With this game, you need to seriously plan ahead, as with many city builders, to upgrade your infrastructure and expand on certain areas, you will need space. You run out of space quickly.

So to start off, I am going to assume you have played the tutorial, it will establish a good basis for you to understand what I will be referring to in this guide.


These are a few noticeable things I have seen within the game UI and it is not always fully explained or detailed.

1. In the upper right hand corner of the screen, there is a "?" icon, use this a lot. It is essentially what boils down to an in-game manual. It really does contain a lot of answers to what you are trying to search for.
   
   
2. Preview videos in-game, with a few of the mechanics there are these nice little preview videos within the confines of the game that shows you what it does with a short explanation in a bit more detail. These I have found do not always clearly tell you what it does, I will discuss it later within this guide on a few I found particularly vague.

So lets get to it then shall we?

When you found a new city, the first thing you must do is CHECK THE RESOURCES in the ground and plan your city around it.

Upper left corner, of your screen on your information pane there is a filter icon. Once you have found the filter, open it up and then run through every resource quickly in order to see which areas you should avoid to build on.

As you can move most buildings in the game, you cant move zones. Once you have zoned an area, the only way to move it is to destroy it. From my experiences, destroying a zone can have some unintentional side effects.

As with any city builder, you must, MUST keep your infrastructure in mind. Your roads. High Rise Cities has a interesting take on the whole road placement/upgrading/downgrading/changing of roads. Its not very conventional and might leave you unable to build the city that you want.

Currently, there is no real negative effect of having serious congestion in your city, other than your OCD getting triggered. Mine does which is why I try and solve it as much as possible for streamlining and general intrigue.

With that in mind, be prepared for quite a lot of.. interesting road networks.

Building roads is a fundamental part of any city.. in HRC, the road building mechanic is quite interesting and pleasing if you like grids and having everything at the right angles and gradients.

Now, having said that, here are things you need to know before you really get into it.


You have to remember, if you dont terraform your land first, its going to be rocky, uneven and weird in places, sometimes causing some real issues for your network or your quests you run.



Note on the above picture, the ground seems bumpy and uneven? its because it is, its not just visually as such, its literally uneven, as you build on it and grow, certain buildings do terraform the ground around it a little bit, but working the ground to be flat is not as simple as it seems and besides the fact, if you level your entire city's starting ground, building tunnels and bridges might pose more of a challenge.



Top left of screen is where you can find the road options

1. You have 5 options to select that will determine the type of road to be built;

Straight | Freeform | Curved are the most important ones you will be using.

- Straight is self explanatory, builds a road in a straight line, by default the grid is shown around the road with measurements and intervals with suggested turning points. You can also build the roads on corners of buildings so that the road "hugs" the building making that smooth corner you so badly want.

- Freeform is basically a method of building the road that allows you to choose a custom road curvature depending on your placement. Basically, select it, point the arrow to where you want the turn of the curve to be and continue forward, with the option of a straight section within the build as opposed to Curved settings which only allows for a curved road shape.

- Curved is.. well.. curved road, a road that bends in a way you dictate with the assistance of a corner gradient measurement, works much the same as the freeform method, as in, point the line at the position you want the turn of your road to be and continue with construction.

Luckily, the game has a very nice way of explaining how to use the tools at your disposal. Whenever you place a road, you'll notice a shaded area around the road to be placed. This is the size of the area that will be available to you for zoning. Once placed the road displays the zone area, as far as I understand it, as long as whatever zone you are building is within that roads zone area, any service building you have can reach the target zone.

Then there are a few other settings.


in order to do this, you need to select the setting available that says "Ignore Landscape". What this then does is essentially, terraform the surrounding ground around the road. This also allows you to extend your road over/through mountains or mounds and water.



to specifically build the road underground takes a mixture of adjusting the height of the road and raising the land. Once you have experienced what happens when the game auto-corrects your immaculate landscaping... You will understand that it is easier to build the road, then pile dirt onto it.

So best method of building a bridge? or a tunnel? Raise the ground before hand using the terraforming tool and then build the road to your hearts desire. Mountainous maps are also a lot easier to build bridges and roads using the game's auto-pathfinder-placer-tool.

Here is an example of what the setting does practically, the tunnel that goes through the mountain has the option of Ignore Landscaping toggled on and the other does not.



Landscaping active allows you to do this with existing landmark features in your map;




In order to manually construct a bridge you will have to at least have to land masses that are higher than the middle ground... obviously. However, there are the options on the road builder tool that allows for you to manually adjust the height settings. It does work, but, it is quite hard to slowly and gradually increase the gradient according to the slope of your construction area. That and the fact that the tool constantly wants to snap you to certain hard points around buildings and such. keep in mind that once you have manually built a road underground, and need to adjust it in any way, goodluck.

If you attempted to build a tunnel manually and ended up having to exit the road building tool, getting reconnect to the exact spot is practically impossible. There is no Layer filter or adjuster. So you cannot see under the ground in order to adjust, reselect it and carry on working.

So, you finally got your city up and running with the basics, soon enough you will be expanding and rapidly.

Once you start on this journey you will very, very early on realise that electric coverage is quite important to the longevity of your city. After building another station, you will soon find yourself stuck with the method of connecting 2 or more stations to the network.

There isnt really much at this stage to elaborate on for electrical pylons. a Few things to keep in mind when placing them though;

• You cannot move a pylon once you have placed it, so be sure that where you build it, you dont have an plans for any zoning related things. To "move" a pylon you have to delete it and rebuild it for the network in the location you desire.
  
  
• If you build a pylon next to a road, try and place it outside of the road zone, otherwise you are going to end up with gaps all over your city because you cant zone around a pylon. You can build certain service buildings under them. You cant build a road close the it, but you can build a pylon close to a road.