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

Ah! That first city. Mine has been blessed by "healing of memories."

Unless all is unlocked from start, availability and budget have guided my first steps. Until you get to HD zoning, C:S will mostly work with any layout. Being mentally prepared to bulldoze and redo was the hardest for me to learn in the first attempts

For anyone intrigued by the description of the diverging diamond as the "darling" of the interchange world these days, bear in mind that it is so well liked because it is especially *safe.* In Cities, there are no car accidents, so just keep in mind that while it is a lovely and functional interchange, its arguably best feature in real life will not come to bear in this game.

My first city was on console with no prior knowledge, a complete disrespect for any tutorials or tips, and the determination to unintentionally build the ugliest city known to man where death waves in the tens of thousands went unchecked due to single digit traffic flow on roads that were somehow always crooked in a grid system. Good times. Personally I'm a big fan of starts that run the highway through the city, but only allow it to dump/pick up people and goods at massive public transportation and cargo hubs on the outskirts. Gives you a good travel-line for cinematics, a feature to divide distinct sections of the city, and the option for direct access in overly busy locations.

"Let's assume that you're a builder of taste" You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.

I'd recommend a trumpet interchange, as soon as highway roads are unlocked, because it's 100% free flow without any crossings.

"and make sure our ramps are facing the correct direction, simply by right clicking" i must have watched thousands of hours and played a couple of hundred, i did not know that, i've always seen people go over to the upgrade tool and change that way ! TOP TIPS

This is an extremely interesting idea! People always tell us their way to start a city but I've never seen them compared. Thanks Yumbl!

@ 7:10. There is a way for vanilla console players to have the inside lane go straight on and turn. You need 6 or 7u length , and use straight road not free form, curving the road gives the turn only arrow.

I've been enjoying watching the New England series of video's here on RU-vid. You have become one of my favorite Cities Skylines builder because you sure do have a amazing since of design and all your city's are very well thought out. So please keep up the awesome work and I promise to keep coming back for more and sharing your video's with as many people as I possibly can because I believe that you definitely deserve it.

Life love and heartbreak. that's exactly how my first city felt :'D

I've watched, I downloaded to watch later, and I'm interacting in the comments. I'm doing my part to help the algorithm.

The Bob Ross of Cities Skylines

I actually started playing Cities when I stumbled across videos of people 'playing' it (making poop vulcanoes) en fixing it (Hugo there!), so I had some knowledge on how to make a city entry from the highway :) Never used Diverging diamonds or SPUI interchanges, I have now subscribed to them on your workshop! Build many cities by now, but still appreciate these starter videos. thank you for making it!

One additional start that I would've considered reviewing would be the collector/express start, where you have one-way arterial roads (sometimes called frontage roads) lined up right next to, and parallel to, the highway, that have slip lanes going to and from the adjacent highway (moving in the same direction, sometimes crossing over and under eachother, like in a basketweave interchange), and overpasses/underpasses (or an elevated highway) to allow vehicles within the parallel-moving one-way arterials to turn around without crossing through highway traffic.

Thanks for explaining the pros and cons of each approach. It really helped me wrap my head around interchanges as a whole. I was too intimidated to touch them before now.

YUMBL: "Remove roundabouts, add traffic lights!" Biffa: "You don't want traffic lights, we want to add roundabouts!"

I like to make that diamond into an overhead roundabout, usually I have the exit go into a collector that splits down into industrial > commercial > residential zoned blocks away from the collector. This way you reduce the traffic between zones and leave the outside connections for demands. Especially with public transit, you can almost completely remove residential traffic and then use a goods trains station leading into the roads coming down from the overhead collector. This will move a lot of industrial traffic from the highway directly to the train station. Most of my cities are the typical grid city, with 90+ traffic flow!

14:32 "incidentally symmetrical" - more likely an (un)conscious habit of yours, Yumbl. :)

FYI: you can remove traffic lights in vanilla

insanely useful info, thanks. i wish c:s had some shortcut tutorials, for example i had no idea how to make elevated roads until i looked it up just now.

Your ParClo on the workshop is amazing. I do admit I made some minor tweaks to it so I use that one locally. The only changes I made were some road upgrades - using the BIG 6L road for the overpass and the BIG highway ramps. Plus, I'm using the asymmetrical national road (2+1) instead of a 2 way local road (that has zoning squares on it). I tried adding the intersection markings in the asset editor but CS crashed on me so I gave that up. I also setup for lane mathematics as well. But yours was the foundation for those changes. And it has worked wonders on the cities that I've used them in. Very, very efficient (especially after applying TM:PE using the lane assignments). Thank you Yumbltv!

