Cities XL Hints & Tips

[gyzzzmo 0]

This topic is about advice and explaining the game mechanics of Cities XL.
If you want to give a tip/hint, choose 1 subject and try using one reply for it where you explain the problem and give the advice.
Maybe a moderator could pin this topic?


POLLUTION!

- AIR POLLUTERS seem to have 2 ways of effecting the environment: A) Heavy pollution limited to a certain radius around the building, and B) light pollution (but stackable) citywide. Especially buildings like powerplants seem to have a big impact on the citywide pollution.
This means that at a certain point there will be so much air pollution in your city that Elites, (business) offices and high tech dont want to come into your city anymore, even if you focussed all the polluters in a corner of your city, far away from your citizens.
There is not really a way of countering the air pollution. Parks give only a minimal boost to environment, way too little to keep them from complaining about it. The only good way is to destroy the polluters and import it all.
Best is to make yourself a supportive industrial city. You'll need a map with at least 2 fuel for resources, and water comes in handy too.

- NOISE POLLUTERS are mainly traffic, airports, windmills and some of the resource boosters. You can reduce traffic noise ofcourse by reducing the amount of cars that pass by. This you do by spreading the cars on more roads, or by forcing them to take other routes (by using one-way roads for example).
And wooden parks help greatly to let the people worry less about noise pollution from traffic, so make sure you got them near your citizens, especially Elites and Excecutives.
The other noise polluters you should just keep far off your citizens, so place the windmills and airports somewhere in a corner of your map.

More to come!

Gyzzzmo.

This thread is starting to take off, good work!  As it grows, let's please keep chatter to a minimum, so tips are the main focus due to space.    It's great to hear your compliments on the thread, so you can make them if you have a tip. 
--Liv
CXL Forums Moderator

[gyzzzmo 0]

MONEY!

here some advices about how to keep your funds positive.

- Dont build city services and/or utilities untill you really need them!

This is very important especially at the start of a city. You wont get much tax at the beginning, so 5k on each service or utility had a huge impact. So dont build those till you notice that people/business dont want to come into your city anymore due to the lack of some service/resource.

- THE way of getting really big bucks is by building specialized cities.

A specialized city is a city that produces alot of certain resources, so many that it can start building 'resource boosters' wich have the effect that buildings produce much more => produce cheaper! That is why people can sell fuel under 5k (a fuel extraction field costs 5k each). If a specialized city has a couple of (for example) fuel boosting buildings, each field you build extra can give you like 4 extra fuel tokens, wich will make it even profitable to sell them to the NPC trader: Don Madalff.

These boosters come for many things: Electricity, waste, manufacturing, heavy industry, fuel, offices, high tech... you name it. That way you can import for example electricity from a support-city you built, for much lower prices than if you would have to build it in that city, wich also means much less expenses and more profit!

Gyzzzmo

[Stef42 0]

Roads:

-Try not to build houses/offices/industrial area's directly at a main road, because if you wish to upgrade these roads, it can become very difficult when other buildings obstruct it

-When some wide roads are clogged by the heavy amount of traffic, try to build a new road next to it and change it to one-way roads.

Then you have traffic flow on each in witch 4 lanes (for example) are used for each side

[gyzzzmo 0]

CITY SERVICES AND LEISURE!

- When to place them:

These are expensive to maintain, so you should build them only when you really need them, so when people leave or dont want to move in anymore because of lack of the services/Leisure facilities.

- How to place them:

City Services and Leisure buildings have a limited radius of effect, people want to live near them. Their effect is stackable though, but only if theyre a different type of building. So if you want high leisure and/or services, you should use multiple types, building 2 Ferris Wheels next to each other is pointless.

If you want to build a building and click on the tab to place it, you'll see the interface changing. The greener the roads, the better that type of service or leisure is in that area. If you place the building next to a road (without actually placing it) you'll see a small difference in road color: That is how much the service/leisure would improve by placing that building.

