Starting off a new city in Cities: Skylines can be challenging, and one of the most difficult aspects of just starting off is setting up your roads. You don’t have a lot of initial funds to work with, and you need to get your power water and sewage setup. These leaves very little money for your roads. Which brings us to one of the most common questions revolving around this game, “What is the best starting road layout I can use?”.
I’m not going to give you a hard defined layout like many others do, because I think that takes away from the spirit of the game a little bit and no two cities I create are ever done in the same way. Part of the fun of this game is building your town into the environment, using different environmental features to give “flavor” to your layout. Instead, here is the logic I use to set up and grow my cities in a somewhat realistic way.
You can only afford to place one connection to the highway at the beginning, and how you make this connection will determine how heavy your traffic jams are going to be in that area until you have the money to rebuild it. That’s why it is crucial that you do everything to separate this area from the main part of your new city. You do not want to have your main traffic flow of people going to and from work to intersect with the traffic flow trying to leave the city.
In order to do this, I suggest a roundabout that connects to the entrance and exit of your city and then a service road to take that traffic onto the end of the main street of your small town. You need to think about this game in terms of how real life operates. When your village first starts off, it is similar to a small little town off of the interstate that people just use to refill their gas tanks. These small towns usually have a main street surrounded by commercial buildings with residential areas surrounding the main street. At the far end of the main street is the industry area, and at the near end of main street is the connection to the service road that goes to the highway.
As your town grows into a city, the freeway will eventually branch off in the direction of your growing city and do a loop back around to the main interstate. This new looping freeway now becomes the entrance to your city, with multiple freeway exits into your city. As the city blossoms into a metropolis, it starts adding freeways to get people to and from work. And on, and on and on.
If you grow your Cities: Skylines towns in the same manner, and are constantly staying ahead of traffic problems you should be good to go! It’s not easy, but if it was how much fun would the game actually be? Anyway, I hope this helps you guys out a little bit.
Questions?
Got questions or other remarks? Feel free to post in the comments below!
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