The Efficient city with DLCs. [UPDATED]

Overview

This guide is about how to build the efficient city with limited population (150K) and use the benefits of different DLCs. If you play only Vanilla game, it can help you to choose DLC(s).

Introduction.

How to build a city without traffic jams? How to make public transport profitable? How to gain profit from tourism? How to build an efficient city? What is an efficient city? How to achieve maximum city happiness? What is a maximum possible happiness? Is it possible to achieve good values without building monuments? Is it possible to have all these issues in one city?
Well known questions? If yes, this guide is for you 🙂

[UPDATE 1: After publishing this guide I had found THIS VERY EFFICIENT CITY by Stealthy: [link] It is big – 150K. It is efficient. It has an outstanding average traffic flow value of 87% and 90% on a good spot! Though it looks completely different from my cities, it’s quite elegant. But it is based on principals described in this guide. So I updated my guide, added this city’s review and its strategy and also compared two strategies.]

[UPDATE 2: Index of the guide is improved. Contents are shorten]

[UPDATE 3: This guide was written for v1.11. In v1.12 some minor balance issues was fixed, but in general guide is still actual. Also Cumpus DLC description added.]

What is an efficient city?

To start we need to define what is an efficient city.
In my opinion, efficient city has:

• High average happiness;
• Efficient city’s economy (positive net balance);
• Efficient transport network (fluent traffic flow, no jams);

The first issue, the high city happiness, is the Goal. And the last two are means to an end.

Before choosing a strategy and starting to plan city we need to know how happiness works.
It is necessary to differ two issues: what do building require to level up and what do they need to be happy. Levelups depend directly on land value and number of workers/inhabitants. Land value depends on number of services and level of zoned buildings. But happiness is slightly different thing. Let’s follow with brief overview:

• City happiness is divided to different types of zones: Residential, Commercial, Office, Industry. Average happiness can be found in city statistics.
• Residential zones, both generic and self-sufficient (Green cities DLS), are more sensitive to level of education and cims health. To achieve maximum value of 100%, average health should be 99-100%, and most of cims should be highly educated. However residential happiness is insensitive to a tax rate. Level 5 residential buildings start to complain only with rate of 13%. With 12% they are still happy.
• Commercial zones are the most capricious type of zones. They are very sensitive to amount of customers, sales and tax rate. Especially to tax rate. Also need a lot of pedestrian trips to have sales. Maximum that I had achieved is 87% with taxes set to 1% 🙁 . This is a feature of game balance, so I see no sense in rising happiness of commercial zones much. Good value in average game is 78-80%, if it has enough customers and covered with proper services.
• Office zones are the most undemanding for services. Generally they require enough educated workers. If you provide sufficient number of services, with 7-8% tax rate, offices will be 100% happy.
• Generic Industrial zones are the second capricious type in the city. They are sensitive not only to sales and tax rates like the commercial zones are but also to a number of workers. If you have high average level of education on a mid stage of game, most of cims will prefer offices to an industry. So to keep industry happy could be a difficult task and to solve this problem. With 4-5% tax rate, sufficient services and number of workers this zone can be 100% happy;
• Tourism and leisure commercial (After Dark DLC) , special industry (Vanilla) and IT-cluster office zones (Green cities DLC) do not level up and have less requirements compare to generic zones. All they need is enough workers, fire-engines and garbage collection. There is no need to provide expensive services, like healthcare, education and parks (except touristic and leisure zones – they need parks and unique buildings to attract tourists).
• Special industrial zones (Industries DLC) don’t contribute anything to the city happiness, same as service buildings. Also these zones never stay abundant. So if you have this DLC, it is better to use them instead of Vanilla special industries. Like Vanilla designated industrial zones, everything they need is fire-engines and garbage collection. But remember, if you place generic industrial building in the Special industrial zones it will contribute to a city happiness as well.

So, the main idea of the efficient city is to provide all needed services and cims to all types of zones. But some services are expensive and you need to keep positive net profit for your budget. So, Profit is the key to the highest happiness.
To gain profit your total income should exceed your spendings. In progress – you need to maximize your income and minimize the costs. You need to understand very important issue:

• All types of income sources and most of services depend on number of vehicle and/or pedestrian trips. These instances are limited by the game mechanic.