You'll also notice that if you already placed for example a ferris wheel somewhere, and want to build another one near, the color of the roads wont get any greener, so placing it would be pointless.

NOTE: Education is bugged atm. Only elementry schools have an effect on education level, and unlockable institutes

Gyzzzmo

[site400 12]

Originally posted by: gyzzzmo

CITY SERVICES AND LEISURE!

- How to place them:

City Services and Leisure buildings have a limited radius of effect, people want to live near them. Their effect is stackable though, but only if theyre a different type of building. So if you want high leisure and/or services, you should use multiple types, building 2 Ferris Wheels next to each other is pointless.

If you want to build a building and click on the tab to place it, you'll see the interface changing. The greener the roads, the better that type of service or leisure is in that area. If you place the building next to a road (without actually placing it) you'll see a small difference in road color: That is how much the service/leisure would improve by placing that building.

You'll also notice that if you already placed for example a ferris wheel somewhere, and want to build another one near, the color of the roads wont get any greener, so placing it would be pointless.

Gyzzzmoquote>

Also, when placing city services, if you place them on a main road (such as an avenue) they will affect a wider range of houses than if you placed it on a secondary street. 

[Androv 6]

With regards to one way roads, the biggest you can make afaik are the large avenues, then have 5 lanes running in one direction. If you have two large avenues running next to each other, you could technically have a 5 lane each way road (you can visit my city Qulara on Hyperion if you want to have a look). The game does get a bit grumpy about intersections involving more than 5-6 roads though, so be careful.

Regarding farms, note that when you are laying it on the map there is a counter with a percentage on the side. If this percentage is at 100%, the farm will be more profitable from what I can see (about double). Also, make sure to strategically place your silos - unlocked for every 10 farms - to double their profits.

Regarding water, for which I have the most experience with currently, for every four or five water towers you will unlock a 'water storage facility' which produces an extra unit of water. Later on, at 500,000 people, you will unlock a water purification facility which increases the output of nearby water storage facilities. I'd recommend placing your water storage facilities as a cluster as they are not dependent on the water resource. Then you can maximize their output by placing nearby water purification. Finally, you will eventually get Water Inc which increases water production by 35%, and the Institute of Water which increases water production by 45% and education by 5%. Qulara makes about 200 tokens of water now!

There seem to be other *Resource* Inc and Institute of *Resource* that will boost production of other tokens. They cost quite a bit so only use them if you're already making a stack of said resource.

[Jack_Hawksmoor 0]

WATER  (Copied from another post to keep tips in one location. Thanks to abcvs for the suggestion)

When I started CitiesXL and worked with water towers, I assumed that the radius of the tower (the part which it carves out of a 'water zone') was the amount of resource it would draw. Therefore I placed them towards the centre of the water zones to maximise collection by spending the least amount of resource. In fact, on the fertile plains map with 2 'water zones' I proudly managed to get most of the water with just 3 towers. Lol.

It was later that I learned that it is actually the number of towers that determine how much water is generated (1 water token per tower). So my tip to share with you is that to maximise the 'water zone' usage you should place your towers at the most extreme peripheries of the zone so that each towers radius carves out the least possible area, thereby allowing you to place more towers.

Okay so you probably already knew this, but I hope it helps someone. In my successful fertile plains example, I had over 90% of my 'farms zone' covered with farms, and yet enough towers to remain water neutral (ie - no need to trade for water, despite the map having 2 stars for farms and 1 star for water).

My warning... is that with this method it is possible to overlap the radii of towers. It may not seem like you have done so, until you go to delete and replace a water tower. In fact because of this I thought at first that the game didn't give you back your zones when you deleted a tower. But then another player confirmed they could delete and replace no problems.

I made a new map and tested. Yes, you can delete towers and recover your water zone. But have a look at the attached picture.

Here I made a tower on the periphery of the waterzone to the south, then wraped it in a road so I could be 100% sure of the location.

Then I placed the tower to the north at the extreme periphery of the remaining 'water zone'. Now I have two efficiently placed towers. Good times.

