Cities: Skylines mods like MoveIt and Fine Road Anarchy may no longer be as vital in Paradox Interactive’s superlative city-building game, as one enterprising player has uncovered a genius trick for creating smooth and better-looking roads, railways, and highway ramps.
It may be one of the best city-building games on PC, but roads in Cities: Skylines have a persistent problem, whereby, when you zoom further and further out, they start to resemble a series of poorly stitched together straight tiles, rather than a curved and graceful singular construction. This is especially a problem if you’re trying to connect your metropolis using highways, as you inevitably need to create on and off-ramps, leading to an ugly system of jagged and unrealistic-looking blocky road tiles. In the past, mods like MoveIt, Precision Engineering, and Fine Road Anarchy have helped to address this problem, as well as allowing you to build ramps closer to the initial highway, making them appear more integrated and less cluttered.
However, these mods may no longer be as necessary, owing to one Cities: Skylines player, who posts to YouTube and Reddit under the name Teddy Radko. Radko has discovered a way to create smoother and more graceful looking roads and ramps in the Cities: Skylines base game, without the assistance of mods.
Essentially, Radko explains that when using the curved road tool, you need to create your ramp as usual, veering off from the side of your highway. After that, you need to add a second section, extending the ramp even further. This is vital, as it creates a join, or node, in the ramp. The key to the trick however is to then add a third section, jutting out perpendicular to the ramp, and attached to the node that you created. This will cause the node to kind of skip or jump along the initial section of ramp, allowing you to attach an extension at a more advantageous and curvaceous position. Radko demonstrates the trick in further detail in their excellent, explanatory video:
The trick can also be used with railways, and has been found to work in the various console versions of Cities: Skylines, too, meaning players previously unable to access mods can now create these better, smoother roads. Of course, as explained in our guide to Cities: Skylines mods and maps, there’s still plenty of reason to try out some of the game’s top player creations, but Radko deserves an enormous amount of credit for solving this age-old problem using tools in the vanilla game.
If you’ve cracked Cities: Skylines and got your perfect metropolis running harmoniously, you might want to move your operation to one of the other best building games on PC. You might also fancy a greater challenge, combining building and the pressures of global war with something from our guide to the best strategy games.