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.

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Food Industry Chart

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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.

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Heavy Industry Chart

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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.

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Manufacturing Chart

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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.

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Hi Tech Chart

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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.

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Offices Chart

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