On returning to first site I then deleted the tower and immediately tried to replace it. But I find that I cannot replace the tower I just deleted.

Yes, it is true that I could simply place it to the east of it's original location in the picture. However in my original game I had already placed towers either side of the deleted one in the fashion described above. As a result when I deleted my tower there was no 'water zone' remaining due to the overlap from both sides, so I couldn't replace the tower I just just knocked down anywhere on the map.

That meant 1 token lost that I had before, and no longer is my agrarian nation water neutral. Yes I know I can build up offices to get the 35% water efficiency building, but that's not the point.

It certainly makes you wish the game had an undo feature.

Anyway, I hope again that this warning tip helps out anyone using the water tower placement method outlined above from stumbling across the same mistake and losing out on tokens. It's unlikely to occur, but certainly annoying when it does happen.

If you have any feedback, or further water tips, feel free to leave them below.

[gyzzzmo 0]

SATISFACTION AND TAXES

How satisfied your citizens are depends on a couple of things like Environment, Taxes, Services, Jobs etc. And ofcourse the higher the type of citizens, the harder they are to get satisfied. The average of these factors is called 'General Satisfaction' and tells you whether citizens like your city or not.

If the general satisfaction of a certain type of citizens drops below 50%, they'll stop entering your city after a while, so you'll have to check what their problem is. An easy way to check is to open the 'population panel', it has special information tabs for satisfaction.

This also means that if you want some extra cash (who doesnt?) and your citizens are happy, you can keep raising your taxes till one of the type of citizens get near that 50%. You can change taxes by clicking on the 'Budget Panel', left of the population panel. You'll see a tab 'taxes' there.

Note: Education is bugged atm, just make sure everybody has acces to an elementry school.

Gyzzzmo

[gyzzzmo 0]

TRADE

- Trading in Cities XL is based on 'tokens'. Each token represents a certain amount of a type of goods and you need at least 1 spare token to be able to sell it. For buying tokens you need enough spare income, AND enough passenger or freight (each traded token takes one of them, depending on the type). You can increase passenger capacity by placing intercity road-links* and airports, and freight by placing intercity roads-links and harbors**.

1C (1 cash token)= 100 cash

- There are 3 ways to trade:

1) Trade when youre viewing your city: Click on the 'X' left on top of the screen and click on the trade icon. Then you have to click on the 'market place' tab, left on top of the page that appeared.

Now on top of the page you'll see a row of all types of tokens. If the number of the token is positive, you have a spare token and can set up a selling proposal, or you can accept a buying proposal somebody else did, provided that you have enough tokens.

To sell something, first click on 'sell', fill in the number of tokens you want to sell, and then the amount of money you want for all those tokens. If the 'Submit' button changed to grey, it means you cannot make the proposal because of lack of tokens or money.

To buy something..... you should get the point by now

2) Trade when youre viewing the planet. Click on the trade icon, then click on the city you want to do the trading from. After that its the same thing as explained above.

3)  Trade on the Cities XL website. First you have to login, then click on 'manage trades' (under 'Live status'). Then a new page appears and it pretty much speaks for itself what you have to do there.

- How to trade with your own cities?

Easiest is to set up a slightly too cheap buy order with your target city you want to trade the tokens with. Once the buy order is up, you can accept it with your city that had the spare tokens.

TIP: What is also handy, is that you can give other cities a part of your money this way. Just make sure you have a spare token on your 'poor city' and put up a sell order for a way too high price. Then accept that order with your rich city, and you'll have plenty of money on your former poor city to build up a decent economy quickly.

NOTE 1: Importing workers is useless, they dont have any effect on employment and labor. I got told that atm they would only work for blueprints, wich arent part of the game yet.

NOTE 2: DonMadalff is an NPC trader wich trades any token as long as you got at least 5 of them. His prices arent that good ofcourse.

* intercity roadlinks: you make these by placing a road at the purple colored border of your map, a connection will appear. All the normal type of roads have the same bonus: 20 freight and 20 passengers.

