Art of the Smart

Thoughts and lessons from a techie, entrepreneur, and curious observer of the world.


Cities: Skylines Optimal RICO Zoning Ratios

I'm fascinated with pushing the limits of Cities:Skylines, so in this experiment I found the optimal zoning mix of Residential, Industrial, Commercial, and Office space (RICO) using high-density, maximum-leveled tiles.


Summary

The optimal mix is summarized in the table below.

Zone Type Tile Count Percentage
Residential 896 (14 parts) 60%
Industrial 256 ( 4 parts) 17%
Commercial 192 ( 3 parts) 13%
Office 128 ( 2 parts) 03%

Objective

The purpose of this experiment was to find the optimal ratio of RICO for Cities: Skylines. Obviously a lot goes into this, so read the whole post for details.

Turns out this blend is profitable too, even when your RICO is smothered with services.

Conditions

It’s easy to just lay things out and call it done, but the rations fluctuate wildly as the game settles into the zoning available. Education changes, wealth levels change, and zones advance up the density tree. So below were the conditions that constrained the objective

Caveats

I can’t control everything. Here’s what you should know about these results:

Methodology

I created a small prototype town with three major sections: a residential, a commercial/office, and an industrial. This makes adjustments easy to zero in on the right blend and I can add services all around without trouble.

Showing the layout and proportions of fully leveled RICO zones in Cities Skylines.

Each “block” is 8x8 tiles to make counting easy!

You can download the Cities:Skylines save file here.