The concept behind retail in Cities XL is pretty straight-forward. Residential buildings simply want shops nearby, which makes sense. If somebody’s got to drive across the city for a loaf of bread, they’re not going to be as pleased as someone who only has to walk across the street.

Retail doesn’t pay a lot in the way of taxes, but they pay enough to carry their own weight. They don’t particularly care where they are, although you’re going to want to build them right smack in the middle of residential areas to get the most benefit out of them.

Unfortunately, retail is currently very hard to balance. The problem is, it’s very easy for retail shops to have problems selling their Retail Goods, giving the message “Retail goods are too hard to sell. Decrease production!“. At the same time, you may have areas of the city where residents aren’t happy because retail is too far away.

The best way to balance retail is to build SINGLE units (not blocks) of LOW density retail, and spread them out as well as you can amongst your population. Once you’ve got good coverage, if your retail isn’t having problems selling, feel free to step up a couple buildings to medium or high density. Do it very gradually – one at a time. It’s very easy to quickly end up with too much retail with the addition/change of even a couple buildings, particularly when your population is below 500,000.

Retail buys Food Industry (from your farms or from tokens), and produces Retail Goods (which do not have tokens – it’s local demand).

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Retail Chart

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Suggestions and Notes

• Be careful not to place too many. Only place what you need, and spread them out sufficiently.
• Focus on low-density first. Only move up to medium/high if and when you need it.
• Maximize placement for best residential coverage.

Business hotels are fairly simple. They sell their services to offices. The more offices you have, the more business hotels your city can support.

There are a few different hotels available, hiring different types of workers, and varying in size and price.

The Peace Hotel (a landmark) is one of the better hotels, and is unlocked once your population hits 500,000. The Peace Hotel increases office profits by 5%.

As far as placement goes, business hotels like to be placed near office industry, in areas with high passenger services.

Try to keep them away from pollution. Smog doesn’t make for a very nice window-side view.

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Business Hotel Chart

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Suggestions and Notes

• Place business hotels when you’re placing office services – try to keep a good balance.
• Keep business hotels near office services, in areas of high passenger service.
• Keep business hotels away from pollution.

Citizens like going on holidays. You know, the type where you’re in a nice hotel, with an incredible view, the pillows are soft, you wake up to birds chirping… you get the idea.

Tip: Holiday Hotels can only be built on maps that contain “Holidays“. If your map does not contain these holiday areas, you can not build holiday hotels.

On a map with holiday areas, you have to be very careful about what you build, and where. Holiday areas are very sensitive to pollution. If you have busy roads running through your holiday area, or pollution that’s managed to creep it’s way over, you can forget about building any holiday hotels there.

I’ll emphasize this again – build very wisely near these areas. Remember that holiday hotels are your key focus for these prime locations – they take priority. If you’d rather not give them priority, pick a map that doesn’t have Holiday areas and just buy the tokens from the Cities XL marketplace.

When you go to build a holiday hotel, the map will light up green in the areas you can place them. There are 2 shades of green – light and dark. You can only place the hotels in the dark green areas.

According to the manual, leisure activities and monuments should have a positive impact. They’re affected by the quality of life nearby, so make sure the area is pleasant, and pollution free.

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Holiday Hotel Chart

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Suggestions and Notes

• Plan early! Keep anything that pollutes very far away from these zones!
• Don’t run busy roads through these areas.
• Fill up your Holiday areas with hotels early in the game. First of all, they make money (and don’t require anything). Second, you can sell all your extra Holiday tokens for a nice money boost as you create your city.

Leisure in the game is fairly simple. Leisure buildings have a rather large range of impact, and they influence the happiness of your citizens. A city made up of Unqualified or Qualified citizens will need fewer leisure buildings than a city with Executives or Elites.

While residential areas like leisure buildings, they don’t generate any revenue. That’s right, free Ferris Wheel rides, and free Paintball for your citizens (no wonder they love them). Of course, someone has to pay the workers (yes, it provides some employment), and that someone is you. They cost you money to run. Sport Leisure also creates noise pollution (Cultural does not).

This creates a bit of a catch 22. Your citizens want them somewhat near-by, but if Sport Leisure is next door they won’t be quite as thrilled. Essentially, they want Sport close, but not too close. Perfect placement can take a little planning.

You really want to keep a few things in mind when placing them:
-Sport Leisure should be in range of residential without being right next door when possible (if they’ve got to be next door, unqualified workers probably won’t care about the noise as much as elites would).
-Cultural Leisure’s probably not a bad idea in Executive/Elite areas since there’s no noise pollution.
-They cost you money every turn. If 95% of your population consists of Unqualified/Qualified workers, and the other 5% is Executives and Elites…. just worry about pleasing the poor. It’s probably not worth spending all the extra money to please that last 5%.
-In a city that’s large, spread out, and well-balanced (worker-wise), you may want to consider having a “richer” section of town, and a “poorer” section of town. Then place the minimum leisure in the poor area (it won’t take much), and place whatever leisure is needed in the rich area (it may be quite a bit). That’ll help to make everyone happy at the least expense to you.

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Leisure Chart