To reach maximum profit and keep the costs at minimum we come to keep traffic flow as fluent as possible. Traffic is the key to maximum profit!
So, logical chain is:
Efficient transport network → Efficient economy → Happy city → Efficient city.

City transport network.

Basics of city transport network.
City transport network is needed to connect different sources of traffic and consists of different routes, junctions and hubs with different participants.

The participants of the traffic are cargo vehicles, private cars, emergency vehicles, public service vehicles, pedestrians, transport vehicles.

Different traffic participants interfere with each other at routes, junctions and connect on hubs. Some junctions are connecting different types of traffic, some are just crossing different types of traffic. City routes are: highways, roads, railways, ship paths, etc.

Every junction, rout and hub has it’s own maintenance cost and flow capacity.

Also it is important to know sources of traffic and possible routes:
For the cargo traffic possible routes are:

• Outside connection (highways and cargo hubs) ↔ Industry: importing raw materials;
• Industry (generic or special) and recycling centers (Green cities DLC) ↔ outside connections: exporting goods or raw material;
• Industry ↔ commercial zones: delivering goods;
• Outside connections ↔ Commercial zones: importing goods.

Also Industries DLC adds warehouses as an option to manage cargo traffic:

• Industries or Outside connections ↔ Warehouses: storing a products;
• Warehouses ↔ Outside connection: exporting stored goods or raw materials;
• Warehouses ↔ Commercial zones: selling stored goods;
• Warehouses ↔ Industries: selling raw materials for local use.

The average route of cargo vehicles is quite simple: Place of origin → destination → place of origin.
For private vehicles and pedestrians possible routes are:

• Outside connections (highways/transport hubs) ↔ Commercial zones and unique buildings: tourists visiting the city;
• Outside connections ↔ Residential zones: citizens inhabiting homes or traveling outside the city (quite seldom);
• Residential zones → Industries/Offices/Service Buildings: citizens going to work or study;
• Residential zones → Commercial zones: citizens going shopping;
• Residential zones → Point of attraction like Unique buildings, parks, stadiums: citizens going to entertain;

I have to mention that tourists and citizens are two different kinds:
Average route for tourist is quite simple: outside connection → point of attraction (parks/unique buildings) → commercial zones → outside connection.
So tourists during their stay in a city will generally shuttle between POI and shops.
Citizens can generate more complicated routes, because they also work or study, like this: home → job/school → POI → shop → home.

Efficient transport network is a branched, complicated network with many different types of routes (highways, roads, railways ship paths, etc.), which allows:

• to travel any vehicle/pedestrian to any needed destinations;
• in the shortest possible time;
• at the lowest possible cost;

In a real situation transport network will be always a compromise between cost, time of travel and complexity of network.

Possible strategies. Basics.

All economic strategies in CSL depend on the main source of income. So it could be: Taxation (Vanilla game), Special industries (Industries DLC), Tourism together with transport (After dark DLC), a combination of all above.

Traffic is a key of economy. Fluent traffic flow is needed with any strategy you use. Managing traffic sources are the key to keep your traffic fluent and have two issues. The first is to manage the amount of traffic sources, by zoning needed amount of needed type of zones (residential, commercial, office, industrial) and building needed amount of public service buildings. The second is to manage location of sources. Any gameplay is a combination of these two issues, but it is possible to stay focused on one of them.

Let’s start with managing the location. The obvious way is a proper zoning. Few obvious tips for zoning:

• Industrial zones should be as close to highways as possible to get raw materials and export goods if needed;
• Commercial zone is better to be located beside industrial zones to have an access to goods produced by industries;
• Residential zones should be buffered from noise and soil pollutions by parks, trees, low density commercial or office zones to increase health and happiness of citizens;

I will show the examples of different zoning on my custom testmap: [link]
The possible ways of zoning are:

Sizes of zones are very large. The least efficient way of zoning in case you have generic industries and a lot of commerce. But it is OK, if you have generally residential and special industry zones.

This type of zoning is the base of Industrial strategy.

In this case city is zoned with different layers. This zoning allows to cut the distance and save the time for cargo traffic and thereby increase average traffic flow.
This zoning is good solution for early and mid stage of a game. I recommend this type of zoning for low density, small to medium sized districts. And it should look like this:

Very efficient type of zoning and should be used as a base for tourism and transport strategy.

It:

• Increases an access for customers to commercial zones and rise tax income.
• Allows to build an efficient and profitable public transport network in the commercial zones where demand for public transport is the highest.
• Saves the costs for public services.