Thank you for posting this! This was one of the most helpful tutorials I've watched on how to plan out and build roads. I will definitely be subscribing to your channel!

Parclos are excellent for asymmetric traffic, you can use the free-flow in the high traffic direction, of course not needing to support the full infrastructure installation anf maintenance costs.

One time I started a city with a gigantic roundabout. As the city grew I upgraded the roads and added through roads and things. Seemed to work pretty well.

I always brace my roundabout. It makes it far easier to build anyway. Start the same by finding the center. Then extend the brace road to the diameter of the circle. Which is 14 units in this case. Then draw a cross road at the center (7 units). Use the ends of the cross to draw the circle perfectly. Then attach the interchange entrance & exit. Then add city entrance roads, two or three will do. Finally, delete the brace roads.

I like that Par-Clo design. I might adopt it as soon as I buy the area on the far side of the interstate.

Thank you so much for this video! I'm just now picking up the game again after years and starting the game is always the hardest part for me

Personally, I'm a fan of the, "destroy the interchange and put down a gravel road" start. But that's me

I like to build a stack interchange that leads to a roundabout on each side, seems to work fine in vanilla. A lot of fancy clever interchanges don't work in vanilla even if you can build them due to stupid unchangable lanes. I would also suggest having a few ways to get in your city from a highway and to spread out traffic as much as possible. But not too much! Otherwise sims will just use the shortest rout, which may not be designed to manage big amount of traffic. Try and plan ahead, that's the main advice :)

highway in the city is the most mesmerizing thing in the game. i can watch the cims just passing by it and using my interchanges to get into the city

It's cool to see you experience success, I was there on twitch one time, you said you were going to try and upload a few utube videos you had like 2 videos on your youtube channel lol :D I dont really watch twitch anymore because they made me mad when they started recurring billing and didnt notify me... Anyway, still enjoying your videos, thanks! lol your first city made me laugh :D i came from sims 4 so mine was slightly better, it was a long road with many connections to it, probably just as bad traffic hahaha.

Very helpful and informative!!!

Thank you so much for this video. Good entrances are one of my biggest stumbling blocks with CS; either they get clogged up too quickly and end up with jams later in the city's life, or they're too spread out and I have to waste precious starting money on power lines and long water pipes to connect everything. Might be my American-ness (especially Texas as we love our Frontage/Access Roads paralleling our highways) showing, but of these my favorite is the Diamond Interchange; nice and compact, but good traffic flow. I can even see how if crossflow traffic becomes an issue, one can modify that later by taking a leaf from Biffa's book and converting it into an Oval-About; double bonus for having a tram line up the middle of said oval as they don't need to interact with the highway at all. One comment on the Service Interchange: Purely personal preference, but I would continue the arterial road overpass until it has crossed the railway line to avoid blocking traffic with a level crossing. Especially as rail traffic can often get even more congested than road traffic and is more difficult to control. P.S. Though I can't speak for everyone, in Texas we absolutely HATE Diverging Diamonds. Two intersections that claim to have Diverging Diamond properties were built in my hometown of San Marcos and if anything they've only made traffic flow worse and more dangerous, not better. Just the concept of them makes no sense to me; immature a critique as it may be, have these engineers never seen Ghostbusters? You don't cross the streams!

That is an awesome trick with the free-form road tool and adjusting the highway one-way roads into the roundabout . Ever since playing, entrances and exits from highways and train tracks never let me normally place where it makes sense.

Thanks for the reminder of your DDI how-to. I need to re-watch it... right, now! haha

Very nice presentation, per usual. very relaxing and always interesting.

greeat video. thank you so much!

I'm a fairly new player on PS4. Love the first city on Switch. Looks like a sunrise 🌅 Greeting from Phoenix, AZ and I love the videos!

I like that first roundabout start - YUMBL mentions the idea of bringing the highway into the city as a possible upgrade need, and right away I thought of a highway to city roundabout interchange, where you can actually still use that roundabout, with 1 exit and 1 entrance ramp on either side to connect the highway with the roundabout and then connect in 1 or 2 intersections with the city streets to complete the interchange. The roundabout will eliminate the need for any traffic lights too close to the highway that could backup onto the highway and clog it up, allowing traffic to free flow in/out of the streets and highway systems with minimal holdup. FYI, for the local to collector interchange points, I usually like to have the local streets in more of a trident arrangement, where the locals on the sides bend in to join the central one which along intersects with the collector. That reduces the number of intersections on the bigger road and keeps them more to the smaller roads. If traffic builds up over time, the middle road can be upgraded either to a 3 lane asymmetric or small 4 lane mini collector along the busy part, giving good expandability and flexibility. That's one of the things I love about YUMBL's videos, he always introduces me to ideas I hadn't thought of myself and gets the creativity flowing on other ways that idea could be adapted to other uses or further enhanced in new ways.

thank you this was very helpfull.

