I must agree. The amount of work you put in and how you manage to make your videos both entertaining and education must have already affected the time-space-continuum. Thanks!
"Build _towards_ the paved roads to avoid weirdness with the zoning grid." See, it's little tricks like that that make me love this channel and low-key loathe Colossal Order for remaining married to the grid squares in the first place.
Yes...I wish there was more control here for us too...or that it was just about fitting buildings in on appropriate shapes lots...but the zoning grid does make things easier. 🤷🏻♂️ Oh well...I’m glad you found a useful tip in there!
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto As much flak the last version of SimCity rightly received (I still blame EA for the worst of it) I will always praise the Glassbox Engine's ability to fit building plots to curves and impressively simple road tools, something I truly believe Skylines has yet to match.
@@Vespuchian I never bothered with the last SimCity because all the reports before release made it sound like EA was getting stupid and greedy-and as much as I wanted a new SimCity, I just couldn’t give them my money until other real people tried it. I ended up never giving them any money, because the game was such a stinker. Colossal Order hasn’t been perfect, but they have done a great job with this game and made it a real blast to play. The best thing they did was allow so much in the way of modding! Wow...it just changes everything to make the game we want out of an already great game. It sure has its flaws...but they’re tolerable for what we get IMO. I definitely would love some of the good elements of SimCity though. I always appreciated that they for the most part created buildings and vehicles that seemed realistic and not so cartoony as CS. But that’s all fairly easy to fix with mods...so I can live with this pretty comfortably.
It's not being able to zone the full outside of the curve that drives me nuts. I could accept it still being little squares if it would just smush them around the way they do with the segment mesh...
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto Its the always online requirement that was the deal breaker for me. Why should I connect to some server, potentially disabling the game, for something that is suppose to be a _single player game_ Glad I never bought the game, appearently that was far from the only issue.
LOL I had hoped a lot of people would catch that! And this one's from the BOOK too! The movie version is pithier, but I LOVE Frank Herbert's writing style! Gives me goosebumps how great that book is! And I'm not even a bookworm...
Hi Lee! I really appreciate the more technical approach you've taken, it definitely sets you apart in the community, also the editing, the music selection and the addressing of actual economy theory is just great. Amazing work I wish you the best of luck and I'm looking forward for more great content of yours, Subbed √
Lee, you have found the sweet point of content for CS. Your videos are detailed enough that the most seasoned player can learn, yet simple enough for me to wish I had known about this when I first started playing the game. Great voice quality, editing, and humor also allows me to easily predict you have much more than 9000 subscribers in your future. Stellar work.
Hey Lee, I was introduced to your content through 5B1C. I'm finally pickup back up on CS after a long hiatus and this series has been immensely informative AND entertaining. Mad props and thanks for putting it together!
the production value on this series is incredible. Tons of very useful tips like building roads in a certain way to get the right zoning grid shape. Thanks for this, it's awesome :)
Regarding "not enough educated workers", in my opinion, high density commercial and office zones are a bit of a beginner's trap since they require the university resources that likely haven't been built yet. High density residential can be utilized straight away but high density commercial and office should be held off a but until there is sufficient capacity through the entire education pipeline. Even level 3 low density commercial is problematic if those start appearing before a university is placed. A sort of emergency solution to that is to rezone "too valuable" locations as Organic and Local Produce, which effectively is Level 2. The zoning type is a good choice in general for starter cities.
I seriously doubt it'll be another month...I'm really excited about getting through the next 2 episodes...and then there's even more good stuff beyond that!
I'm playing this on console. I was trying to mirror your city, but I started a little farther from the highway. Still I've learned a great deal. Also this starter layout is by far the best I've been able to do. Great videos. Extremely helpful.❤
As a thousand-hour City Skyline player, I was a good highway builder but had little idea of planning a district well. By chance found out about your channel. I am delighted with your videos. They are of great quality. Look forward to learning more from your guides in district planning and building. Liked and Subscribed.
Lee, you've done it again. Keep them coming. As soon as my CPU is fixed, I'll get cracking at copying this city. I wanna see all this planning working. Well done.
Keeping up the download Site so long after creation of this video is so cool, man! Thank you for that! And the rest is perfectly described by City Planner Plays as pinned up. First time for me to really get an idea of how to avoid many problems I always ran into when building a city. Many greetings from germany. Michael
😁 thanks! I bet that poor planner wishes he didn’t have to make his bosses happy...it’s a lot harder job IRL because of all the politics...which thankfully aren’t in this game 🤪
Lee, dude, 2 months of waiting to continue watching this series is tough, I know that quality content like this takes time to produce, but come on man. 😩 Fantastic work! See you in 2 months. 😉
Been playing this game for years and I've learned more from these first four videos than I have from most other SC youtubers! Eager to learn how you eventually handle industrial traffic without the need for highways (I think that is your aim?). Fantastic production quality sir!
