What is its focus? Type of business? Will it be an exporter or importer? A tourist destination ( guide here ) or an industrial powerhouse ( guide here )? Once you’ve got an idea, build around that. What’s the story of the city?īefore you even load into a map, it’s worth having an idea what the city is going to be about. Personally, I like it, but I do understand the desire for a more muted, gritty appearance – and perhaps that would be great for a future sequel.īut without really getting into editing the colours and assets in the game, ‘authentic’ is a lot more achievable than ‘realistic’. By default, Cities: Skylines has quite a cartoony look, probably inspired by 2013’s SimCity. It’s worth saying I’m not talking about cities that look ‘realistic’. And here I’ll go into a few ideas and things I use to try to bring cities to life. There’s a lot of tools and techniques in the base game we can use to make cities look more natural and authentic. For anyone on a console, an elderly PC or who prefers to play vanilla, that approach isn’t going to work. But a lot of those realistic-looking cities depend on vast numbers of mods and assets. Some of the images that go up on Reddit are little short of extraordinary. How do we make a city feel like a real place? How can we make it feel alive – like it exists independently of us?