My first cities were highway roads straight into a T junction with 4 lane roads, later I started with using a roundabout instead of just a T junction. Both were always modified later to have a highway go through the city

surprisingly my first one was not that bad, but tbf I learned a lot from Biffa, the concept of lane maths, TMPE usage, stuff like that. Still learning efficient public transport.

I think its also very important to plan and have multiple access points to the various highways and arterials. For me I use raised roundabouts with on/ off ramps like a diamond. Works really well for me. In fact my whole 85k pop city is an inner highway with 4 lane arterials running off to areas using round abouts and standard in game connections. Sat at 88% traffic on vanilla console mode. I did create an octo-about that works amazing but mine is a mess cos console is limited for design unless you want to spend hours making a round about

Yumbl has such good vibes. Thanks for the info good sir.

The first city I created I started the first way with the roundabout and the default directional half intersection in the game. But at upgrade time I made two tunnels under the roundabout and continued the highway forward and then turned the intersection with the other highway into a turbine intersection. But now I have move it and intend to replace these segregating highways with double-deck viaducts over conventional boulevards. It will be very Tokyo style.

I'm a big fan of your diamond interchange with the reversed overpass lanes. It handles tons of traffic. I use them a lot. Thanks!

This video is so useful, thank you!

I personally tear that vanilla interchange out ASAP and typically use a trumpet style interchange, I also like to use the district brush to pre plan zoning ( makes future highway planning much easier to manage in a long build imo)

@7:00 the trick in vanilla for addressing that left turn lane is highways. If you add a 3 lane highway piece for a node then you get your two straight one turn lane. It looks funny, but that’s vanilla limitations for ya. This works well for service interchange lights as well. I usually exit with one lane then split into two lane highway a node then end with a short 3 lane highway piece for all the turn lanes onto a 4 lane overpass.

Oh wow... I've just found your channel and my god... your so calm and relaxed.. and your voice too.. just makes me wanna copy you to the square 😅😭😭

I've made cities with all of those options and option A was the best for traffic flow. All other methods backed up traffic coming off the highway.

Can't wait to see what you create in the new 5B1C

The "my fist city" design is still a valid design for first time players. It's one thing to watch a video and listen to someone say "don't do this, this is bad, M'kay" and actually understanding why it is bad. Until you do something like that and watch it break down, understand where it is breaking down, why it is breaking down, you won't be able to conceive new ideas that avoid the pitfalls and won't break down. You did touch on one valid form of startup but went right past it. the T-bone intersection. You kind ran it through the center so it was x crossing (at 9:09), which is bad, but a T-Bone (remove the 4 lane road south of the x crossing so entry ends there) is decent start and will get you to well over 1k (I've pushed it to 3k many times, but that's usually more of an Elbow intersection where you start in a corner) before it starts to have issues. By then you have access to more tiles and enough money to rebuild the interstate junction and entry point.

I like bringing the hiway in with the one ways at game start. But I dead end it in a roundabout, then bring two lanes into the straight sections. I upgrade those into two on ramps, one in, one out. As I expand, I add more of these as I move the big roundabout down further. Seems the speed of the highway makes up for them having to go down and turn around to leave.

These days I decide based on what the mapmaker gives me. If he's set up something already, like the often seen complimentary roundabout, I'll use it, at least until the money starts coming in. I'd give the roundabout start the best bang for the buck award in that they handle a lot of traffic for the cost of resources and the time they take to build. You just need to leave room around it to fix it later or acknowledge that the starting area is never growing past a small town. Another option is to combine the highway start with roundabout exits. Highway over and under the roundabout both work. This alone is a bit meh and breaks down sooner than one might think but a way to buy some more time is to lead the roundabout into other roundabouts on each side and disperse traffic through up to three directions per additional roundabout. This scales surprisingly far for what is an ultimately a low cost, low space, kind of chintzy setup. It survives the transition to high density, though with stress, particularly along the exit ramps and the roads connecting the roundabouts. You can ease the stress by building more of them and/or elongating the ramps and roundabout roads so that the tailback doesn't bleed onto the highway and secondary roundabouts.

