a a kind of incidentally symmetrical diamond make sure that the ramps are facing the correct way and that's it so now vehicles from this new theoretical area that you've not built yet will have highway access and this is kind of a the us way of doing things having a highway come right through the middle of your city very very effective it's not very quaint it's not very cute but boy does that look good that's a that's a good looking diamond for no no special roads or no special treatment but yeah same rules apply you can exit from this part of the highway into this area by going right or exit left and getting on this way is as easy as crossing the overpass and making a left [Music] or otherwise crossing crossing this way and making a right to go south into town this is a very strong city start this is this is um incredibly strong arguably too strong in certain situations maybe you don't always want an interchange right next to your people living in town i'll give you an option to uh to avoid that as well but yes bringing the highway in very very strong let's assume that you're a builder of taste this next option might be for you this implies that you're going to use the arterial transition to begin with so so i've i've reenacted our transition from the highway interchange to an arterial road you can combine this with roundabouts if you want or it can be lights i'll leave that up to you it's it's totally whatever you want in this case but if you want to go back later and replace this one-way kind of trumpet it's not a trumpet it's a t interchange if you want to take this t system interchange and replace it with a service interchange that crosses the road because you're amazing i would recommend doing this personally this is that high tier option i was talking about um we're going to end up getting rid of this entirely this is a system interchange which means you can connect a highway to it but we're gonna get rid of it and make a service interchange which basically means highway exit and entrance so with that said without further ado let's get crazy oh god so i didn't really mean to delete the highway there but i think we'll do just fine um let's actually convert all of these to three lane highway i'm just going to put that back the way it was convert all of these so now just like the diamonds start so we had to bring the highway in and we made a diamond let's do a not bring the highway and start to be super next level now this implies that you're going to take this arterial road and bring it up over the top and also i wouldn't actually do this this is more of a a way to for vanilla players or console players this is a way to continue your game in a really good way for pc players who are okay changing the game a little bit with mods you might want to do this initially but what we would end up doing is making an overpass so using that that node right there i'm going to go up 10 units just like we did with the diamond maybe we'll give ourselves a little more space so maybe we're going across 14 units sure i'm just making this up 10 units down to ground 10 units down to ground that's great and now we've got access to both sides of the road the diamond interchange that i showed you if you want to hinge your entire city off a diamond you can but i think that you're gonna run out of steam and wish that you and wish that you brought the highway in if you're gonna do that so for this situation i would recommend a service interchange i'm gonna throw some names out there you might have to research these on your own i have videos about these but you can use a parklow which is a partial cloverleaf an example of it that i've built looks like this actually i'm going to end up implementing this one in just a second but a parklow is a nice way to get cars off the highway using an overpass and an interchange a spoolie or a single point urban interchange is another great option you might have heard of a diverging diamond which is like the the darling of the interchange world these days a lot of a lot of places have been upgrading to diverging diamonds you can find example of these on on the workshop you can find videos of how to make these on youtube i've got several but what i'm going to do for now is just delete this whole thing because i've already made the video outlining how to do this feel free to watch that one if you're curious i'm just going to throw in a parklow and i'm going to approximate i'm going to approximate where the connections are so just kind of looking at the already existing roads and the angles something like that looks pretty good so this one's pre-made feel free to build your own in fact i think it's very rewarding to learn to build your own and the benefit of this is actually pretty enormous i'd say it's for people who don't want to build a city that's entirely highway based because you end up with kind of a nasty situation you end up with this big highway running through the middle of your city which for some of you that might be the reality that you live within i actually did a great job lining oh never mind i did a very mediocre job lining this up but hopefully you'll do better than me that's okay so the result is rather than a system interchange which converts this highway into the city you're getting cars off of the highway using these ramps so it's a highway entrance and a highway exit that turns into this arterial road which is perfect now you're now you're going on and off on both sides of the highway maybe this continues up just for a little a little spit ball in here maybe it continues