:-D thanks!!! I'm thinking of piecing together all my cinematics from time to time and putting them in a video...should be fun to watch :-D I have lots of footage that doesn't show up in these finished videos! When are you getting the game? ;-) lol
I love how you take us from settlement to gran city telling a tale, when you speak of the streets by its name and such... like grandpa telling a child the history of the city :) I can't hardly keep track of my district names, i have resorted to name them after their function with a humorous twist. (Like "Greta lake park": for a hippy self sufficient local produce district and such hahahha) Education is a delicate balance in the end game, as in order to keep providing workers for the factories one needs to keep the supply of education lower than the demand, I am placing schools everywhere, but reducing education budget to always have 1000 to 1500 lower capacity for elementary schools. I tried isolating a mine town (Ore DLC blah) but the bloody CIMs had higher hopes and where travelling 6 tiles by train to attend school. On Garbage, thanks to this series i explored RC and I realized Recycling centers have half the capacity of the incinerators and a little less trucks, but cost like 6 times less than incinerators to operate. I bulldozed all my incinerators and replaced them with Recycling centers and cut my garbage expenses drastically.
😊 I feel like names make a place a lot more real, so I love naming everything in my city! I'm glad you enjoy that aspect. Education is definitely a greater challenge than I think most recognize. I think it's important to get industry to upgrade ASAP to reduce the number of uneducated cims required. We will eventually have a video on this as well...because it is something I get a lot of questions/comments on. And YES recycling centers are super cool! I just wish they didn't take up so much real estate...
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto They indeed do, i not only onjoy it, i admire it... I just discovered a small drawback with the recycling centers, they do export the raw materials they produce, and run out of trucks from time to time un 25 tiles.
CS CIM: "I would like to buy this 5 star residence." "Do you have a high paying job to afford this? " "I have a university degree, so probably, I don't know". "Sounds good enough for me, enjoy your villa". SC4 SIM: "I would like to apply for the position of CEO because I have an expensive house to maintain." "Do you have a relevant education?" "Well, somebody in this city has, who's to say it's no me?" "Sounds good enough for me, here's your job as CEO of the nuclear power plant." SC2013: "What do you mean, you have had education, how is that relevant for anything?"
Glad to hear this! The road layout map really only saves you from having to figure out how to align the streets to start...it doesn’t include the entire city plan.
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto I know but I really liked the road layout you came up with on that map. So I placed that down and now I’m growing out the rest of the city the way I want to.
Love the education on game, as well as real life principals. Example. I didn't know that 4 percent is an unemployment number that is acceptable. Thanks man, great guides, on many levels.
Glad you enjoyed! That 4 percent was what they said in my Econ 101 class when I was in college ages ago...so that could be in dispute depending on which economist you talk to. 4% seems to be a pretty happy medium in the game since it prevents abandonment on both the business and the residential side.
Lee, what's your day job? are you an urban planner, a university professor, a historian, operations manager at some big company? these are easily the best edited and planned Cities videos on the website. it's clear you put the same level of planning and organization in your videos as you do in your cities. I can't wait until part 20 to see how you handle megalopolises
I’ve always been an engineer and a scientist at heart, but mainly I’ve spent my time working in IT and photography. I have had a lot of writing and public speaking experience too, which thankfully is paying off here on YT. And btw...I started the _Less Traffic Livestream,_ where I’ll probably have a megalopolis a lot sooner than in _More Money Less Traffic._ It’s not as scripted, but it will definitely demonstrate some traffic planning concepts that will come much later than here in MMLT. I’m going to go live again tomorrow afternoon at 2pm 😁. Last Friday’s stream is available on my channel already...where I start a city from scratch with everything unlocked, limited funds...and no land connections! 😳
So public library is the answer, how I got highly educated citizens without university. Actually I started your series to watch your layout planning to avoiding my late midgame and endgame traffic jams, but its more entertaining than I thought. Of course I hype in my original interest, because when I finish industry, little leisure, city parks and natural reserves, money never a problem, but my every layouts around 50k people are never enough to serve advanced tourism for example. I'm lacking flexibility with huge cities and maybe your series will give me the answers, how can I integrate whatever I want.