On the first view the zoning is chaotic. But it’s not. Mix all types of zones and position different buildings as close to each other as possible with the rules above: residential buildings are buffered from industry, high density commercial is beside industrial, industrial buildings are on arterial roads. This zoning is a base for Taxation strategy.

Taxation strategy (Vanilla game).

So, Mosaic zoning is the most efficient type of zoning for Vanilla game (no DLCs) and the most effective strategy, if you have the only one source of income – the taxation;

In average, citizens will choose the closest building of needed type (job/shop). Same way, industrial building will sell goods to the nearest shop. However distant trips will still exist, generally to commercial and unique buildings. But they appear seldom, and can be covered with public transport. As a result it will have very fluent traffic flow value – up to 90% at a good spot.
The road and public transport network should be the same on every map – large grid of arterial roads, tight net of local and connecting roads.
With such a type of zoning there are no limits for size of a city. See this over 400K city: [link]
The main disadvantage of this strategy is that all districts in a city look the same. And it is very boring gameplay. Let’s see something more interesting and realistically looking.

Industrial strategy (Industries DLC).

The base idea of Industrial strategy is to stay focused on managing the amount of traffic sources, to have no generic industries at all, and to have very few commercial buildings. In this case:

• It is possible to eliminate most of cargo traffic in the city and have to deal only with private vehicles.
• It is possible to deduct the number of private vehicles by encouraging bikes and building lots of roads for cyclists and building public transport network;
• It is possible to distress highways and outside connections, by having less tourists (less commerce – less tourists);
• Without commerce demand for public transport will be low and easy to satisfy;
• But if there are no generic industries and commerce the taxation will be very low and the budget will need additional source of income.
• The solution is Industries DLC. This is a mighty source of income.
• Also with special industries it is possible to separate most of cargo vehicles from the rest of a city and handle with it in Special industry zones.

The key point of this strategy is the very high tax rates for industry and commerce. They are needed to limit the amount of generic industries and shops. The general plan for this city:
You can find the example of such a city at steam workshop:
[link]
It looks nice and elegant, has very fluent traffic flow (88-92%), has quite high happiness and profitable economy.
Main disadvantage of this city is unprofitable public transport. That is because of lack of commerce. So, the tourist’s attendance and demand for public transportation is too low to keep transport profitable. However, public transport is a subject for subsidy in many real cities.

Transport & Tourism strategy (After Dark DLC).

After dark DLC gives very good source of income – tourism. In that strategy all types of zones are needed in quite big amount.
In this case logical cycle is:

• If profitable transport is needed, it needs more tourists, and there is need to attract them;
• To attract tourists, more commercial zones, parks and unique buildings are needed;
• To keep commerce in a good shape, it needs more goods;
• To have more goods there are two ways: import or produce locally; but import will stress highways cause of traffic jams and bothering tourists coming to the city;
• So, to produce goods locally and have generic industries it needs to produce raw materials locally also with the same reason;
• But in case of local produce of goods and raw materials, there will be a lot of cargo traffic on local roads delivering products;
• So, to avoid traffic jams it needs to reduce some kind of traffic. That is a private vehicles, because cargo vehicles are needed for industries to function;
• To reduce private vehicles, it needs very efficient public transport network to serve citizens and tourists; That is the key to both: profitable transport and profitable tourism;

So, the cycle is closed.

The general plan for touristic city:

You can find the example in steam workshop:
[link]
Compare to the previous cities, this city has slightly less average traffic flow (78-82%). However there are no traffic jams and the economy functions properly. And public transport is very profitable (10-20K per week of net profit). It also looks elegant and realistic.

Combination of strategies.

So, all three strategies are efficient and have theres own features. But also, it could be run together. See the example at steam workshop:
[link]
Because of combination of these three strategy, this city have best features of all above:

• Very high happiness (100, 80, 100, 100);
• Sufficient traffic flow (77-80%);
• Positive net profit (up to 100K);
• Profitable transport (up to 18K per week);
• High tourist attendance;
• Nice look;

So I will continue my guide with tips for the Transport and Tourism, strategy, but with some references and notes about Industrial strategy and combination of strategies.

Traffic.

