A technical guide on how to increase tourist numbers

You want to know how actually to increase the amount of tourists, and I have a decompiler to look inside the game files. So, let's get to the topic: how to actually increase the amount of tourists visiting the city?

I will keep this brief.

With the decompiler, I have identified the following factors:

1. City Policies
   
2. Monuments
   
3. Transport Budget
   
4. Attractiveness
   
5. Land Value
   
6. "Home-Work Count"
   
7. The Map Itself
   
8. Using Mods

Currently, there is only one policy that boosts tourist counts:

• Boost Connections: +20% tourists

Some monuments seem to directly boost tourist count, but I am currently unable to decipher which monuments are responsible. The relevant game files reference both Code 5 as "RoadConnectionTouristBoost" and Code 8 as "ShipConnectionTouristBoost".

Increasing transport budget boosts the corresponding tourist count. Example: 100% ship budget = normal tourist count from ships; 150% ship budget = +25% tourist count from ships.

City attractiveness. Not gonna elaborate it here.

This one is interesting: it looks at your total land value, which means you can:

• Go tall: improve your existing neighbourhoods; or
  
• Go wide: just build new city districts!

This is perhaps not the most obvious, but basically, the game generates more tourists as your city grows (by looking at the household count and the workplace count, hence the name). An end-game city will usually have more tourists than a starter city.

Everything in this guide can eventually be traced back to the outside connections of the map. The game generates tourists per each outside connection, so it generally depends on the map you are playing.

One thing to note: try to trace the outside connection paths to ensure the city is actually connected to all of them, for maximum tourist counts.

With the right mods, it is possible to build beyond the city limits, and add more outside connections. This then tells the game to spawn more tourists since tourists are spawned per each outside connection. (Provided that the new outside connections can reach the city, of course!)

It seems there are mods that directly modify the values of the outside connections themselves to quite literally spawn more tourists, but idk.

It's not difficult, really. Just build a big nice city, and eventually, tourists will come visit. (How to build such a big nice city is out of the scope of this guide.)

Or, you could always find the correct combination of mods to make it work.