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  1. Features
  2. Sim
  3. Cities: Skylines

Your best Cities: Skylines cities

By Phil Savage
published 17 April 2015

  • Comments

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.

Page 1 of 21
Page 1 of 21

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—filled with over 40 screenshots of effective city planning.

Cities1 Full

Page 2 of 21
Page 2 of 21

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.

Page 3 of 21
Page 3 of 21

"Nothing special," says Jack Fletcher, linking to his album of screenshots. 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.

Cities 3

"Nothing special," indeed.

Page 4 of 21
Page 4 of 21

"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. 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."

City 4 Full

Page 5 of 21
Page 5 of 21

CyberBot's city is built on the Oahu map, 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:

Cities5 Overhead

Cities5Side

Head here for the full album.

Page 6 of 21
Page 6 of 21

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, and here's the overhead shot:

Cities6 Circles

Page 7 of 21
Page 7 of 21

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.

Cities7 Overhead

Cities7 OVerhead2

Page 8 of 21
Page 8 of 21

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 paint a portrait of a picturesque place to live.

Cities8 2

Page 9 of 21
Page 9 of 21

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

Page 10 of 21
Page 10 of 21

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.

Cities10 2

Page 11 of 21
Page 11 of 21

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:

City11 - Sheffield

Here's York:

Cities11 - York

And here's a screenshot gallery.

Page 12 of 21
Page 12 of 21

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, and also below.

Cities12 Overhead

Page 13 of 21
Page 13 of 21

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

Overhead

Page 14 of 21
Page 14 of 21

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.

Cities13

Page 15 of 21
Page 15 of 21

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.

Cities14 2

"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."

Cities14 Overhead

Page 16 of 21
Page 16 of 21

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

Cities15 Overhead

Page 17 of 21
Page 17 of 21

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.

City18 Freeways

City18 Stuff

City18 Overhead

Page 18 of 21
Page 18 of 21

IVIaarten has kept up a diary of his city. 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.

Cities19 overhead

Page 19 of 21
Page 19 of 21

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."

City20 Map

"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.

Page 20 of 21
Page 20 of 21

Nerdsworth's city—Nerdsville—is built on the impossibly mountainous Kiin's Landing map. 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.

Cities21 Overhead

Page 21 of 21
Page 21 of 21
  • Comments
Phil Savage
Phil Savage
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Editor-in-Chief

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.

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