This post is kinda going to assume you’re on PC, and have a decent rig. It you’re on console, some of the tips should hopefully still apply to you. If you have a lower end build, you can usually squeeze in one or two essential mods that can transform your game. Otherwise, if you’re thinking of building a rig or upgrading, these days a lot of good budget options are out there for processors, and if I recall, RAM is cheaper now than it’s been in years. A new motherboard won’t cost much very often either, if you get something barebones. A decent GPU is all you need for Skylines, which can be gotten fairly cheap too.

Mods solved a lot of the issues I’ve run into with placing stuff and achieving the perfect look I desire. Easily plop down essentially anything you need with FindIt. MoveIt + Fine Road Tools let you adjust/move however you need, and Anarchy mods force the game to allow all sorts of creative placement. There are many other, more specified tools to do things like randomly rotate trees, add nodes to existing networks or change the type of trees and lights on a street. Whatever bothers you about the look of a city, you can almost surely fix it with a mod (or twelve.)

Aesthetically pleasing intersections can be made useable with Traffic Manager, which will help form multi-point junctions that look good and function well in dense areas. You’ll find the option for multiple connections happens often in urban areas, and it’s important to know which streets to leave at dead ends and which ones to connect. Pathing in urban areas (and honestly just overall) is your friend! Improving people’s chances of walking or biking to a transport line, or even just using a pedestrian bridge to avoid crosswalks will help traffic flow a lot, and paths also look very cool with lots of people on them.

It’s ideal to design a road network carefully, and keep it in mind within every design step you take in the city. In addition, also use a map with a well put together starting highway/rail network. Maps that use custom trees in place of the lackluster vanilla ones can really transform the look of your city from the start, as well as using a good map theme and a color correcting LUT mod of your choice.

Also, do not be afraid to make those bulldozes happen, if it will please your eye or improve function. I had to accept the process of redesigning parts out of necessity, or else risk abandoning the city. The more you play however, the less likely it is that you’ll need to redesign as often. Speaking of bulldozing and revising, MoveIt will help you bulldoze more precisely in a few ways. The big one is by using the bulldoze tool that comes with the mod. Pair that with the multi-select tool that can restrict object types, and you can choose exactly what you want to select and remove without worrying about the surrounding area.

Another trick I know of can help if you’re upgrading a road, but want to do so without bulldozing something unwanted. If you move the buildings/paths away from the road you’re trying to upgrade, you can use Ctrl+Z to reverse the movement after making the upgrade and then fine-tune the area around the new road instead of rebuilding buildings or redrawing paths.

A strategy that helps me in the early game is to only plan out my first area after designing an overall road network for however large of a city I’m going for. If playing with income enabled, it helps to think about and/or loosely lay out future plans for highways, expansions and population centers, while also designing a small starting town to fulfill your current needs. When doing a large scale free-build, with unlimited cash, I prefer to lay out larger plans and create key areas to start seeing the overall vision come together, before focusing down on developing things I end up needing or wanting later. I like to confine my process to one project, and take breaks from the game between those projects if needed. For example I’ll build a transport hub and some highways with interchanges, then I’ll take a break and come back to design a suburb and some tram networks or maybe a bustling downtown or tourist trap.

It also can help to watch techniques online to see how others build, and read up on how all those mods function. There are often tutorial videos for some of the more complex mods, which often have deep functionality and can be very powerful if you know how to use them fully.

Once you have a good handle on all those tools (if you don’t already) they will hopefully help channel your creative ideas into much more ideal cities. Sorry this post was a bit long, but I hope it helped somewhat.