Cities Skylines Campus Review

Cities Skylines Campus Review

While we all are waiting for any news on the next DLC (or probably Cities Skylines 2 as some rumors suggest) I decided to review the latest existing expansion for the game – Cities Skylines Campus.

This expansion is focused on education. Players get much more options in regards to Cities Skylines universities and education becomes meaningful for both the social life of your city and its actual layout.

Cities Skylines Campus Area

Developers used the well-known approach similar to Parklife and Industries – you zone areas of university campuses (there are 3 types of those – University, Trade School, Liberal Arts College) that have different specialization, place buildings of the 1st level and then as your campus develops you unlock more and more buildings for the campus (20+ per each type of campuses). This is a simple but working approach because a good video game is the one where the player constantly has goals. And developing your campus, getting more specialists to work in your city, adjusting your city layout and transport, and expanding the campus area with new buildings are really exciting activities.

An important difference with parks from Parklife DLC is that you can’t place objects inherent for one type of campus to the zone of another type of campus. Well, that’s probably good because each type of campus has its own architectural style so mixing them may be not the best idea.

New Challenges

This will be a new in-game challenge for you – increasing attractiveness of your universities. The attractiveness is affected by numerous factors which involve both how the campus is arranged and how your city supports it. This topic deserves a separate guide.

Another interesting thing is that this time specialized campus areas may degrade if you somehow lose the factors that allowed you to level them up (e.g. the number of students has decreased).

But campus areas aren’t the only new feature in this DLC.

Academic works

Basically, that’s a tangible representation of how successful this or that university is. At the end of each academy year, each of your universities has a 30% chance to create 1-4 academy works (one per 500 students, 4 is maximum). You can influence these chances by building special laboratories and hiring academic staff. As an alternative, you can pay 50k to get a guaranteed academy work.

These academy works allow you to level up your campus areas.

Museums

Sure you want to show your academy works to your citizen. That’s why you need one of three museums (The Technology Museum, The Art Gallery, The Science Center). These buildings attract visitors and increase Entertainment. But keep in mind that you need level 5 campus area (aka Prestigious) to unlock museums.

Faculties

We’ve got a set of unique buildings called faculties. Their role is to increase Cities Skylines university campus attractiveness and to add some bonuses to your city. For example, a police academy increases jail capacity, the number of police cars, and police efficiency. Sure you need to pay for everything – this building costs 75k.

Libraries and Policies

That’s not the DLC but a patch 1.12.0 which was released to support the DLC but anyway. You’re getting the Сities Skylines Academic Library and Public Library- buildings that upgrade the educational level of your citizens.

Also, we’ve received new policies to support new educational features.

University Sports

With this DLC you get another thing to manage – varsity sports. You have to build a stadium for one of the available kinds of sports (football, basketball, baseball, track & field, swimming) within the borders of your campus. This increases the popularity of this educational establishment but adds some headache to you – from now on you should hire staff, manage prices for tickets and even choose the uniform color for the team. 

Campus Life

This expansion adds a great portion of great atmosphere to your gaming – you will see the graduation parties and matches between your varsity teams and other teams, you can even place a yellow school bus to some bus lines in your city (and I always have bus lines to deliver people to educational establishments). 

How Does Cities Skylines Campus DLC Change the Game?

Let’s start with how the new campus areas and educational establishments work with the good old Cities Skylines university. Well, people still go to this university and their choice still depends on the way they can get there. 

Campuses turned into very important points of your city which require significant area, impact your transportation system, city layout and so on. At the same time, they’re greatly dependent on the development of your city because the bigger population you have the more students appear.

And sure you received a number of instruments to manage your city in a more flexible way.

Is Cities Skylines Campus Worth It

As for me, this depends on your background. 

If you own all the previous DLCs then this would be a new experience and a new bunch of challenges to overcome. Plus some awesome atmosphere of a university city adds some life. Definitely recommended, I received a lot of fun.

If you’re thinking about what DLC to buy first then Campus is not a game-changer, it’s just an expansion for one of the numerous aspects of this great game. For such people, I’d recommend going for Mass Transit first because it’s much global as for me.