Old player returning. Looking for tips.

[xuse]

So I decided last night my weekend was going to be returning to the best city builder out there cities skylines. So this morning I downloaded all the new DLC started up a very small very profitable city and took off for work to leave the city to fill my bank account (fingers crossed the fireman and cops can keep the place running while I'm gone).

I may be a returning player but I only dabbled in the game when it first came out. So feel free to treat me like a total noob. Here are some questions you can awnser to help ease the learning curve for me.

What are some things you wish you had known when you first started playing?

List of essential mods?

Maps that offer a better then others start? (Not afraid to abandon the small town I made this morning)

Traffic tips, When should I start to use public transportation? Good ways to plan from the start to avoid traffic headaches later down the line.

General city layout planing. I generally try and keep residential to one side of the map industry to the other and commercial in the center. Will this tactic work well in cities why or why not?

I know that like most city builders the best way to learn is to try and fail. I'm totally expecting to probably totally ruin a few city's over the weekend. I was just hoping you guys may be able to assist me in maybe not running my first few cities into the ground so quickly. Thanks for all your help ahead of time.

 

[metacritical]

too many questions ;p

i learnt by playing, and the first few maps were messy with terrible traffic (the game is essentially a traffic simulator since that is the only real challenge of the game). the thing to do is download a few good intersections from the workshop to help motorway flow. only ever have one cargo port and one ferry port otherwise the cargo ships will just cause so many problems and sometimes your cargo ports ship to each other which is stupid.

essential mods are personal choice, Network Extension Project is essential (but not currently compatible with Natural Disasters. most mods by bloody penguin are essential.

for transportation, use bus lines as soon as you can, taxi's are pointless and are never profitable, use trains to transport long distances rather then within cities, use metros for that. for trains never connect to the external lines for anything (an essential mod is the one that allows you to use dual track stations; Multi-Track Station Enabler, but it's also not yet updated for ND), there's a good one for industrial (by bloody penguin if i remember correctly) and lots for residential. just to repeat, never ever ever connect your internal train line to the external line.

layout, it's not a good idea to separate the zones out like you're doing, this just increases the amount of traffic between zones. it's better to have a bit of industrial near to commercial and residential a bit away from both to remove the noise pollution.

for roads, if you have a two lane one way road, the right lane will be used exclusively for cars turning right, the left lane exclusively for those turning left. this is the most essential thing to know (this may sound patronising but it's not) all roads work like this, whether they have two lanes or six (or eight if you use Network Extension mod) this is why if you use a three lane road and you only have right or left turns and nothing going straight on the middle lane will never be used, ever. this is just the mechanics of the game

forgot, don't go mad downloading lots of assets and mods if you have 8GB of RAM or less (if you have 4GB of RAM don't download anything, or only very few). if you must use a traffic changing mod like Traffic++V2 or Traffic President, these will affect how you game runs when your population is around 100,000. so don't say you weren't warned ;p

 

[Grapplehoeker]

I would highly suggest you take time to watch and digest Skyestorme's Building London series. He covers pretty much everything you would need to know during the build and is entertaining too.

And this guide should help get you rolling,
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=422074590

I would also unsubscribe from all of your current mods and only resubscribe when you can see that the mod authors have updated the mod to the curent game version. This is due to the recent major update to the game that included the introduction of the latest Unity game engine. This naturally rendered most if not all mods obsolete and the modders are busy right now with updating them.

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

Never put a water tower where there is pollution. Always put your water intake pumps up-current from your sewer output.