Quick Start · Part 7 · About 4 minutes
Should you build cities?
Every settlement on your map opens into a city you can design street by street. It is a whole second layer of the game — and the first thing to know is that everything you just learned about money does not apply there.
There is no construction fund in a city
The Transport Fund never reaches the City Map. Nothing you draw there is quoted, charged, maintained or reported in the accounts. You can lay a boulevard and a metro line without spending a dollar.
That sounds like a cheat code until you meet the actual constraint: you cannot build more than your nation has earned the right to build.
- Population gives you land
- How far the buildable area reaches is set by the population of the city and the settlements around it. Terrain then decides how much of that is usable ground.
- Development gives you allowance
- How much you may build on that land is capped per category — residential, commercial, industrial, public facilities and the rest — and each cap comes from the macro development levels behind it.
So the City Map does not cost money; it spends entitlement. A refusal message there is not "you are broke", it is "your nation is not developed enough yet".
What comes back to the nation
Two things cross back, and only one of them changes anything.
The completeness score is the one that matters. A city reports how much of its allowance is actually built, weighted with how well its streets and transit move it, and that score becomes a small multiplier on its settlements' development growth.
The bonus is capped at +5%, rising to +10% and +15% once you have earned the Million City and Metropolis milestones — the city feedback cap from Part 8.
Your city streets also count as national road mileage. The Roads panel reports urban road length as its own figure and folds it into your total network mileage. This one is a statistic rather than a mechanic — the streets still cost nothing and earn nothing — but the roads you draw inside a city do show up in the national picture. Footpaths are left out, and a street adopted from a national road is not counted twice.
Nothing else crosses. A city cannot send you money, and a badly built one cannot hurt your finances.
So should you?
Honestly: not yet, and it is entirely optional.
Nothing in the national game requires you to enter a city. The feedback is a growth bonus of a few percent — real, compounding, but small next to getting your network right. A new player is better off spending that time on the demand list.
Where it becomes worth it:
- When you have a large city
- The allowance scales with development, so a big well-developed settlement is where there is actually room to build something. Doing this to a small town caps out almost immediately.
- When your network is stable
- The bonus multiplies growth you are already generating. It is an amplifier, not an engine.
- When you want to
- It is the part of the game with no budget, no failure state and no clock. Plenty of players build cities purely because it is the part they enjoy.
If you go in now
- Look before drawing. The city metrics page shows every category's cap against what is built. That tells you what you are even allowed to do.
- Finish one district. Completeness rewards completion, not extent. Six sketched neighbourhoods score worse than one finished one.
- Draw streets before towers. Transport is 40% of the score, and it multiplies rather than adds — a fully built city nobody can move around scores near zero on that half.
- Do not expect it to fix anything. A city cannot rescue a settlement your national network is failing to serve.
Next
Part 8 closes the Quick Start: how your network turns into growth, and which goals are worth steering towards.
When you do want to build seriously, Designing your cities is the full collection — starting with the allowance, then zoning, streets, transit and terrain.