up and crosses the railway or maybe it goes under the railway that's up to you i don't mind a good at-grade crossing uh maybe this just let's mix it let's mix it with our other with our other start let's make a quick roundabout a 7x7 like we talked about earlier throw in a quick roundabout there why not and maybe this is where your city really takes shape or maybe it's a four-way intersection and and there's a light there i don't i don't mind either way both are viable if you're building a european city it would probably be a roundabout or maybe even these would be roundabouts or maybe this would be a dog bone interchange or something different but now you can build your city off of this instead and they can get across the highway if they want to and you have the benefit of not having cars whizzing by at 100 kilometers per hour or 65 miles per hour past your little neighborhood you just built i think that this is a wonderful option vanilla players will have to learn how to build this on their own because i don't think it's included with the base game people that have access to the game on pc that have access to the workshop can download these i have my own versions and other players have plenty of versions of system interchanges which are very very helpful but i think this is a wonderful way to build your city a way a way to use the already existing highway that we have to use and ultimately get off the highway get the cars out of the highway and into your livable spaces that you've designed i endorse this 100 after all that greatness i just want to take a moment to recognize what i would call the my first city city start so this is my first city i started on nintendo switch make no mistake i i play a heavily modded copy of skylines now but in my first city you better believe that i built some roads you i built some roads coming off the road and then i and then i went across and i and i built some other roads because i realized after i started building neighborhoods over here on some random layout that the cars couldn't get back onto the highway and i said oh well i gotta connect it back to the highway so i did this and i did that and i built neighborhoods coming off of this and every single road that was connected to this was backed up every single road led to this and it was just absolute hell this is how not to build a city in my opinion this is the this is maybe it would work in a very low density situation but in any in anyone's experience once you get high density zoning this is going to break down so quickly it ignores the principles of road hierarchy entirely i have another video called road layout inspiration which which kind of focuses on road hierarchy so i'd recommend checking that out as well just for concepts but i wanted to pay homage to my first city this is this is yumbles this is a recreation a re-enactment of my first switch city and i learned so much i learned a lot about the game and i learned a lot about life and and love and heartbreak and and and growth so please feel free to start building like this but then realize very rapidly that you're going to want a a better city start because your entire city depends on it and here it is the actual tier list all of the options that i've just given you ranked please do not use option d the my first city option was my first switch city i would not recommend that but maybe we've all been there so i figured i'd include it no c tiers for this one but b tier i've put it as a tie for the roundabout slash arterial options so you can convert that city that highway interchange into an arterial road or you can bring the highway in and connect it to a roundabout both are viable both are upgradeable either can be used it's realistic enough it works out but they also might break down at higher density populations so for that reason i put them at b tier highway in is the next step up at a tier it's very good bringing the highway into your city is a very very very strong option probably the best one for major high density areas but the downside is you have to bring a highway into the city and now you've got your your sims sitting next to this major roadway and you've gotta look out for noise pollution and it doesn't always look as beautiful as it could doing it that way which is why i've placed at the s tier at the very top s is for service interchange please feel free to use a service interchange to get your cars off the highway if you don't want to bring the highway into your city any further and you'd rather just create a nice exit and an off-ramp and an on-ramp for cars to have access to the highway without a highway going past your sims houses and businesses i would absolutely recommend using a service interchange whether it's a parklow a single point urban interchange a diamond there's a myriad of interchanges i've got tutorials for all of them but everyone that is going to conclude this video thanks for hanging out i've been yumble i stream on twitch twice a week i make youtube videos generally two a week feel free to subscribe here if you'd like i also have discord server if you'd like to join our community please feel free to come post some pictures of your city and maybe ask for some traffic help if you'd like but that's all i've got for today everyone thank you for hanging out i've been yumble i'll see you in the next stream or the next video

Channel: YUMBLtv

Views: 104,553

Keywords: how to, city start, city skylines, highway, start a city, biffa, cityplanner, tutorial

Id: HpLBayIV5xQ

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021