Your best Cities: Skylines cities

Last week, we asked the Cities: Skylines players among you to send us screenshots and details of the places that you've created. In other words, we wanted your Cities: Skylines city's skyline.

The response has been huge and varied, with everything from precarious mountainside resorts, eye-straining circle worlds and lovable port disasters. Here are the cities we'd happily move in to.

Our first mayor, J_T_R_2008, has created a wondrous metropolis, filled with 105,000 citizens. It's profitable, too, making 10-12k Skylines Bux in profit per week.

It's an attractive looking place, filled with professional looking intersections and quaint cul-de-sacs. Below, you can see an overhead view of the full city. For a much more detailed tour, take a browse of this Imgur album (opens in new tab)—filled with over 40 screenshots of effective city planning.

Kingleazard YT brings us a "beautiful modern city where every area is dedicated." Each district has its own specific purpose, and the prominent highway suggests some proper planning forethought.

"Nothing special," says Jack Fletcher, linking to his album of screenshots (opens in new tab). The expression of pure, white-hot jealousy on my face would suggest otherwise.

Here's the overhead view of a city that was 22 hours in the making.

"Nothing special," indeed.

"Here is my little creation," writes GoatofSpace, giving me hope that I was being linked to a tiny town that would make me feel good about my own meagre hamlets.

No such luck (opens in new tab). Rockford is a population of over 100,000 people, and a weekly profit of 14,000 CimCash. "The city did have a dam for quite some time producing a measly 128MW of electricity," writes Goat. "I bulldozed the dam after experimenting on moving it further down the river for more electricity and promptly flooding the entire city with sewage water."

CyberBot's city is built on the Oahu map (opens in new tab), available from the Steam Workshop. It's a stunning location, and the resulting city has been nestled into the mountains for an incredible effect.

The overhead view provides an even better look at how the buildings have been packed into the available space:

Head here for the full album (opens in new tab).

City builders really help highlight how inefficient non-grid based layouts can be. Luckily, if the city builder in question gives you enough land to overcome that fact, it doesn't really matter. Hence Rodrigo's beautiful design. Here's the full album (opens in new tab), and here's the overhead shot:

Sure, it's not the prettiest road system, but according to Max it's "highly efficient". The city is called Empire Bay, and it's inspired by LA and New York, only without the grid system. Instead, it's almost hypnotically beautiful layout of roundabouts and winding roads. See more here (opens in new tab).

I love the above shot, with its slowly undulating road winding into the distance. Frosteye didn't provide much (or any) detail explaining his city, but his screenshots (opens in new tab) paint a portrait of a picturesque place to live.

Yes, Joao has built a castle. Or, more accurately, he's build a city using the Modular Castle mod (opens in new tab). It still counts. You can see more of the medieval municipality in this screenshot gallery (opens in new tab).

TeaBelliedTitch's city contains a monument to Half-Life; a fine cultural artefact that every city should contain. There's also has an ode to Borderlands, which is less widely celebrated, but still pretty neat I guess. You can find more screenshots through the link (opens in new tab).

I'll let Aleksey explain the twin cities of Sheffield and York:

"Aim was to create not-so-perfect, realistic looking city. Also less grids, more curves. As a result city has some problems with income, traffic, garbage, education, healthcare, fire-safety and dead bodies lying around. No poop water however."

You take the good with the bad, I guess.

Here's Sheffield:

Here's York:

And here's a screenshot gallery (opens in new tab).

Kepler314's thing is farming. "I hate the farms in this game so I had to improvise," explains the agricultural architect. The solution is very natural looking hedges containing plots of farmland that stand separate from the main city. You can see more of this effect here (opens in new tab), and also below.

I do like a novel intersection, and Masterstatesman's city has a few of them—all pulled from the Steam Workshop (opens in new tab). Check out this 23 image gallery (opens in new tab) for a full tour through the 300,000 strong city.

Here we have MrIceCat's city of Elisa, which once again is not a dull and boring grid-world. Instead, there's a kind of strange, curvy land of half-circles to the south-west of the city. That's pretty cool, although I bet anyone forced to walk through the dense industrial district in the north-east is less taken with the city's layout.

Just look at that road network! This, from Zehntelmensch, is going to need some explaining.

"The freeway plays an important role to my city. I have to admit though it looks very improvised."

There was also an incident with a boat.

"My harbour is only very small but I think it is the biggest attraction of my city that occurred by accident. When there are cruise liners approaching the docks you can witness an amusing spectacle."

Okay, so it's possible I'm only including Cirurginn's city because it features this Better Call Saul sign mod (opens in new tab). Of course, there's also the fact that it's a 230,000 monstrosity of epic scale.

Welcome to Urbanville. It's mayor, Michael, has provided the following tourist brochure:

- Uptown is the newest development, equipped with its own airport and subway line and flanked by the region's two hydroelectric dams. I wanted high rises to dominate the upper plateau of the map; however, they are slow to develop.

- The Hills caters to the rich and those who don't mind a long drive to work, located across the river from Uptown. IKEA has set up shop across the freeway from here.

- Adjacent to the Hills is Spiral Street, an office development built by Spaceship Corp.

- Across the freeway is the Urbanville Airport, Congress Park (where public servants and elected officials must live), and the Corsa Dino Raceway.

- Hamilton University and Little Dubai make up the next area, where the young come to learn and the old come to take a load off.

- Downtown is composed of Sips Street, Capitol Park, Performance Park, and Peach Beach, along with the bulk of the city's population.

- There are honestly too many user-created items to name, but some of my favourites are the Spaceship Corp. HQ by anomega, Soder Torn by GolonkaSwe, and Gula's Down N' Out Burger.

- The freeways, which I will dub here as the I-O, the I-O.o, and the I-O.O, features roundabouts attached to offramps that I've designed. These have been enormously effective, and were inspired by a planned roundabout-offramp along I-25 in my hometown Colorado Springs.

- Another offramp, named Consider Redoing near Corsa Dino, has been less effective.

IVIaarten has kept up a diary of his city (opens in new tab). According to the latest entry, "Forkton is doing well. There's more tourists arriving every day, people are feeling good, have jobs, and spare money to spend." It all sounds pretty idyllic, although maybe not so much to the residents of notably less wealthy 'Otherside' district.

When I first saw Jack's city, my reaction was "woah! That's a lot of circles!" Then I saw the full overhead service map, and my reaction was "woah! Previously my definition of 'a lot of circles' was clearly flawed, because this, now, is a lot of circles."

"The basic idea was to create largeish roundabouts out of 6-lane one-ways connected via 6-lane 2-ways to create little isolated areas," says Jack, "most of which have a 2-lane one-way running through the middle." If you say so.

Nerdsworth's city—Nerdsville—is built on the impossibly mountainous Kiin's Landing map (opens in new tab). As such, it's a bit of a mess. There's roads weaving between isolated islands, and near-inaccessible districts scattered around the land. That's not a criticism. All cities should be a bit of a mess. It's what makes them interesting. For more, have a browse through this giant 50 screenshot album (opens in new tab).