Few words about traffic flow value and traffic overlay. The value of traffic in your city reflects an average situation in city and there’s no need to chase this figure. As for me, I don’t care about traffic much until economy is functioning properly. What is really important, it’s to avoid traffic jams, when some vehicles queuing for a long time. So, it is better to find the red zones at the overlay and fix it.

With my personal experience at mid or late stage:

• Below 70%. You need to fix your traffic and/or fix your road layout and/or balance of zones and/or add public transport if you have no. Mosaic zoning can help. Public transport tips are in the next section.
• 71-74%. Your network is fair, but it can be improved. If your layout and zoning both are well, maybe it is caused by lack of public transport. Also you can have too many traffic lights controlling junctions;
• 75-79%. Your network is good. You can do minor improvements, like prohibit pedestrian crosswalks, add sleep turns, restrict left turns, etc (see tips below).
• 80% and above. You are traffic hero:)

You can find main ideas for planning of city layout in community. See the list of useful guides in the last section.
I wouldn’t say much about layout, just give some tips:

• Shape of the layout doesn’t matter much. Proper combination of arterial, connecting roads, matters. So you are free to create. However, grids are easy to deal with. I advice you to start playing with shapes after you have enough experience with grids. In my cities I often use curved grids, which look more attractive and realistic.
• Try to avoid sharp-angled, traffic light controlled crossroads and 3-way junctions. In this case it gives the green light to only one direction at a time. With straight-angled 3-way crossroads two main directions will have much time. But you are free to make any angle in planning local roads without traffic lights.
  
• Avoid roundabouts in high traffic areas of network. 6-to-6 lines junction controlled with traffic light will work better. See this video comparing different types of junctions and intersections:
• Use Traffic Manager: President Edition (TM:PE). It gives you ultimate tools for traffic management. See below how to deal with it; [link]
• If you use TM:PE, prohibit pedestrian crosswalks at the busiest junctions. This will make easier both, right and left turns. So it will decrease queuing on crossroads. But do not forget to place overground or underground path for pedestrians.
• At the junctions with high usage of right turn you can add sleep right turns. It could increase traffic flow significantly. Watch this video to know how to arrange it:
  
  Also it is good tutorial how to deal with TM:PE.
• At junctions of arterial and connecting roads you can restrict left turns and turn off the traffic lights. It works well at the connecting roads of the neighborhoods. If there is enough other connecting roads it can increase traffic flow. Also it can increase an appeal to public transport, if it becomes more efficient than private cars using.
• Also you can turn off traffic lights at any junctions with low traffic. Following this tips in a whole city can rise traffic flow value on 5-10%!!! without making any other improvements (Thank you, Stealthy!);
• Encourage biking and building streets with bicycle side roads could decrease number of private vehicles in a city. Also bicycle roads increase speed of cyclists. Thus it can also decrease demand for public transport, it could be a good solution. See the section about public transport how to run biking and profitable transport together;

Public transport.

Public transport network is a combination of international (airports, harbors, train stations), regional (subway, monorail, railways) and local transport (buses, trams, ferries).
Efficient public transport network decreases private car traffic on the roads and brings profit. 🙂

• Try to use each type of transport properly in order of general plan of the city.
  Do not build long bus lines and short subway lines with many stations.
• However sometimes it is effective to make long regional bus line if demand for it is low, but still existing.
• Buses should have stops beside subway stations or not far.
• Locate your bus lines and subway stations in the commercial zones, where the demand for transport is the highest.
  
• Do not locate subway stations in the industrial areas. They will never give you enough trips to cover maintenance costs.
• However if most of jobs are located in one large area (Industrial strategy) it will be OK to place one station;
• Locate your unique buildings as close to subway stations as possible. It will increase appeal to both – transport and point of attraction.
• Connect your international hubs to your subway or monorail network. Standalone airport or harbor will generate lots of private cars, so you will loose money and increase traffic.
• It is better to connect your hub to subway/monorail lines on the loop of a line than on the end of a line. The loop doubles throughput capacity of the station;
  
• Try to avoid putting two lines on one stop. Use interchange subway station for two or more lines. Read this guide how to build subway interchange station without mods: [link]
• Also you can use custom assets. I prefer assets that do not require any mods. I can recommend this: [link]
  and this: [link]
• If you have Mass transit DLC, this asset will be very useful for a combination of monorail and subway: [link]

