The types of workers/residents in the game are as follows:

• Unqualified Workers
• Qualified Workers
• Executives
• Elites

As you might guess, the level of wealth also determines what types of jobs they’re willing to work, and what level of services they expect.

In Cities XL, you’ll need just about all types of workers in some form or another as your city grows. You may be able to focus more on one type, but you’ll almost certainly need them all.

At one end of the spectrum, you have Unqualified Workers. They work in just about all the city services, most of the commercial, and the dirtier industries. They don’t pay as much in taxes, but on the plus side, they’re more easily satisfied by city services. Really, it’s fairly easy to keep them happy. Try to keep them away from pollution and provide the basic essentials, and they’ll usually be content.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Elites. There aren’t as many jobs that hire elites (and those that do generally don’t hire very many at a time). They pay the most in taxes, but they have pretty hefty expectations of your city. Expect to build many services to keep them content. Keep them away from road noise, pollution, and make sure they’re in nice areas of town. It might be a good idea to locate them near their workplace as well.

Qualified Workers and Exectuives fall in between. They pay a medium amount of taxes, and have medium expectations.

–

A few things in particular to keep in mind with residential:

• Environment- Cloudy skies are one thing. Smokey skies are another. Nobody likes pollution, so try to keep residential away. Building on this, nobody likes noise pollution either. It’s tough to sleep when your house is on the side of a busy freeway. Nearby parks on the other hand are a boon for everyone.
• Travel time – Driving across the city to get to work is never fun, but sometimes it’s a must. When you can, try to keep people fairly close to work. If they must travel, make sure your roads aren’t too packed. Building efficient roadways are very important. Whether you need to upgrade or add roads, make sure everyone’s able to get to work quickly and on time.
• Employment – This is always a balancing act. You want unemployment to stay as close to 0 or 1% as possible. On one hand, without enough workers your businesses aren’t productive and may go bankrupt. On the other hand, too many workers leads to lower satisfaction, and you’ll have empty homes taking up space.
• Services – Whether it’s schools, leisure, or police stations, everyone wants a degree of health, education, entertainment, and safety. Lower-grade workers tend to need less, whereas higher-grade workers expect more.
• Taxes – The standard tax rate will last you quite a while. If you’re running short on funds, you can fortunately jack up the tax rate in many cases – some of the population will leave, but it’ll bring you some fast temporary income. Lowering the tax rate can bring more people to your city though. Be careful when jacking up the tax rate – if you go overboard and too many people leave, some of your businesses may not have enough workers which could cause them to shut down. If it’s important services that shut down, then satisfaction may drop further leading to even more people leaving. It’s a vicious circle, so be gradual when adjusting the tax rate.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can’t always please everyone, and you shouldn’t always try to. For example, if you’ve just started building housing for Elites, your services probably won’t be enough to keep them happy. That doesn’t mean that you should instantly double the services in your city to satisfy them – it’s not worth spending twice as much money to satisfy 2% of your population.

Above all, remember to make changes in your city gradually. Adding too many services to please your citizens might bankrupt you. Adding a new development area to your city can cause traffic jams which stop people from getting to work. Make changes slowly, take a look at the effect that they’ve had, then make more changes slowly.

Generally, when you start your city you’ll want to see where your fertile areas are, and save that land for Food Industry. Plan accordingly – farms don’t like pollution, so don’t build any dirty industry near your fertile areas.

Once you start building your farms, note that you can build a Silo for every 10 farms you have.

Farms can be a little tricky to build – if the angle isn’t right, it won’t let you build it. Farms also have a minimum and maximum size, so you may have to experiment a little and do your best to make sure you don’t end up with small unused spaces.

Big or small? A little testing showed that although the income often varies widely (for no apparent reason), the income farms generate tend to be proportional to the size. That means there’s no direct financial advantage whether you make them small or make them large – it’s the total land area that will matter. However, you do get a Silo for every 10 farms. Many smaller farms will obviously give you more silos than fewer large farms. That said, each farm is surrounded by a road, which means many small farms will waste more real-estate because of all the extra roads that are created. Your best bet may be to just build reasonably, and focus more on utilizing all the space available, while maximizing traffic flows.

-

Food Industry Chart

-

Suggestions and Notes

• Check the market early on. If Food Industry tokens are selling fairly high, it may be a good idea to fill up all your fertile land with farms early on, and sell the tokens for a helpful money boost.
• Note that the farms do use water. Don’t go crazy with them if you can’t afford to keep them well watered!
• While the farms don’t care much about freight, silo’s do care about freight. Make sure you give them decent road access!

Heavy industry is just a fancy way of saying dirty industry. Unfortunately it’s a necessary evil, even in the game world. In Cities XL it’s more than just a stepping stone – if you plan to have manufacturing or high-tech industry, you’ll need the raw materials that heavy industry provides.

Build these factories far away from civilization if you can. The pollution expands/spreads, and there’s little that can be done to reduce it. There are very few buildings that will tolerate the pollution spreading towards their area. In fact, the only ones who don’t mind the permanent clouds in the sky tend to be other polluters such as the manufacturing industry, power plants, garbage dumps, and oil rigs.

Heavy industry comes in 3 different types – essentially a low, medium, and high density. The first two create smaller buildings, while the high density has a slightly larger tile size.