A highway intercity link gives 100 freight and 100 passengers, though it also costs 100k income!

** Harbors can only be placed on maps that have a coast.

Gyzzzmo

[masochist 111]

I read in a different thread that passengers were an essential-yet-overlooked part of the game.  I can't tell you how right that is!  I've experienced it in my own town...let me demonstrate.

Before I knew better, I had exactly one city link simply because it was necessary.  It was a 'Simple Road' link that curved down a mountain before reaching the town itself.  Here's what it looked like:

You can see how it really did nothing for me; the passenger traffic dispersed out as soon as the road met its first intersection down in the city.  In the red outline is a struggling office park.  I never knew why it wasn't doing well; I always thought it was becasue I didn't have enough people (in this shot, there are about 36,000 or so).  I was making about $4,000 in revenue; I had no idea how I was supposed to afford the leisures and services my citizens kept demanding.

Then I read the aforementioned thread and found my answer.

As it turns out, my office park was starved for passengers (you can see that there are no passengers at all over that way).  So, I built a road up a hill that would better serve that area of town (I wanted it to be a freeway, but I couldn't afford $100,000 per turn!).  The effect was immediate!

Passenger traffic shot up, the office park was no longer struggling (notice that all the roads are green with high passenger traffic), and my revenue shot up from $4,000 to $16,000, all in about 30 seconds (immediate access to the freeway helped a bit, I suspect).  Not only do passengers help offices, but also retail...and when they need help, it increases the productivity (and income) of industry, as well.

The moral of the story: do NOT underestimate what passenger traffic can do for your city!

[site400 12]

Trying to determine where air & noise pollution exist within a city can be a pain; especially the air pollution from cars as the overlay for pollution works great when you have a large amount of pollution (like over an industrial area) but is very hard to see when it is very light (like over roads)...the same goes for noise pollution. 

However, if you switch the overlay to Holidays, you'll screen will obviously show where you can place holidays, but it also shows where all the pollution is (both air & noise).  Plus, its really easy to see!

Check out the image below.  The top left blob is noise pollution from windmills; the middle blob is air pollution from cars, and the blob on the right is air pollution from industry.

I can only imagine how easy it would be to find all the pollution areas in a big city using the holidays overlay.

[Jack_Hawksmoor 0]

SILO PLACEMENT 

(Discussion and testing regarding this tip is being held over here)

>>Edit<<

Theory: Silos each contribute up to 50% efficiency to farms based on the silo's proximity to the building on that farm. The benefit from multiple silos can stack, but only to the maximum possible productivity of the farm (which is affected by water availablity and pollution).

More testing required. Further testing is inconclusive at this time. Will update when community develops a consensus.

Don't go building up your farms based on this tip just yet

[Sincx 0]

Originally posted by: Jack_Hawksmoor

SILO PLACEMENT 

(Discussion and testing regarding this tip is being held over here)

>>Edit<<

Theory: Silos each contribute up to 50% efficiency to farms based on the silo's proximity to the building on that farm. The benefit from multiple silos can stack, but only to the maximum possible productivity of the farm (which is affected by water availablity and pollution).

More testing required. Further testing is inconclusive at this time. Will update when community develops a consensus.

Don't go building up your farms based on this tip just yet

quote>

Concerning Silo's, it seems only the farms directly connected to the silo actually benefit form the Silo itself.

The 'white' area of effect shown when you place the silo actually does...nothing. Only the farms directly connected have the boosted productivity.  Which in terms is kinda nonsense....and if the mechanic works this way....then I need to puzzle the best possible way for 10 farms to ALL be connected directly the the silo while staying within the farm zoning area ANd maintaining a 'freight heavy road' to which the silo connects.........will comment later after some puzzling and fiddling.  Kinda crap mechanic tbh.

[Sincx 0]

This tip is most usefull.

It is VERY important to have enough Freight and passengers coming passed and to those buildings benefiting from it.

it will GREATLY boost your income from taxes in general if stuff is placed jut right.