• If you want to have the profit you should cut the costs. Set your budget for all types of transport where you are able to manage number of vehicles on a line to minimum;
• Set needed number of vehicles manually;
• Rise ticket prices. In districts with high appeal for the public transport you can apply “higher ticket prices” policy;
• When you build regional transport network, try to avoid building expensive routes like railways, monorail ways without roads;
• Try to build railways only to connect stations to existing routes. Plan your city in the way to maximize the usage of exciting network;
• Do not build railways to make new passenger line. Build cheaper subway line instead;
• However with custom assets like this, you can build profitable railway passenger lines on existing railways: [link]
• If you want to have an efficient public transport network, DO NOT build Space elevator. It brings no profit, so it is giant hole in your transport budget;
• Right positioned International airport will deliver large amount of visitors and bring high profit. In case you have enough touristic zones and points of attraction;

Thus ‘encourage biking’ policy and a lot of bicycle roads decrease private vehicle traffic, they also decrease demand for public transport. But there are some cases when it’s reasonable to run bikes and public transport together:
• In case you had risen tickets prices in some district, bus lines have 500% budget and demand still excess supply, you can build some bicycle roads and apply the policy;
• Also it is good idea to connect neighboring low density residential zones by bike roads, when a demand too low to run public trancport;
• Do NOT apply ‘encourage biking’ in a large (over 100K) city at once. It can crash your commerce. So apply it step-by-step.

Cargo network.

There is one important thing to keep in your mind, when you are planning efficient and profitable transport network – Cargo transport objects and separated cargo networks DO NOT bring direct profit, but bring the costs. So, the best cargo network for economically efficient city is an absence of cargo network!

• If you use transport and tourism strategy, keep both, import and export, as low as possible. That will decrease need in cargo transport network. To reach this you need to:
• Keep the right balance of zones, rebalance if it is needed. Keep the number of generic industries sufficient to cover local demand for goods (at the late stage).
• Try to provide raw materials locally with small excess;
• If you have special industries try to keep production at level which just covers the demand of generic zones;
• Place recycling centers (Green cities DLC) in your generic industrial zones. They will cover most of demand, and special zones will not be needed;
• If you play with Industries DLC, you also need a production to cover demand of unique factories. But do not exceed this demand much;
• Previous issue is more right for transport and tourism strategy. With Industry strategy income from export of resources in base of city economy. In this case very rapid access to outside connections is needed;
• Try to avoid building expensive cargo transport hubs, like cargo hubs, cargo airport hubs, an so on. They have high maintenance cost, but bring no profit at all;
• However it is good salution to build cargo railway station and/or cargo harbor to cover spikes of demand. But:
• DO NOT build separate local railway cargo network. It is economical suicide! Instead, develop your road and highway network.

Tourism.

After dark DLC gives you ultimate source of income – tourism. As it brings mechanic different from Vanilla game. From the official guide we know that tourists are temperate citizens. So they don’t work. They attend parks, unique buildings and, ta-daaaaa, commercial buildings and spend their money. Also they use public transport if it’s more convenient than private cars. Actually amount of tourist’s taxes doesn’t impress much, but profit from public transport and commercial tax, both rise significantly.
Also we need to know that tourists are attracted by:

• number of commercial buildings;
• number of parks and unique buildings;
• number of tourists’ and leisure specialized buildings;
• number of outside connections including harbors, train stations, airways;
• transport accessibility of buildings mentioned above;
• land value;

It gives us the ways how to gain profit from tourism:

• Build tourist specialized zones at high land value palaces – beside water at riverside, or seacoasts. It will increase tourist attendance;
• Leisure zones attract both citizens and tourists, so they can be built wherever. But they work better together with parks and unique buildings. I recommend to place them near international hubs and interchange stations to give transport accessibility;
• Neighborhood of touristic and generic commercial zones is an excellent synergy. Do not build standalone touristic and leisure zones. Surround it with generic commercial zones. It will maximize commercial tax income;
• Transport accessibility gives the biggest contribution to a number of visits and maximize the profit from touristic and generic commerce. Thus Land value, unique buildings and monuments rise tourist attraction value, but do not increase the number of visits directly. So:
• Build sufficient number of touristic zones and international hubs and connect them, with regional transport (monorail, subway, railways) or with tourist buses;
• Place hubs around your city center as distant from each other as possible. Two international hubs built together compete for tourist visits. Also two hubs will stress one local subway or monorail station.

