Welcome to another Cities: Skylines The Dev Diaries
These videos take a closer look the official Dev Diaries that can be found
at the Paradox Interactive forum and I'll include a link to them in
the video description
In this episode we'll be looking at Districts and Policies
The developers of Cities: Skylines wanted cities to be big but they also wanted to
give us the ability to control and customize smaller areas of the city
And so they created Districts
Districts are simply areas of the city that you can define using a simple paint tool
and they can be used to create all kinds of things from residential neighborhoods,
industrial parks and commercial districts
to more generic areas like the boroughs of New York or London
Once you've defined a District the game automatically assigns it a name
but you can change that name whenever you like
and you'll now have access to the Statistics Panel
which gives you all kinds of useful information
Now I'm a bit of a stats freak, so this is exactly the kind of thing
I want in a city builder
As well as a total population number we get a complete demographic breakdown
of the population by age group
and not only the current numbers of households and workers but also the maximum capacities
I like that
We also get the average level of Zoned buildings for Residential, Commercial, Industrial and
Offices
along with the average land value
Another thing I like is that the list of icons that shows which policies are active in
this district is also displayed under the district name on the map
One thing I'm not so keen on is the apparent lack of any information about jobs
Now remember that the game isn't finished yet
so everything we see is potentially subject to change
But I'll be kinda disappointed if we don't see at least some basic information about
commercial, industrial and office jobs
And just to be clear Commercial buildings definitely DO create jobs
Now this panel also gives us access to the District policies panel
but before we look at that I think the first thing to clarify is that you can
control policies at two different levels
either City Wide or at the District level
City-wide policies are accessed by clicking the Policies button on the main UI
Any policies you set here will be applied to the whole city, including any districts
that you've already created
and any new Districts you create will automatically adopt any city-wide policies
which are already in effect
District policies are set by accessing the district panel which you do by by clicking
the district name and from there by clicking the Policies button
And changing these policies only affects the district that's selected
The ability to create districts and the different policies will unlock as the city
grows once again illustrating the developers philosophy
that they want Cities: Skylines to a 'game' and not purely a sandbox city builder although
with modding a sandbox mode should also soon be available
So what exactly are the policies?
Well, the Policies are divided into four categories:
Services, Taxation, and City planning can all be
applied at both city or district level
while Industrial Specialization can only be applied
at the district level
Services policies affect things like Police, Fire
Health and Education
The Education Boost policy is pretty self explanatory while the 'Smoke Detector'
policy for example reduces the chance of fire by
a hefty 25%
But along with the pros of these policies you'll usually find a corresponding con
and it's usually financial
So for example the fire detectors reduce the chance
of fire but increase your costs by a fixed amount
per building
The Taxation policies allow you to fine tune your
tax rates for different zone types and densities
while the District policies allow you to either give tax relief or maybe raise taxes to milk
an area that's booming
City planning policies can often be used to affect how the city or a particular district
will look You can, for example, ban highrise buildings
or exclude heavy traffic from a specific area or turn your residential buildings into smart
buildings that help to increase land value
Last but not least we have the Industrial specialization policies which allow you to
convert generic industry to one of four industrial specializations Oil, Ore, Forestry and Agriculture
Select one of the 4 specializations and you'll soon see the zoned industry buildings start
to change to industry type you've selected
And in case you were wondering, there's also a Generic industry option which reverts
specialized industry back to generic industry
And that's it for this episode
I'd like to thank Henkka for putting together the original Dev Diary
I'd like to thank you for watching
and you enjoyed this vid hit the like button or better still, leave me a comment
and I'll be back for episode 9 where we'll be taking a more detailed look
at Info Views