Currently wiped my city..( again )..and rebuilding it with this idea as main focus to see what can be done.

Last time I made 4 million with no more then 10.000 citizens in no time with just the right things placed strategicly.

So..more testing.

Edited to take out quote w/ pics--it took up lots of space, and didn't seem to add to the tip. 

--Liv

[Stef42 0]

It might also be handy to build the offices at the border of the map, or else directy make a road from the offices to the CityLink.

In that case, you don't have any sideways which inflect the amount of passengers..

[masochist 111]

This one might be obvious, but it's easy to overlook and has helped me quite a bit.

In relation to passengers/freight, if you have freeways in your city but don't want to pay that $100,000 per turn to connect it to the edge of the map, simply create an avenue city link, then convert it to a freeway immediately.  Don't have to pay the immense fee, but you still get the benefit of passanger/freight movement that freeways provide.

The Link:

The Passengers:

Just a neat little obvious-but-overlooked trick to utilize.

[drcacklefanny 0]

I finally figured Cities XL out!

Use the satisfaction button - for the longest time I was trying to figure out how to gauge my people. This wasn't obvious to me until today. Re-enforcing Gyz, just build one of each building. You'll get to about 1.5m citizens right around the time you've built one of each, at that point you should be raking in the dough. All that's left is to use landmarks.

Secondly, plan around freeways. Yes, they cost beaucoup bucks at the beginning, but leave spaces. My trick, I just lay down a pair of small farm roads of where I want the Freeways to go. Make sure to accommodate spaces for junctions as well.

Some of the maps are bugged, In Old Valley it appears when you try to link a highway and highway bridge you get an "Invalid Junction" error - you can circumvent by connecting the bridge ends to a junction of your choice (large intersection works well) and continue the highway from there.

It took me a long time to figure out passenger and freight - just make sure you have high traffic roads running across your city and this will be generated for you. In rural farm areas, make sure you have plenty of atleast small avenues. Unfortunately, freight will be a problem for farms until you start building civilization closer to the farm area.

Again, another reiteration of a previous post: you cannot have a large city with heavy industry/manufacturing because of pollution. You must rely on trade.

If it weren't for the bugs (ie education, leisure, commerce, etc etc) I would give this game a 10/10 (even if it didn't have disasters, ambient sound, mass trans).

[Stef42 0]

Tip for 'wooded parks' :

When having trouble making 'wooded parks' between two roads because the space is too big (red blocks) , try to make a small square in the middle made out of roads.

Make the park within the square and around, if that still doesn't work make another square.

When completed, destroy the roads and fill these spaces up with park.

You can also fill up to space were the road was, with some other type of park, to create a walkingpath effect (looks more realistic)

[zwr100 2]

Originally posted by: Stef42

Tip for 'wooded parks' :

When having trouble making 'wooded parks' between two roads because the space is too big (red blocks) , try to make a small square in the middle made out of roads.

Make the park within the square and around, if that still doesn't work make another square.

When completed, destroy the roads and fill these spaces up with park.

You can also fill up to space were the road was, with some other type of park, to create a walkingpath effect (looks more realistic)quote>

I have an area I made into a park that had some neat looking rocks.  The rocks got covered by the wooded park and I was sad.  When I get home I'm going to delete that park and put roads around the rocks I want to keep, make the park again and delete the road!  I know that's kind of the opposite of your suggestion, but the principal applies.

RE: Maso's post about converting fastlanes to an avenue:

I've had the opposite problem, where I have cashflow, but need more passenger/freight.  I've taken existing expressways and converted them to fastlanes which provide more passender/frieght, and seem to count as a different kind of link once all normal road links are consumed

Your ideas are really simple and totally genius. Thanks!

[Sincx 0]

If you have been terraforming and are now facing steep slopes which look unnatural here is a tip.

Lay down a road from just the higher area to the lower area. The ground will level somewhat and hence will be less sleep.

This offcourse looks more natural. Just repeat this step as much as you can putting the roads as close to each other as possible over the complete 'ridge' you want to convert back to a better look. Sometimes you need to place the small stretches of road in other directions.