By the way, as the legacy of “Cities in motion” in CSL different citizens prefer different types of transport. Tourists prefer monorail to subway. So, if you have Mass transit DLC, regional public transport network based on monorail brings you more profit from tourists than subway network. But if you build network as a combination of monorail and subways – REMEMBER, THEY SHOULD NOT COMPETE! It means that different types of lines should lead to different destinations.

Managing the economy in progress.

Managing the economy is very simple on early and mid stages. Stay focused on a positive balance of incomes and expanses, that will give you positive net profit. Invest profit to new districts and structures and get more. Simple, until you start to feel imposes of game mechanic at late stages (after 100K) when your net balance start to swing.

• Try to provide public services as early as possible, but keep the costs in mind. It will rise the level of surrounding buildings and rise tax income. However, be sure that you have positive budget balance and it is enough to cover costs of newly constructed structure until it starts to bring profit.
• Provide emergency services first;
• Take the loans, if your budget balance is higher than weekly cost of loans. If you take a loan for building new structure, keeping in mind the previous tip, your balance should cover together cost of a loan and cost of a structure;
• Refinance the loans, if you need more money. As you will see in Loans panel a ‘payment left’ for loans becomes less and less with weekly payments. If you have amount in your treasury to pay balance of a loan instantly, you can pay it and take it again immediately. Sometimes you can take a smaller loan to refinance a bigger one;
• Keep your costs as low as possible. Use the cheapest available structures at early stage and don’t upgrade it till mid stage;
• Pay more attention to maintenance cost and efficiency than to the price of construction during the building of a new structure. Water and power structures have their own production/maintenance cost rate. Some structures are more expensive but more efficient (Green Cities DLC), so it is better to choose them;
• DO NOT buy new land on early stage. This is useless investment at this stage;
• At this stage you can run without public transport. You can build only post service and taxi depot at 3-4K. Population. They do not need manual control and rise level of buildings.

• Choose your strategy for late game before buying new tiles. Sometimes this is a choice between lands attractive for tourists (watersides), tiles with access to outside connections and tiles with sights of natural resources. If you choose Special industries, you need sights of natural resources. If you choose tourism, outside connections are always go first than lands with waterside.
• Build generic industries with surplus, and level up them to a maximum (Transport and tourism strategy). On the late stage it will be very hard to upgrade them. Much easier to cut the surplus at late stage.
• Try to keep budget for public services (except transport) at 100% rate. This will give you maximum efficiency.
• If you have sufficient number of the emergency services, the coverage is more important than values of services. So, small clinics, police stations, and fire-depot have higher coverage/cost ratio than big hospitals, police departments and fire stations. Use them;
• Make reserves in your treasury. Before making any kind of big infrastructural construction, collect sufficient amount to let your economy survive until new project starts to bring profit;
• Manage the polices. It can help you to develop your city faster or even solve some problems. Read this very useful guide:
  [link]
• If you had chosen Industrial strategy, manage the taxes. It will help you to decrease demand for generic industries and commerce and have less of that kind in your city. Read this:
  [link]
• If you had chosen Industrial strategy, try to avoid death waves. At the late stage immigration into the city and out of the city can cause huge traffic jams. So you need to control population at mid stage. You can find some advices in the guide above.
• Thus, if you have very developed public transport network (transport and tourism strategy), deathwaves will not bring traffic jams, because most of immigrants will use public transport. So deathwaves will bring you profit:)

this is the stage to achieve the Goal:
– Maximum city happiness

• Provide all possible services to achieve maximum level of all buildings;
• Build all possible unique buildings, to achieve maximum tourist attraction, if your balance allows;
• Balance your industries, number of industrial buildings, supply and demand of raw materials and goods, with tips from public transport section;
• Use your city statistics to see the chart of taxation trend and spending trend (city budget). In vanila game, If average trend of taxation exceeds spendings than it is OK.
  
• Use taxation to gain maximum happiness, or balance happiness and profit;
• On the late stage your budget can exceed you taxation. But this situation is also can be OK, if you have another sources of income;
  
• On the late stages of the game (above 100-120K) your current balance can be negative from time to time, than it comes back to a positive value. This situation is normal, if you are focused on sources of income different from taxation. Check annual simulation. If your treasury grows, you are on the right way.
• Limit a population of your city, if you are focused on transport and tourism or Industries.
• Cities with limited population will NOT stay economically efficient at same level for all time. Trend of taxation in city with stable population is descending. So it could be a good idea to reconstruct your city time to time to keep economy stable.

