Best Cities: Skylines 2 maps to start with
Best Cities: Skylines 2 maps to start with
Choosing the right Cities: Skylines 2 starting map can be quite a challenge. No one wants to commit several hours into a project only to later realize you picked the wrong option.
The right map for you is the one that lets you turn your visions into reality, and play comfortably with your current skill level. The balance can be difficult to find – so, in this section, we’ll give the best map options for beginner, intermediate, and expert players.
Best Cities: Skylines 2 Starting Map for Beginners
Barrier Islands and Lakeland are the best beginner maps on Cities: Skylines 2. Barrier Islands, has 41% of buildable area, mild weather, and easily-accessible main connections.
Lakeland has 49% of buildable area, and lets you quickly grow your city due to its flat terrain. No water paths can be a downside, but if you don’t want to focus on that in your gameplay, it doesn’t matter much.
Other good maps for new players:
- Tampere (only on the Ultimate Edition)
- San Francisco (only on the Ultimate Edition)
Best Cities: Skylines 2 Intermediate Starting Maps
For intermediate players, the best Cities: Skylines 2 maps are Great Highlands and River Delta. If you’ve played the previous Cities: Skylines games before, you will appreciate their stunning visuals, and subtle challenges.
Great Highlands gives you a massive initial building space and surrounding mountains, and two rivers, making it a great canvas for an interesting city. River Delta is a great pick because of its sea shipping connections, and a great challenge posed by the multiple islands to build in, along the river delta.
Other good maps for intermediate players:
- Windy Fjords
- Twin Mountains
Best Cities: Skylines 2 Expert-Level Maps
The best Cities: Skylines 2 for experts looking to build a great city in challenging conditions is Archipelago Haven or Sweeping Plains. Archipelago Haven is a highly complex map, with many different terrains and multiple different islands, making it an exciting challenge.
On the other side, Sweeping Plains won’t have any islands: but this map’s constantly-elevated terrain and harsh weather will make it difficult to grow and maintain your new project.
Other good maps for expert players:
- San Francisco (only on the Ultimate Edition)
- Twin Mountain
- Mountain Village
How to Pick the Best Cities: Skylines 2 Starting Map
Every player, looking to pick a perfect starting map on Cities: Skylines 2, should look for three things: as much building area as possible, easily accessible connections and resources, and a map that best resembles their perfect vision of the city.
The first two are easy to measure – that’s exactly what we did on this post. These maps are different, and will give different challenges. Look for the option most suitable to your Cities skills – or accept a challenge, and build your perfect city in difficult conditions.
As for the third one, that’s for you to decide. Maps of Cities: Skylines 2 replicate some of the world’s most well-known terrains, and you might have a specific idea in mind. Don’t let difficult ratings of the maps discourage you from taking them. In case you run into a problem, you can always use free terraforming to give yourself a better building area, or just use some Cities: Skylines 2 cheats to make your gameplay a little bit easier.
Pick the map that works best for you, and start building!
Credits:Cities Skylines 2 Mods