Where should they go? You probably want all the big polluters packed into a corner somewhere, or with their own dedicated section. Either the corner of the map, or an edge is generally the best place, because part of the pollution will run off the map. Make sure they have access to freight lines running out of your city – generally if they’re near the edge they’ll be near a road running out, but if you’ve placed them towards the middle of your city for some reason, make sure there’s clear roadway going out (or better yet, access to a harbor).

Even though you’re going to want to keep these away from residential, don’t forget that workers still have to travel to work! Ensure your road network is up to the task.

-

Heavy Industry Chart

-

Suggestions and Notes

• Put these near the edges of your map when you can. That way, half the pollution radius is outside your city land.
• If you’re loaded with money and want a green city, consider buying Heavy Industry tokens from the marketplace instead of building heavy industry yourself.
• Even 1 heavy industry building will cover a huge area with air pollution although it’ll be light. Multiple buildings in the same area will simply make the pollution more heavy/dense and create a thick cloud.
• If forced to put heavy industry near residential, try to put it near the Unqualified residents – those with a lower pay-grade tend to accept pollution a little more than the rich.

If there’s one thing manufacturing does well, it’s to create demand. This is one of the few buildings that will create a lot of demand for Office Services (which in turn creates demand for business hotels). It’s also the middle-man that takes Heavy Industry’s goods and turns them into manufactured goods for High Tech industry. Unfortunately, Manufacturing also places notable demand on your power plants.

While Manufacturing doesn’t pollute a whole lot (although it does pollute some), the Heavy Industry and Power Plants needed to support production tends to mean that it’s yet another industry contributing to the pollution of your city. That said, it does pay well. Very well. So well in fact that you might want to throw the tree huggers into another city and pollute your way to riches.

As far as positioning goes, you’ll probably want to keep these with the other polluters, secluded away from the population, but with good road access for workers and freight.

Manufacturing tends to employ mainly Qualified Workers, and by creating demand for Office Services, you’ll definitely need a strong Qualified population if you’re intent is to focus on Manufacturing. Unqualified Workers come in at a strong 2nd.

Low, Medium, and High density types are available, with High being slightly larger, pulling in close to $1000 per turn (although all sizes pay well), and employing all 4 citizen types.

-

Manufacturing Chart

-

Suggestions and Notes

• Keep manufacturing with the other polluters. While they don’t pollute quite as much, they certainly don’t mind being located in a cloud.
• If your polluting areas are getting close to the residential areas, move things around so that the heaviest polluters are farther away, and manufacturing buildings are the ones that are closer (because they pollute a little less, they should be a better buffer).
• Manufacturing has chaining effects on demand (demand it places on services will create new demand by those services), so build gradually.
• In a town that doesn’t mind a good chunk of pollution, manufacturing can pull in some good money.

High Tech employs a good chunk of Executive workers in the game. In fact it’s the only industrial building that has Executives as the main focus. It also doesn’t employ Unqualified workers to any degree. If you’re trying to minimize the poor population of your city, High Tech is something to look into.

Being one of the more “elitist” industries, high tech doesn’t really create pollution, and it also doesn’t have much of a tolerance for pollution either. What this means is that you should probably treat it like a residential building – keep it away from pollution. You’ll also want to make sure it’s got good access to freight.

The biggest downside to High Tech buildings is that they produce a lot of waste, and thus you’ll either need to create some landfills, or buy some Waste tokens from the game’s marketplace. It also creates demand for manufacturing which may be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your city.

In short what this means is that while High Tech industry itself is pretty friendly to the environment, it relies on other things that aren’t quite as enviro-friendly. If you’re building a clean city, note that you’ll have to buy/import tokens to meet it’s dirty needs.

While the reliance on polluters can pose issues for some, high tech does have a few notable benefits:

• employs Executives
• creates demand for Office Services
• creates high-tech industry tokens
• non-polluting itself

All 3 density types are available (Low, Medium, High), with high being slightly larger than the others. They’re average money makers – not terrible, but nothing to brag about either.

-

Hi Tech Chart

-

Suggestions and Notes

• Keep High Tech away from pollution. You can probably integrate them into your residential areas if you’d like as long as they maintain good access to freight (it’ll also give the Elites a shorter drive to work).
• Remember that while High Tech doesn’t really pollute, it relies on other polluting industries.

If you have other industry in your city, you’re going to want offices. Sure, you could buy Office Services through the market, but why would you want to? Offices don’t pollute, they employ workers, they’ll create demand for business hotels, and there really aren’t many reasons you wouldn’t want them in your city.

Exceptional offices are particularly beneficial – once unlocked, you can build an office for +35% production to fuel, water, electricity, or heavy industry.

The one and only negative (and even this is a stretch – it will usually be a positive) is that the medium and high density offices create demand for Hi-Tech industry which itself relies on other polluters. That said, Offices and Hi-Tech have a symbiotic relationship (each produces something the other needs), and work very well together.

Offices like nearby passenger services, and dislike pollution, so feel free to put them in clean residential areas beside busy/noisy streets and avenues (residential buildings tend not to like noise, so it works out well).

The game allows for 3 office densities (low/medium/high), as well as a few buildings in the “Exceptional” category.

-

Offices Chart

-

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).

-

Retail Chart

-

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.

-

Business Hotel Chart

-

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.

-

Holiday Hotel Chart

-

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.

-

Leisure Chart