Very large cities (over 200K).

You know the way how to build the efficient large city from section about Zoning 🙂
Another way of keeping very large city efficient is that you have to focus on cutting your costs.
Monuments can help you. It is a kind of perks given by developers to the game-mayors. Some work like superstructure, some cut large part of game mechanic. Let see brief overview:

• Space elevator. Useless. If you read ‘efficient public transport network’ carefully, you know why.
• Fusion power plant. Useful. Very big power plant with extraordinary output/cost rate. With 50% budget can supply 200-300K city. With 100% budget – over 500K. Total savings can be over 10k per week.
• Eden project. Cheating staff. Removes all soil pollutions and rises land value in the whole city up to the sky. It will maximize levels of your buildings and tax income. Since it is built, all manages of land value have no sense.
• Medical Center. Cheating staff. Gives 100% health to all citizens. So citizens will be able to live and stay happy in the hardest conditions of soil/noise/radiation/brain pollutions and vacuum of the open space. LOL. So you can demolish all clinics and health-boosts. But keep crematories, because citizens are healthy but still mortal. Total save of the cost can be more than 40k per week.
• Hadron Collider. Cheating staff. Washes brains of all citizens and provides education domiciliary. Gives 100% education. You can demolish all education structures. So total saving will be about 30K per week.
• Ultimate Recycling Plant. Useful. Just very big recycling center with very high processing rate. It doesn’t cut the game mechanic and garbage tracks are still in use, but it can replace 20 recycling centers. So total savings can be 4,8K per week.
• Castle of Lord Chirpwick. Cheating stuff. Covers whole city with park service and increases the attractiveness of all unique buildings. So you can demolish all parks and plazas in your city. It can save you more than 25K per week. However without parks number of visitors would be much lower. Because number of visitors and tourist attractiveness are not related directly – tourists need physical point of attraction as many as possible;

So with monuments you can save over 100K per week. That is significant amount. Also Hadron Collider, Eden Project and Medical center all together gives 100 happiness to the residential zones.
Personally, I prefer to avoid building monuments and limit number of citizens about 120-140K. And for me it is a mystery how it is possible to build really big (over 500), realistic looking (not mosaic mess), efficient (profitable) city without cheating monuments. Maybe you can try to build it? It’s a bait lol. Don’t waste your time 🙂

DLC’s benefits and values.

I will overview the DLCs in a key of building efficient city, with my personal rating:

1. After Dark DLC. Must have! I hope you will agree with me:) Actually this guide is generally about this DLC.

2. Campus DLC. Must have! System addon. Brings new mechanic of universities and education for profit. Togerther with developed tourist infrastructure 5-level campusies give very high profit.

3. Industries DLC. Worth buying. Developers perform this DLC as a system addon. However it is not. It brings no new mechanic in the game. The only one thing it gives is an ability to control production chains of industry, buy buildings and managing special industrial areas and unique factories. The chains are the same as they were in Vanilla game. But it worth buying this DLC, because dealing with Vanilla special industries was a headache, especially with farming and forestry. Workers were leaving very quickly and it was very hard to keep these zones alive. In DLC you can build processing and extracting building in proper place and in proper amount, and it will never stay abundant. Also this mighty source of income. If full production chain is being built and managed right, industries can bring more than 200K of net profit per week. But it is quite dependent on number of vehicle trips computed. So after 150K population, as a source of income it will fluctuate significantly. After 250K it will bring more losses than benefits. Also If you don’t play ‘unlimited ore and oil’ mod, when a sights of resources will dry up, these special zones will generate high pressure on outside connections to import raw materials. Also time of delivery will be longer, and industries will be less less effective. So if you are keen on very big cities and playing without mods, it’s not for you.

4. Green cities DLC. Worth buying. Maybe this is a surprise for you, but it will help you to decrease traffic on highways. Let me explain. This DLC brings new option to the game – recycling centers. On the first view they have no benefits compare to Incineration plants, but they produce raw materials. Placed in generic industrial areas it will cover most of demand of industries in oil, ore and forestry materials. So they are significantly decreasing traffic generated by generic industrial zones on highways and outside connections. Also DLC give more efficient ‘green’ solutions for water and electricity which can help you to cut the costs.