You sound like Mathew Broderick.. That's a compliment.. As I picture you in cat form from his guest appearances from Rick and Morty.

Yuo sure did learn a lot from your first city! :)

really helpful video. loved it

20:56 "OR MAYBE ITS A FOUR WAY INTERESECTION" - YUMB. YOUR DIVERGING. I AM DEAD XD

I like the Partial clover with roundabouts the most

I highly suggest you all check out YUMBL’s train station start. Hands down the most efficient start as far as congestion tracking and turning off Despawning.

I do your third option: I extend those two dead end stubs through the entire length of my city as a 4-lane divided stroad with a roundabout at the far end of my city. And you can save a ton of munny at the start by using dirt roads and setting your highway budget to 0. And FWFW, once or twice I just brought my dirt road right up to the highway and made an level interchange onto the highway, lol.

I often start with a roundabout at the end of the preset interchange, but leave open space beyond so I can upgrade it into a highway in the near future. Of course, that'd be how I do it if I played legitimately, but with PC, I just mod and look at shaping cities up.

Wow amazing!!!

Yumble: Teaches us how to build roads the right way. Graystillplays: "We don't need roads... where we're going..." *Manic cackling*

You wild and crazy road at 9:17 is literally something done along a state highway in my city. Each directoin separated by about 200 ft and every mile or 2 they have an intersection with dedicated u-turn lanes.

i tried some modification for diamond interchange, by making it into oval roundabout or adding roundabouts at cross sections, to avoid left turn, but as they have to change lines so it still backing up at those points

Thank you for this video, you make me miss this game after I left it.

For the "bring your highway in" method personally I really like either raising or tunnelling my highway, especially since the area I start at normally becomes my high density centre. Having a highway break up your centre really sucks. I also think the roundabout is better than you give it credit for, at least with mods. A three+ lane roundabout with proper lane control can quite easily handle large traffic flows. It certainly beats the hell out of the arterial approach. I think even without mods they can still move traffic quite efficiently, you just need to consider things like bypasses on the straight or 3rd exit if they're the busiest on the roundabout. I think a modded turbo roundabout is actually competitive with an interchange though. I'd put them both in A tier and a train station and harbour in S tier, since they actually reduce the pressure on a pre existing interchange and let you contain traffic to certain areas more efficiently. In a walkable city a pedestrian link might not even generate a ton of traffic either.

Great video, i am working on a brand new city that i just started today and this will be handy, i usually use a roundabout for mine.

I like having the highway come in and have a half diamond and then ending the highway like 20 units later with a roundabout

Good information. I have one big issue. A four way Intersection with lights is an upgrade to a roundabout?? 😂

I just began building a freebuild city recently and just shoved the freeway underground to the depth that three lane freeways default to, and did one larger and one smaller half clover mostly underground with just the exits poking out. I didn't bother with the right side ramp that would exit the freeway on the close side of the road it intersects, so I just have the exit going through the u turn. Idk if I should put those in it at this point, I was very unconcerned about freeway traffic. I just wanted to start building a heavily metro based city. It's a bit like Chicago with the elevated rails, but the city is laid out more like a really small LA, but with the industry to the west on the coast, I used the lagoon map, and vanilla, I can't be bothered with learning how to mod this game especially with an epic games install. I put in several lines going to the various stations throughout, I tried to make a north and south loop but the lines don't respect the north loop and it just reversed the train instead of fulfilling the loop. It works well enough tho, and I want to build out an entirely separate, or possibly connected subway. The surface and elevated stations are pretty big, and the subterranean one is essentially a little square lol. It's really silly but I decided to not touch the buses. So I have mostly non-public transit road traffic, then some elevated metro, with a few passenger train stations, an airport and the cruise ships. I should probably just use buses, but roads get so cluttered as it is without them in this game xd I will start on the subway when I get back to it, though the metro network isn't complete yet.

I like a modified version of the arterial to highway connection. BUT I always bring the highway down about 60 units and depending on the map build an overpass around 40-60 units that will be the main boulevard for residential and commercial. I build on/offramps going towards the highway on the overpass but not down. then at the underpass i build the arterial connection to a nice long stretch of 24-30 that is a the feed to the main industrial area... LOL AND as I'm typing this you literally figured it out... IF you build from the center of the highway out wards it works much better with a full SEGMENT coming out from each direction...