Yes! The Public Library is much more important than I ever realized even myself! I’m glad you brought up traffic-there’s a video coming very very soon that’s all about traffic, and it’ll give you at least some ideas of how to lay out roads as well as lay out your zoning-zoning I find is the most often overlooked aspect when it comes to traffic. If you get that right, it makes a gigantic difference!
Yes! I find the demand bars are best for figuring out whether I need commercial, or more industrial/office jobs...but they’re not necessarily so good for balancing population against jobs.
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto In case you haven't seen it, check out steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2074258904 -- it splits out unemployment by education level, which I've found super helpful for knowing whether to build more normal industry or to switch to offices (or Industry 4.0). I don't really know what to do with commercial. I usually only build it when my industry complains about not enough buyers.
Thank goodness for this! I think I have too much mods on. Some cims are not able to cross pedestrian crossing even if traffic lights are on. I make path bridges to solve it, even transportation alternatives; but some cims still get stuck waiting on the ped crossing. This would, in turn, make them unable to go to work and their workplaces get abandoned and so on and so forth.
Yes, it's important to understand what mods do before getting too crazy with them...I've done that myself before, not realizing the unintended consequences! Sometimes it's good to step back and just go vanilla for a bit again.
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto oh, and by the way! Your guide on education (adults don’t attend elementary schools) are key factors I’ve never thought about playing cities skylines for years! I always assumed schools do their thing as is regarless of age. Now it makes more sense to monitor the population tab every now and then. Just goes to show how eye-opening your guide series are!
@@johndalenino well I'm happy to be of service! I have to admit I never realized some of this stuff either until I dug in to research...it definitely affects how I plan as well!
My current goal is to build a city with lots of dirty industry, but I find the linking of education to everything in the game makes it really difficult. I've tried going the education route in the past but the demand for industrial seems to completely disappear over time.
I try to separate my cities into a couple different residential zones, the "Normal" education, just elementary and HS, Highly educated, and low income high density that is close to my industrial with alot of extra stuff to raise happiness, then I separate industry and low income and Regular with a couple blocks of commercial with a couple blues dotted in throughout the residential, then when I'm more settled in and established I'll start making my high education and office buildings
It’s always funny to me when my “convenience store” requires an educated employee, whilst the industry areas will hire anyone, even though in the warehouse industries pay a lot more and require more skill than small commercial. 😂😂
I have built a lot of schools in my city but for some reason there is still to many places that say "not enough educated workers". I'm not sure what to do lol, but great video
Capacity is the critical piece. As long as you have enough slots, you’ll get everyone eligible into school. The green on the road-from everything I can tell-shows where you’ll get a land value bump for proximity to the school.
I dont get bored of watching these videos @11:45 while the Walkires walk... I just realized some mod is interfering with my Levels infoview, my industrial zones shows always white... There i have something to do when i get bored... It might be the one that breaks down import export raw materials blah... or toggle whiteness... arghh to many mods...
A Dune quote like thar would have earned a subscription if I was not already subscribed due to the AMAZING workers and resources Map I saw on BBalljos channel 😀
I make cities from scratch oevr and over again, I spend all my money on education (middle schools, high schools, universities and libraries, but still ALL businesses are shotdown eventually from not having enough educated workers, they all abandon their buildings and commercial demand starts to rise to the roof again. I can't find a solution to it.
I had just above 2400 people and was doing great. Then all of a sudden my population dropped to around 300. I don't know why. Maybe because I changed the design of the zone to European suburbs? My population bounced back to about 1500 but now all my businesses are dying. I'm at 60 grand in debt after bailout and my income is barely in the positives. I feel like I just wasted my time...
Hi Lee, great video. can I ask, in a long run, my city tends to have too many highly educated people, there are many jobs for educated people and below are not filled. so how do you balance this too many highly educated people tilt?
hi, great series so far, really enjoying it and wanting to start playing again. are you using any basic mods for this series. i know it's vanilla but i mean things like no fog, road units etc??
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto i'm looking to follow along with you as you build, i do like some mods though to help enhance my experience, not cheat mods just ones that enhance my understanding. mods like detailed population views etc, do you have any suggestions for some good mods of that sort? thanks for your reply, really great work your doing.
@@AmazinJ89 I have a list here of the mods I typically use, all in a handy collection on the Steam Workshop! steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=779572710 I need to update this a bit for everyone...I'll post about it when I can find the time to do it!