5. Mass transit DLC. Worth buying. This DLC gives ultimate transport solutions – monorails and monorail hubs. As it was mentioned in this guide it can be a base for very efficient and branched transport network. With such public network it is possible to achieve 83% and over traffic flow in 150K city. I highly recommend this.

6. Match day DLC. This is free DLC. Download it. Very useful, because this DLC stadium is the only one source of income in the game which is not related to the number of trips – money for victories of local team. So it will bring income in a city of any size. But victories are random. Also it generates attraction and brings money from ticket sales, which are dependent on number of visitors. Any way it brings more profit than loss, so try to build it as soon as possible. It is better to place it near the big international hub, like International Airport of multiplatform railway station or near interchange subway station.

7. Parklife DLC. Fair. It allows to build special park zones and level it up. Unlike generic parks and unique buildings, these designated park areas bring money. But this source of income depends on number of pedestrian trips. So it can bring quite good net profit (about 6-8K per week) with 60-80K population, null profit with 140-150K, and after 180K it brings losses. So it is not economically efficient in large cities. However, if it is designed good, parks could look very attractive and realistic. Also this DLC adds quite useful park maintenance service. It boosts the entertainment value of both, special and generic parks. And effect is visible – with park maintenance number of tourists will be about 5-10% higher. So, I can recommend it.

8. Pearls of East DLC. This is free DLC and content is good. My girlfriend said: “Waaaaaaa… Pandas!!!” Download it.

9. Snowfall DLC. Brings nothing new to a game, but gives a lot of alternative content: trams for local public transport as an alternative to buses, sauna as alternative health-boost, its own line of wonders and some alternative parks, and adds new public services – road maintenance and heating. Personally me, I am not impressed by trams, they compete with buses and loose because of higher ticket price. So it is better no to use trams and buses together. Also trams interfere more with other traffic than buses (on left turns) and originally have maximum 4 line roads with tracks on median. So they are not suitable for high density districts and work better in low density where both, traffic and demand for public transport, are lower, so it won’t bring a lot of profit. Road maintenance seems useless. I see no changes in traffic flow. Also, heating consumption can bring a headache. If you have not built expensive heating pipes and facilities yet, electricity consumption will fluctuate significantly because citizens use it for heating at cold time. So in common game, I use only few options from this DLC: saunas, because of lower costs, and road maintenance slider in budget panel, dragged far left, because it doubly decreases maintenance costs of road network, and heating facilities to get reed of electricity consumption pikes. So Paradox offers to buy DLC and try snow challenges. But the place I live forces me to challenge every f*****g winter, thus do it for free. Worth buying if you are fan of official content and trials:)

10. Concerts DLC. On the first view it is an analog of Match Day DLC, but it gives only profit dependent on number of visits – ticket sales. Also maintenance costs are very high. Net profit of fully upgraded level 3 festival area is close to null, and with active policies is negative. However, it attracts tourists well and looks nice and there is some sense to have it in your city. So, I leave a decision up to you.

11. All radio and content creator pack DLCs are just cosmetic content. There are a lot of free alternatives in a workshop.

12. Natural Disasters DLC. When I was looking for reviews for that DLC, the fist video given me by youtube, was ‘how a kid is ruining his ugly city’. So, I didn’t buy it and can’t give you any recommendations.

Conclusion.

I consider this game to be the outstanding city simulator. The community and workshop are awesome. Economy of the game is quite tolerant to gamer-mayor at mid stage. CSL gives lots of opportunities for different style of the game: you can build realistically looking city, a copy of real city, you can play sandbox mod and build any fantastic city, you can chase the figures, or you can try to beat the game mechanic and build efficient city. So you are free to try any strategy and any challenge you like. Good luck!

List of guides and tutorials.

1. Good guides for understanding basic of planing road and transport networks, written by engineers and experienced players:
THIS [link] THIS [link] and THIS [link]
2. How to avoid grids in your road layout
[link]
3. Very good guide how manage you labor force and provide workers to an industry:
THIS
[link] and THIS [link]
4. This is Very useful guide, how to manage city policies;
[link]
5. Brief guide how to manage land value [link]
6. This guide is very good to learn mechanics of Industries DLC and how to manage them;

7. You can find ideas of intersections in this video:

8. Use this video as tutorial for TM:PE