Early development of the City of Hanse. Created with CitiesXL 2012
Check out the Hanse Gallery in the links below for more images.
CitiesXL 2012
Review: Summary |
Basics |
Game Play |
Tips and Thoughts |
Quibles - Critique |
Resources
More Topics:
Facebook Cover Art |
Icarus City Journal |
Icarus Gallery |
Hanse City Journal |
Hanse Gallery |
Farcus City Journal |
Farcus Gallery
Cities XL 2012 Tips and Thoughts
The game is fairly complex and there are whole wikis and forums devoted to the details of the game. The possibilities of what you can do are pretty limitless and so is the advice on how to do it. So with that in mind, the following are some general tips for the new player. For more tips and how to details, please by all means search the web and hit the forums and wikis where a lot of great information is available.
Commodity Specialization and Production Boosters
If you specialize your city to produce a specific commodity like manufacturing, heavy industry, electricity, food, etc. you will start to make profits faster that will allow you to unlock and use two or three very important production booster buildings – storage, education, & research. You can nearly double production after adding these buildings to your map and increase profits dramatically.
Dead Zone
The closer you get to the center of the map the more difficult it will be to sustain freight or passenger routes to support commodities like offices, factories, etc. Anything that needs to be sustained by trade or which needs a connection to the rest of the world will work better closer to the edge of the map than at the center. You may find that the center of the map works fine initially, but as your traffic builds, your roads will become congested and may not provide adequate passenger and freight service to the center of the map. You may overcome this with expressways and freeways, but those are expensive to use.
Electricity
This is the one commodity that does not consume passenger or freight resources although it does pollute city-wide. If you have limited freight and passenger connections available to your city, this may be a commodity to build to maximum production to increase revenue. Like other commodities you can progress through better capabilities, add the related commercial building, the eduction building and the research building to increase production and profit.
Farms
In one word – cheat. The profitability of farms is tied to proximity to silos and fertilizer facilities. If you use the ratio provided in the game you won’t have enough to service all of your farms and so many of them will fail. The solution is to use the expert mode/unlock all buildings to place extra silos and fertilizer plants so that they can service all of your farms.
Unlike Sim City where highways were a no-no, these farms require adequate freight services that in turn require at least small or large avenues. And they have to have extra labor in close proximity. So you have to have a road network that will support freight and population running through your farms.
Fuel
Fuel, road connections, and water have to be built in areas highlighted a different color on the map. Stop the game using the speed and stop control before placing your fuel farms. This will allow you to place several of them close together. Otherwise you will only be able to place a few on the map because with each placement while the game is running the area available for a new fuel farm decreases markedly.
Leisure Buildings and Services
Depending on your goal for your city, the use of leisure services may not be necessary at all. My city of Hanse with a population of over 2 million has none and still supports all classes of citizens, offices, high tech, and has reasonable citizen satisfaction.
Leisure buildings can increase citizen satisfaction and accelerate the growth of population. So, if you want to use them you can.
They are expensive and so I would advise placing them only where you need them to support an area of the city. Their effect is primarily at the neighborhood level with a small radius of effect. (The radius is a little large if placed on larger roads) The effect can be magnified by adding more leisure services of different types to an area. Having multiple instances of the same leisure service right next to each other will not add any value and should be avoided unless you simply want the aesthetic effect.
Money and Cash Flow
Build slowly at the beginning and wait until you have a nice cash flow before starting any major improvements, adding major roads, adding utilities, and so on. Once you get a nice amount of say 50,000 to 100,000 income; let the game run without doing anything else for awhile. This will allow you to accumulate a lot of cash reserves that you can use to pay for improvements, for terra-forming, and for your pet projects.
Having a lot of cash on hand (over 500,000,000) will assure that if you get into a pinch with cash flow going negative that you have enough resources to build more of any commodity or zone type that you want, improve your transportation, re-arrange areas of your city that are a problem and so on. If you can make improvements fast enough that improve profits, you can escape the negative cash flow and still have funds available for big projects.
Trades with other cities are less expensive than producing a commodity and far less expensive than buying from Omnicorp. So the sooner you can trade with other cities the better your profit margin will be.