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto thanks for that, I use most of those mods you have in there although i don't bother much with ones that change the game aesthetics. I used the real population and life cycle mods plus real time mod but i found i have to build way more residential space than yours to get the same amount of cims in the City. I also used real city mod and real construction and while the idea of them is great it does mess with the game mechanism alot, do you have any experience with them?
@@AmazinJ89 I use Realistic Population and Citizen Lifecycle all the time. I don’t have experience with Real City or Real Time yet. I have used Citizen Lifecycle on the legacy settings mostly so far, because otherwise it really messes with my existing very large cities that used it before the Sunset Harbor update. You definitely need more residential for a city that uses RPR, and probably even more yet for RPR+CLR together using the new default settings. I find it is much much more realistic than the vanilla game, and that the city has some really good density as you grow it vertically. I want to a video series on these with More Money Less Traffic after I get done with the current series. Those are some great mods!
Part 5 is coming...it takes time to do these things if it’s in minute detail. I’m working on Part 6 at the same time too...so you’ll get more videos in a shorter timeframe. And there’s a lot more coming after that too.
How much does it matter whether the residential actually has green coverage of education? They seem to get the education even if they need to go across town to get it...
They do indeed! You are correct...the major plus with having residential in the green area is that it gets a bump in land value due to proximity. I don’t think it’s considerable though...so long as education is available, parks really make the biggest difference in land value, at least based on my research...more will come on this in Part 5 😁
LOL I knew that would being out the best science fiction fans! I love that book! My sci-fi loving bookworm wife has still not read it...it does take a lot to get into because he really defines a whole unfamiliar multifaceted world and makes it all seem completely normal and plausible. But man is it a great story!
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto absolutely, I was also kinda skeptical of these fictional universes but Dune is nothing less than 'magnificent'. hats off to Frank Herbert!
@@walidhasan9739 that is the truth! It's so good, nobody so far has made that great of a screen adaptation. It's a shame too...the story is so so cool and so is the world he built.
For the record, that is not why economists tend to like ~4% unemployment. They might sometimes say it's because of people *switching* jobs, but the real reason is that employers like it when workers compete for jobs, not when they compete for workers. This doesn't really change how things work in Cities: Skylines, because this assumption is baked into the gameplay mechanics.
Hmmmmm...that makes sense, especially seeing what’s been happening the past year in the US. My Econ instructor in college didn’t explain it that way. I suppose if unemployment got too low though that it could cause inflation, so maybe 4% creates a balance more economists are comfortable with. In the US I think the Federal Reserve (which has a dual mandate to maintain low unemployment as well as low inflation) has a target of 2% annual inflation. Maybe at some point they felt like 4% unemployment was a good target to balance against that. I’m not sure I would completely agree, considering wages have stayed pretty well flat for the past 40 years while economic productivity has multiplied...but that’s a whole other ball of wax. Thanks for pointing that out!
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto No problem at all! Thanks for the thoughtful response. And yes, you are 100% correct about the Fed balancing unemployment and inflation. (Although technically they're talking about a specific type of inflation. Not all inflation is evidence that private employment is too high.) The main reason is that our society's productive capacity can always increase as long as we have people who want work but don't have it. If the productive capacity is hit (or if it has a bottleneck in a supply chain, as we just saw) then the supply of goods can't meet their demand. But different people are afraid of inflation for different reasons. One of the major inflation-hawk lobbies is the credit industry, because debt becomes less valueable if prices inflate too much. It's also not entirely clear that public employment has the same runaway inflationary affect as private employment. Anyway, Stephanie Kelton has some good writings on this (particularly a book she wrote a couple years ago called the Deficit Myth, that argues that deficits and government debt are not the danger of overspending; it's inflation). Not everyone in economics agrees with her (obviously) because she's specifically a post-Keynsian, and not an anti-Keynsian, and most established economists these days are more influenced by Hayek than Keynes. But in any case, I agree with some of her arguments. Again, this doesn't really affect city governance, or how one plays Cities: Skylines, since cities do not have sovereign currencies, and can't prevent jobs from fleeing a municipal minimum wage. Again, I appreciate the thoughtful response!
Great topic! Hard to make a video about though...it's pretty geeky stuff...but I will eventually have to tackle it with how big these expansions are getting :-o so I'm confident it'll come up at some point.