Once done delete the small pieces of road....recheck you ridge and repeat where needed.

You should be left with a normal hillside again now.

Offcourse if the ridge is to high this will not work, but for 2 or 3 layers in terraforming you can get it done.

If it's is unclear what I am trying to explain just telll and I'll add some pica's.

[Stef42 0]

Hint & Tip:

Do not build all your city services on one single road, why!?

Thats because the road congestion affect the radius of the services..

More spread over the city is already better but also at roads which are not congested.

Congestion can decrease city services satisfaction with almost 20% (my experience)

[Mathew_MC 0]

Very nice thread

Let me add one:

As you know, holidays hotels can only be placed in specific zones which you can highlight by selecting the "Holiday" layer on the right. But if you build a zone with a strong enough quality of life (by placing wooded parks and landmarks), you will be able to build hotels in that zone too (even if the map has no stars for holidays).

[jeremy12 0]

Originally posted by: Mathew_MC

Very nice thread

Let me add one:

As you know, holidays hotels can only be placed in specific zones which you can highlight by selecting the "Holiday" layer on the right. But if you build a zone with a strong enough quality of life (by placing wooded parks and landmarks), you will be able to build hotels in that zone too (even if the map has no stars for holidays).quote>

Avatar parks work very good for this

[Sainty 0]

Surround your residential area with "smaller roads". Smaller roads arent used by the passer-by trafficant so they never get jammed up. And around the residential road system build expressways or avenues, what ever you prefare. And connect those two road networks.

That way your residents will always have a green way to a expressway/avenue that isnt jammed. This will lead to less traffic problems.

Note: "Normal roads" doesnt work for this, they are used by everyone and you will get traffic jams. Smaller roads is the way to go.

[Sainty 0]

How to create roundabouts and perfectly round circles:

[cdagger 0]

Hi everybody, this is my first post, I just joined.

I found a new trick today while playing solo mode. I haven't read anything about it yet, so not sure if many people know about it.

While clicking on a road, I noticed that my camera started to move all on its own. At first I thought it was some glitch and tried to duplicate it. I figured out eventually what I did was actually clicked on one of the cars! This is so cool. Click on one of the cars, and you can go for a ride!

You can zoom all the way into the driver seat and you can pan 360 degrees and look out the sides and the back as well.

Anyway I thought this was kind of neat to go for a ride in your city and get a whole different perspective.

On an off note, I really like this forum, a lot of very useful and helpful info from this budding community. Quite friendly as well.

Thanks everyone.

[Stef42 0]

Funny you mention, I noticed yesterday that when clicking cars the camera follows, it's very cool!

[thijser 0]

perhaps we could post some of the information here on the wiki

http://citiesxl.wikia.com/wiki/Cities_XL

[lots 0]

In response to the circular road post. I thought I'd add my own method of doing this, since I managed to do it with less..

First create a road using the road that snaps at 45 degree angles. Draw a plus sign like so:

Next, go to the residential tab and select the unqualified worker houses. Choose the single lot option (for this pic I used the high density one since i wanted to make a larger circle, but anythign will do really). Drop down the lots as in the pic:

Take the road tool once again, using the same 45 degree angled road and cross the plus where the tool snaps to the lots. Try to make them even on both sides, I also try to make them as small as possible, since the curved road toll will take care of the rest:

Delete the lots and then take the curved road tool and connect your little road stubs:

If you want, delete the "guide" roads as well... I just deleted the inner part in this pic...

Using this technique, I have created half circles, layered circles, quater circles, etc. You can also expand this to make other shapes, such as perfect squares, tirangles, etc. The main idea is that you use lots to create exact measurements, mark off the bit of road, and then delete the lot and connect your bits together with whatever type of road you desire (curves, straight angles, whatever)

[Sincx 0]

Yep thats the way to do it !  You can even use several other methods in making such forms but its the basic idea. Cheers for posting hope it helps others.