Pollution
Don’t worry to much about the ambient pollution across the map unless you have a huge amount of heavy industry and manufacturing. The city can accept a small amount of this pollution without too much impact. If it gets to be too much, however, you may find that the quality of life has degraded to the point where the city no longer supports offices, high tech, or the elite class of citizens. This suggests that you should have a supporting city for any major pollution generator that is geared toward lower classes of citizens and which purchases commodities like offices, high tech, and the like from other cities.
Noise pollution can be a factor as well. The wooded parks help reduce noise pollution from traffic. However there is not much you can do with noise pollution from airports, wind power generation, and other noise polluters so you will want to locate them in areas away from any commodity or population group where quality of life is important. I like to put them in a corner with waste recycling and industrial zones where the impact is minimal.
Road Connections
Start out with only a minimum number of road connections and build a starter city some distance in from the edge. Plan on wiping this area out later when you have sufficient capital to really build. Once you do, delete the road connections that you have, wait for the purple areas to show up again, and then stop the game using the speed and stop control at the top. Now you can build as many road connections as you would like around the edge of your map. The reason for doing this later and with the map stopped is that if the gaming is running each time you open a connection the purple area will diminish around your connection resulting in fewer places to locate a road connection. In the stopped state, you can put connections as close to each other as you please.
Taxes
You can adjust the tax rate on population and commodities as you wish. The game starts with population being taxed at 15% and commodities being taxed at 25%.
While you are building you can increase the tax on commodities like heavy industry and manufacturing a little, but be careful or you will stifle growth. Unskilled citizens seem to not react much to tax increases and will continue to come even with a tax rate of 28%. Tax rates become more important to whether citizens will come to your city the higher the class level of the citizen, so the game dictates a tax structure that has the poorest paying the highest rate.
It is easier to throttle taxes back as the city grows and has a lot of revenue than to raise taxes when you are in a pinch.
Terraforming
You can get some minor free terraforming by placing roads next to each other and by using wooded parks to flatten areas near roads. This is not adequate for large terrain problems but can help in small areas.
Terraforming should be done before you lay subways. Subways are glitched in that if a line is broken, it cannot be fixed. You have to take out the subway and do it over.
Transportation Networks
Plan ahead as you build. It is okay to start with a small city to build up resources and later wipe it out to build a more desirable and better planned city, but this may not suit your tastes. If you want to progress without having to go back and bulldoze your way to freedom, make sure to allow room for larger expressways and highways later in the development of your city.
Traffic congestion around offices and residential areas is far less when you use the paved road with lights. This is used only by local traffic and not as a through-way. Surround your building areas with these roads and use them to connect to larger roads to minimize congestion.
Intersections cause traffic congestion. So when you build expressways, it may help to have feeder roads along the expressway that handle the smaller roads going into office, tech, and residential areas. This will allow traffic on your high volume roads to move faster and get to their destinations easier as well as assuring that you have adequate passenger and freight capacity.
You may also want to have parallel one-way roads of up to four lanes each to manage traffic.
You can build a huge city without the most expensive highways. If you have a large number of well planned avenues and expressways, you can do fairly well. It seems to me that the primary utility to the freeways is to open a larger amount of trade with neighboring cities, but that comes at a high cost and it can be avoided by having more expressway connections.
Water Resources
Just like road connections, you will do better to stop the game and build as many water pumps as you want. With the game stopped you can plop down several right next to each other and really boost water production. Otherwise if the game is running you may only be able to place a very few of them before the water source area disappears. Each pump creates a water token, so this is good for trade as well as assuring you have sufficient water resources for your city.
As you add water towers (pumps) you will unlock water storage and then as you place water storage, you will be able to unlock water purification, both of which will boost production. After this you can unlock the water commercial building, the education building, and the research facility to really boost production.
CitiesXL 2012
Review: Summary |
Basics |
Game Play |
Tips and Thoughts |
Quibles - Critique |
Resources
More Topics:
Facebook Cover Art |
Icarus City Journal |
Icarus Gallery |
Hanse City Journal |
Hanse Gallery |
Farcus City Journal |
Farcus Gallery
CitiesXL 2012 Review