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto yea it's like an endemic phenomenon in this game but I'm sure that most of us has or will experience that thing especially when the high density residential has been unlocked 🙃 and so far I've only seen useful threads about that but not in a video form so it might fit into the niche 😁
@@daniellxnder indeed it will! I’ll explain how I fixed them...they are super annoying, and the way I’m expanding the city even with the low density development in the next couple of episodes, I may end up with them if I don’t keep growing the city. 😳
@@daniellxnder My usual advice is to just overbuild cemeteries. Cims like living near them so you can treat them like parks, their hearses are much cheaper than those from crematoria, and multiple cemeteries can empty into a single crematorium no problem.
How about the other way around; Imagine all your cims are educated and there are not enough uneducated people working - does that happen? Can you please touch on this topic again, when maybe you build universities and have access to high density office?
And in addition: if you don't have enough educated people working, is it better to expand or to build a child health center, for there to be children that can be educated? Of course you wanted to expand in this particular scenario, but if you could also cover that whenever you touch on this subject again, that would be cool ;)
Great questions!!! This topic will definitely come up again in the future! Education, employment, and the city economy will be regular topics as the city expands, for sure.
In Cities Skylines, my biggest problem is the over education. Elementary schools are frequent, not just with number coverage but also with area coverage. So I mostly have twice as much place as I need. Mostly the same with high schools, and, because of the land value, the sport and campus fetish, I always build a university. I have no heart to build an outside village without schools, at least I build community schools and colleges there. Also, I have some church assets with minor education bonus, and they look pretty in a village like environment. :)
I feel like most city service buildings have way smaller service areas and way lower capacities than they should. I don’t know of cities of under 20k requiring so many police stations or hospitals to cover them. It always bothered me that the game didn’t have bigger versions of schools until very very recently. I totally agree that it shouldn’t take 2 high schools to cover a small city…but it definitely does in CS. 🤷🏻♂️
Then, comes another topic regarding education: When education level in the city went so high, sometimes there's overly-educated people working in a building when you highlight it. Is that a problem or can we just let it be?
There's also a bunch of topics I'd love to see in this series: Effective upgrading of zones & service buildings (especially space requirements) Keeping a balance of low density to high density as city grows.
That's something I will get into eventually, because I'm certain it will come up, and something a lot of people wonder about. I'm planning to cover densification in an episode not too far in the future. I will most likely discuss the low-high density ratio more as time goes on. This is an important subject I think definitely deserves attention, just because it can definitely give you more realistic results if you do it right. And THANK YOU! I actually really enjoy the technical stuff, but yeah...it's definitely hard to make videos about LOL. That's probably why nobody does it :-D so I guess that just leaves more room for me!
I'm new to cities skylines and I'm a bit confused. I have schools (many elementary, a few highschools, and one university) and 18% uneducated. However, I'm constantly bulldozing abandoned buildings because of "not enough educated workers". It's so annoying having to go through and delete them. I'm not sure how to fix the issue. I've even tried allowing time to pass before zoning anything more. And then I tried leveling up land value first before building residential in the hopes educated cims would move in... Nothing is working. I've read and looked into this and can't find what more to do. I'm on PS4 so I can't add any mods either.
It’s annoying but the problem will eventually work itself out. New cims always move in as uneducated workers...it’s really hard to improve their education level, but their kids have a great opportunity to grow up with an education...however it takes time for that to work it’s way through your economy. The game will allow businesses to upgrade to a level that requires more education, but it will not let so many upgrade that you get a ton of abandonment. Nowadays, all I do is grow my city and not even worry about these Not Enough Educated Workers icons popping up...because the problem does go away on its own after a few game years.
You get a smaller high school when you play on a map with the International building theme. Only European building theme maps use the ginormous high school...which is weird, since I would have thought European high schools would be more compact. 🧐
@@LeeHawkinsPhoto Ah OK, thanks. ATM I'm applying your major principles to the Foggy Hills map. Here in Australia High School campuses are double or triple the size of even the 12x13 Euro one (96x104 metres really isn't that much), once sporting fields and associated assembly areas are considered.
I still have trouble mixing places that generate both noise and entertainment. Yes, you can build just parks everywhere and get away with it but it makes your city boring. You place a hotel that generates noise and entertainment and your citizens get sick. And no amount of hospitals and trees is enough to offset that. Not to mention that noise radius of such buildings is quite big. The only option is to create separated zone with high noise... BUT... the radius of entertainment is almost on par with radius of noise! So placing nice expensive buildings has no real gameplay value besides behaving like props.
We’ll see...it’s been a long time since I used leisure and tourism specializations, but I don’t remember having too many problems with them near my residential areas...but I also usually buffer C and R with office...which mitigates things quite a bit!
