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The original was posted on /r/citiesskylines by /u/FemaleAssEnjoyer on 2025-11-11 21:52:46+00:00.
Over the course of the free weekend, I had the opportunity to play for ~10 hours, and I thought I'd share my thoughts and perspective as a brand new player jumping in blind (no guidance outside of the in-game tutorial).
(Posting this again, since my screenshots didn't upload properly in my last post.)
Background
I've never played a city builder/simulator before. I've heard about SimCity, but never played any of those titles growing up. For the past decade or so, I've heard a lot of good things and universal praise about Cities Skylines being a modern, spiritual successor to the beloved SimCity series, but I've never tried it.
In general, I do love simulation/management games, but my experience is limited to RCT2, Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, and Jurassic World Evolution 2.
When CS2 released, I was very excited and thought it'd be a perfect opportunity to try out a city sim, but was disappointed to hear a lot of negative reviews and feedback, particularly regarding performance as well as a lack of content compared to CS1.
At present, being under the impression that the game is now in a better state than at launch, I thought the free weekend would be the perfect opportunity to try it out for myself and see if my system could handle it.
My Experience
I started by creating a new city in Normal mode, following the in-game tutorial. I think the tutorial is a good starting point to introducing new players to a high-level overview of most of the in-game systems/mechanics/general gameplay loop. Having said that, it quickly became apparent that there is a lot of depth to this game, and the bulk of learning and familiarizing will come with time and experience.
I learn best by doing, so I decided to start a brand new city (Normal mode, again) to try and apply and reinforce the basic principles taught in the tutorial.
As you can see from the screenshots, I more or less made things up as I went (insert Moon Knight "Random Bullshit Go!" meme). I started my initial approach by building a landfill in one corner of the map, a water pump on the corner of the map, upstream of the water flow, and a sewage output at the other corner of the map, downstream of the water flow. I built some windmills to generate power, and placed them downwind of the airflow (I didn't realize this, but placement of the windmills matters a lot - in some parts of the map, they will not be able to reach 100% power generation, so I made sure to put them in a spot where they'd fully generate the power they were capable of). I also tried to put my industry zone near the edge of the map, so that no one has to live too close to the noisy pollution.
I realize that this is still a tiny town, but even after reaching ~6k residents, I wish that my infrastructure had been a little more organized and well-thought-out.
Overview of my town
Residential zones
Oops! All agriculture!
Perfectly normal pedestrian group crossing?
Education district (High School + Elementary)
Residents enjoying their scenic view of the town landfill + ore mine
Oil industry island
Commercial zone in the middle of the town
Long street going through the center of the town
Thoughts
- 🖥️ CS2 pushed my PC (7800X3D + RTX 4080 + 32GB DDR5 6000) to its limits, but the performance wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be, especially considering the very demanding 5120x1440 resolution
- I didn't mess with the graphical settings too much, but I did enable DLSS on the Balanced setting and left the quality settings on "High."
- I would say the game averaged around ~60FPS, which felt good. That being said, I'm sure performance would slow to a crawl with an actual, sizeable city population, so I would likely need to adjust my settings in the future!
- 🧠 As I played, I kept learning more and more new things, and I had the constant, recurring thought: "Next time, I'll plan/do/place XYZ differently!"
- It became hard to resist the urge to start over and do things "better," but I committed to growing this first city as much as I could, to see how far I could develop it.
- 🚗 I feel like the cornerstone of this game is built around roads, streets, and traffic
- Because zones are based off of streets, I need to learn which streets are best suited for which districts, and how to utilize the available real estate to its full potential.
- 🚦The biggest obstacle I ran into was traffic and congestion
- There's a learning curve here that I'm eager to explore, and it quickly became apparent that, no, adding long highways throughout the town is not the ideal way to route traffic.
- In fact, replacing some of my longer streets with highways quickly broke a lot of my infrastructure due to highways not inherently including power/water/sewage out-of-the-box 😬
- 🚜 I was really interested in specialized industries
- I definitely went overboard with my wheat/crop industry, because I ended up producing hundreds upon hundreds of tons of wheat, while my town was only consuming a tiny fraction of that.
- I understand that excess production is exported and sold to neighboring/external cities, but it's not clear to me exactly how much income my specialized industry produces (I couldn't find it anywhere in my financial statistics overview).
- This made it difficult to determine if it was worthwhile to produce and export so much excess product, and I definitely used up a lot of tile space/real estate that probably would have been better utilized for other zones (you'll noticed that I also found some land rich in minerals, so I purchased a tile and built a mine covering the entire heat-map). Is this worth the opportunity cost, and the tile upkeep cost? I'm still not sure 😂
- 🏠 Another obstacle I ran into was being able to keep up with the constant demand for housing
- Of all the zones I painted in my town, the vast majority were for low-capacity housing (because that's what was most in demand)
- While I wanted to keep industry zones on the outskirts of town, I wasn't sure what was the best way to balance/distribute the other zones (residential, commercial, office)
- This resulted in me attempting to distribute residential zones around a centralized commercial/administrative district
- I'm positive there are much better ways to plan and optimize the layout, but this is the best I could think to do with the time I had
- 🗺️ Once I had nearly taken up all of the available space within my map tiles, it became difficult to strategize expansion
- If I bought more map tiles to the east, do I relocate all of my industry to the new borders? Do I leave the industrial zones where they are, and build residential districts on the other side?
- I wasn't sure whether it was better to continue expanding directly off of my existing tiles, or whether to purchase distant tiles and start another small town further away, to reduce congestion?
- 🙂 I really appreciated the resident happiness meter tooltip
- This helped provide some basic guidance and direction regarding areas for improvement
- I found it difficult to reconcile the happiness measurements with direct feedback given through Chirper. Residents would often complain about things that weren't at all reflected in the happiness tooltip
- 🚌 I messed up my public transportation
- Mostly as a means to try and reduce traffic congestion, I invested in a Bus Depot
- I fundamentally misunderstood how to run a bus line, assuming this system would simply start working by adding bus stops throughout town
- After allowing public transportation services to drain my finances for an embarrassingly long time, I noticed that there were no actual buses in use, and it took me an equally embarrassing amount of time to figure out how to add a bus line route to link all of the stops
- ⏱️ The simulation runs more slowly than I expected
- There were times when I needed more funds to build more infrastructure and service buildings, but I was hesitant to loan too much money.
- After a while, initially worried that the town would quickly descend into chaos, I finally began to feel comfortable running the simulation at 3x speed, so that income could be generated more quickly and I was spending less time sitting and twiddling my thumbs
- 🐛 I didn't run into many bugs
- From what I could tell, the I only issues I were able to n...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/1oumqs6/first_impressions_from_playing_over_the_free/
