As you dive intoCities: Skylines 2, you’ll face numerous features demanding your attention. To handle them all efficiently while you progress involves optimizing your city and exercising control over its development, crafting a successful urban landscape.

To ensure a thriving and efficient city, optimization is crucial to avoid issues as you progress. This guide will assist you in optimizing your city, ensuring that you follow the right path while expanding and developing your city.

Terraforming Tool from the Landscaping in Cities: Skylines 2.

Use Landscaping

When starting a new map, our main focus is often on building the city, and we tend to overlook making changes to the terrain, whether necessary or not. While engrossed in setting up new buildings, we forget that we can make edits to the map’s terrain using the landscape tool.

The Landscape tool offers a lot of freedom, allowing you toshape your map as you see fit. Its usefulness becomes apparent when you’re creating new buildings or connecting roads, especially when the existing terrain doesn’t facilitate these tasks. That’s why it’s essential to use it toflatten the terrain and mold it according to your needs.

Tram unlocked in development tree in Cities: Skylines 2.

While it’s a helpful tool,it’s important to use it judiciously. It would help if you employed it when necessary, such as when expanding your city and adjusting the terrain for new roads and buildings.Using it excessively might lead to becoming fixated on it, causing you to lose sight of the main goal.

Upgrade Transportation

Transportation is a crucial aspect of your city, and you need to manage it effectively. If you don’t handle transportation well, you may encounter serious issues ranging from traffic congestion to challenges with the mobility of citizens.

While starting in your city, it’s crucial to build basic transportation, butconsider upgrading to trams when possible. Buses are suitable for small areas initially, butas your city expands, issues may arise. To maintain flexibility in your public transportation,replacing buses with trams becomes essential.

Establish a Hospital in Cities: Skylines 2.

Incorporating trains, air travel, and water transportation can be valuable additions to your city, albeit with the consideration of the higher costs associated with each one of these transportation options.

When beginning a new city, the excitement ofexpanding and creating large, realistic urban spacescan sometimes lead us to overlook the importance of developingwhat we already have before expanding further.

Happiness indicator in Cities: Skylines 2.

It’s essential toupgrade existing buildingsto meet the growing needs of citizens. When expansion is necessary and new buildings are crucial, it’s the right time to create them.

The same principle applies to upgrades.They aren’t imperative during the initial establishmentof buildings butbecome necessary as needs arise. At times, it’s vital to replace them with structures that align with the evolving demands of your city. For example, starting with a clinic allows for an upgrade to increase patient capacity.

Disabling Chirper in the menu of Cities Skylines 2

However, as the city’s population grows, it becomes crucial to establish hospitals to meet the expanding needs of our city.

Track The Happiness

Monitoring happinessis a valuable way to understand your city’s and its citizens' needs. It helpsidentify the specific services required for the well-beingof the city.

With this information, you can make informed decisions regarding your upcoming projects andpinpoint the essential services your city requires. This approach avoids haphazard construction and enables you toidentify services that might not be a priorityfor your citizens or because they already exist.

purchase map tiles in Cities: Skylines 2.

Listen To Your Citizens

Listening to the citizens can make you feel like you’re in a real city with real citizens, and this is whatChirperis designed for. While it may be annoying at times, it remains a valuable feature that the game provides,allowing you to hear the complaints and concerns of your citizens.

Chirper functions well as a social media platform, but it’s advisablenot to rely on it too heavily. While you may encounter some complaints that may not be necessary, itstill serves as an excellent tool to provide hintson how to improve your city and identify areas where there may be deficiencies.

Tracking Natural Resources in Cities: Skylines 2.

Make Outside Connections

When you begin on a new map, you’ll find yourself within a confined city. As you progress, it becomes crucial to consider how to expand. During expansion, a key consideration isestablishing connections to the outsideworld. This results in the abilityto engage in trade with the broader external world.

Initially, your map comes with available tracks and roads that facilitate easy connections to the outside. However,as you expand, creating new outside connections becomes necessary. This can be accomplished by conveniently purchasing map tiles to extend your reach to the edges of the map.

Keep An Eye On Natural Resources

To prevent randomness and address potential issues, it’s crucial to have a comprehensiveunderstanding of all essential aspects of your city, including natural resources.

As you expand and set up new buildings,monitoring natural resourcesis an excellent wayto determine the priority of map tiles you should purchase. It helps you identify the lands that should be allocated for industries dependent on those resources. Utilize the information provided in theNatural Resources from the Info Viewsto easily identify them.

From here, you’re able to align your goals by strategically purchasing map tiles.Focus on acquiring land that includes natural resources along the path toward the map’s edge. This way, you can achieve two objectives simultaneously, securingaccess to valuable natural resourcesand establishingoutside connections.