I'm a friend of simple solutions. I started my city using the standard layout and draw a line with a 6 lane road. Then I draw some lines with 4 lane roads, trying to avoid too much crossings. And from those 4 lane roads I started to create my neighbourhood. It took a little time to figure out how to make money now, but when I had enough, I started to draw a "circle" around the first part of my city. A faster way for people coming in and to lessen the traffic on the 6 lane road. It actually worked and my traffic flow is 80% and more. Then I optimized the opening of my city and built something like the diamond interchange, everything fits perfectly. I don't have traffic jam, I'm so proud. But when I start to expand my city, I guess I'll try something new with my highway. Maybe the diverging diamond

This is great Yumbl but here is what I need. When I start a new city, I need a Yumbl Waze app on my PC that I could key in a highway type and you prompt with, "use a two way road here, No, dude, go 7 segments and THEN use the free form road tool" while I build. lol. Thanks for this assistance. All the best.

Damn, you started on the Switch. I played Subnautica on the Switch and it felt terrible, I can't imagine how hard I would physically cringe out of frustration playing this on it. Anyways, very awesome videos, I'm glad to have found this channel.

The diamond highway layout reminds me of one of my cities where I built the highway under the city and accidentally did an above ground diamond but the cars phased through the ground 😂😂😂

I think the best thing is service interchange and highway in is the best thing ever

When you play, do you use the Sandbox infinite funds option? I'm guessing you do unlimited funds for these demos, which makes a lot of sense.

One thing I’d add about roundabouts is that you should provide one less # of lanes than two way road connections. So a normal 4 connection roundabout intersection should have 3 lanes in this starting scenario.

i started my latest city with a singe lane handmade diverging diamond interchange (because the start of the city was at a dead end of a highway(i also used all roads unlocked)) with a roundabout at the side i wanted to start my city and it still holds up because of bigger highway interchanges closeby

Thanks for yet another fun vid. A great example of a failed A class would be Seattle. Holy f**k does our traffic suck.

I find that low density areas with despawning usually work no matter how you build them. The jump to high density traffic is definitely noticable.

I tend to put my residential next to water areas, because of the boosted property values.

good thanks

Meanwhile, here I am forcing a single turbo-roundabout to be the entrance to a mostly high density, unoptimally laid out city of 40k people. And surprisingly, it works, but only because I have other kinds of outside connections. And toll booths can also be a way to have more control over how much traffic comes to your entrances at once. And as a bonus, drivers will finally actually be paying for the service they use.

I just hit 8% traffic flow with the help of this tutorial. Thanks for getting my city in a major traffic jam lol

7 years is a long time to experience love and growth. Then again not many games last like skylines.... nor do many relationships.

On the first one, the start is very good, except for one thing: I would not put in the south road. If you leave an open, undeveloped space on the south side going as far as you can, it gives you the option to easily upgrade the whole area to a highway or multi lane strict boulevard later on. This can save you from having problems of your further south residents or businesses having to use surface streets to get out to the main highway. It can also help to create a noise and pollution barrier between industrial on one side, and residential on the other.

What mod is used for the unit measurement when building roads?

There’s a start style not mentioned, which is the one I use. Bulldozing the starter interchange and connecting a small road directly to the highway. For the sake of argument, pretend the highway is sufficiently rural that it can have the occasional at-grade intersection. From there, build sensibly and fairly tightly as a small town on a budget might. They certainly wouldn’t have the funds for a large avenue, and the state wouldn’t think they’re important enough for a proper interchange. Yes, this creates problems later as traffic gets bunched up with a growing town. But then you get to fix it!

YUMBL: If you're a person of taste... Me: Parclo incoming!

What mod shows you the unit length of your roads? Great video!

Really enjoy the videos, but I do have a question if you have time. I noticed how you have more than one line of options when you're going to, say, roads or other areas of your interface. I'm using the Steam version of City Skylines and when I go in to roads I have the annoying one line with the scrolling to the right. I've went to the options area and I couldn't find a way to change it to be more user friendly like you have there in the video. Is it a mod that helps with this or have I missed the option? Thanks in advance.

At least with TP ME I’ve made a single 3 lane roundabout off the freeway last for 25-35k pop. I build nice boulevards then built dirt roads off of them at the start to save money.

Hey man, this video is INCREDIBLE. Question though, what mod are you using to allow you to adjust the road height by 1u per button press?

Life, love, and heartbreak…. Lol, you got me there.

Build a under ground path in Front of your exit. So everyone can switch to the other side of the Highway, before they get to your City Exit. you only got small Tunnel exit wich is barely noticable I mean , its arkward to See people crossing a Highway with Heavy traffic without crashing 😄