[This message has been edited by Dmytry (edited 05-14-2004 @ 06:41 PM).]

As stated above you can use or create any map file you want for this aim.

Money isnt an issue on that map and plays no role.

You can build as many fountains or houses as you like and than delete them. Its ok if the final save has the needed completion criteria.

Wells are not allowed so you cant build any at any time.

My suggestion is to design a special map with rich sources and a lot of money.

[This message has been edited by philon (edited 05-14-2004 @ 07:00 PM).]

With that challange I wanted to go back to one of the main issues of this game wich is housing blocks. The idea of that challange was inspired by catilina's fountain efficient block wich is really brillant.

I hope players will like this challange after your excellent ones with the two clubs. I myself will try the challange later. Obviously a lot of planning will be needed.

Good luck to everyone.

Entry downloadable here, I hope the thing is valid

Thanks Philon for this interesting challenge, I loved it

In memory of Catilina's block with 24 2x2 houses (wich is the theoretically maximum number) I have build that block.

[This message has been edited by philon (edited 05-25-2004 @ 09:14 PM).]

I'm new on this forum and as Caesar Philon has posted a message on a french forum about this challenge, i will try to send a save. At my first attempt, i have 1825 people on the map, but the population is not regular 1810 1815 1820 etc... for the moment, my problem is to stabilize the population.

I will try to do better for sending a save to Philon, but it will not be better than the three first sends that you have already.

Bye

PS : i never think that it was possible having a so high population with only one fountain !

[This message has been edited by cesar20 (edited 05-17-2004 @ 04:34 PM).]

Quoted from Philon:

[This message has been edited by Dmytry (edited 05-17-2004 @ 06:31 PM).]

My total population was 2780, with the following housing:

7 luxury palaces (1400 people)
3 medium palaces (336 People)
11 large insulae (924 people)
6 medium insulae (120 people)

The design appears to be indefinitely stable. I ran it for three years without incident before I got bored. With micromanagement of the favour rating, I imagine it would run for well over a decade.

The final design has the worker housing (all in the core of the block) fed fish only from a small support block running south out of the centre. Luxury housing is completely disconnected from the worker housing (to avoid complications of multiple food types), and is supported by two blocks, each containing all the necessary health and education services. Entertainers are generated in one block, and finish in the other. A further fish industry, together with the pottery and furniture industries and the dock, is located to the north of the luxury blocks.

The finished design runs with a permanent worker shortage dangerously close to 350 (getting on towards half the required number of workers for the city). Most of those workers are absorbed by the Hippodrome, Colosseum, 2 Academies, 3 Libraries, and 2 Hospitals. This is right on the limit of what's possible. Many more workers down and the luxury houses start losing access to the academy or hospital. Precise placement of those buildings is critical to maintain stability.

In order to minimise the number of workers needed, both fruit and wheat are imported for the luxury housing block (supplementing local fish). Pottery and furniture are made from imported raw materials, and oil and wine are imported directly. To provide access to the second wine, a single wine workshop is built, and the wine industry then turned off!

Although it's not a requirement of the scenario, I wanted to make sure the city was running at a profit, so a few valuable workers are used collecting taxes from the palaces. Result: about 7500 Dn annual profit. Nice.

In purely theoretical terms, it would be possible to add a further 32 people to my total by replacing two large insulae on the edge of my housing by a single luxury palace. It would be extremely difficult to sustain a city with the additional worker shortage, and also very difficult to get all the required goods and services to that extra house without building a further support block (and the additional workers needed for that simply don't exist!).

I'll be posting my finished result on The Appian Way, just as soon as I can track down my password for my account

Enjoy,

Alan

[This message has been edited by Caesar Alan (edited 05-19-2004 @ 00:19 AM).]

Hi Cesar20. You're the Thierry whom I contacted via email last time, right? Nice forum you have.

However, now that I think about it, I could just as easily have micromanaged food imports and scrapped the prefectures in a northern province. That saves another 25 workers. I'd probably then have taxed my worker housing as well, and used the surplus to bolster my employment deficit. It simply didn't occur to me

I originally planned to switch off all my industries at the beginning of the two-year run. Having discovered that everything ran happily with the industries still going, I decided to leave things as they are for a more permanently stable solution.

P.S. Fountain City is now available for download from The Appian Way.

[This message has been edited by Caesar Alan (edited 05-19-2004 @ 06:18 AM).]

Since a fountain supports a 9x9 area, the best way to utilise the outermost edges is to place a luxury palace on each corner, with a luxury and medium palace in between. I did this on three sides of the square, reserving the fourth for road access to the centre and some extra worker housing.

As I said, sketching the design on paper was one thing, building it was quite another. In order to prevent the medium palaces from expanding back into the worker housing behind them, I kept them at medium insulae (using statues to prevent expansion) until the houses on either side had evolved to 4x4. Since houses will not expand through higher grade housing, the medium palaces had no space to go, and thus stayed as they were.

The problem is that if a single one of the adjacent luxury palaces devolves (which would send it spiralling all the way down to small tent!), then the medium palace will evolve back through the large insulae behind it. Obviously this has a bad effect on your workforce and normally brings the entire city crashing down.

The biggest problem I had with maintaining stability of the luxury palaces was loss of either academy or hospital access. Since both are horribly understaffed, they produce walkers infrequently, and the key was to ensure that the walker circled the block every time he was produced. As I ws using an unusually long loop provide services, I had to experiment with a number of different placements before I finally hit on one that worked.

The one thing I learned from this experiment is that it is possible to build a stable city with an enormous labour shortage. It takes more tweaking than I'm normally prepared to bother with, but it can be done.

[This message has been edited by Caesar Alan (edited 05-19-2004 @ 11:00 AM).]

Very, very nice. I have a couple of suggestions: delete the shipyard, and put 2 medium insulae in place of 2 plazas (either the plazas east and southeast of the fountain or the plazas west and southwest of the fountain), which will raise the population to 2820 and slightly reduce the worker shortage.

I am annoyed with myself for sticking with a modification of catilina's large-insulae-maximizing 1-fountain block. (I had planned a city of 2688 people--8 luxury palaces, 12 large insulae, and 4 medium insulae.) I should have thought about the problem (as you did) and realized that maximizing housing meant minimizing roads near the fountain.

I had planned to import all 4 manufactured goods and grow my own food, which requires either 6 or 8 farms. Your solution requires 4 workshops and 2 or 3 more warehouses, only slightly better in a central province but considerably better in a northern province.

Congratulations!

With the addition of the two further houses suggested by Brugle, my total population now reaches 2820. A revised version is now available from the Appian Way (same link as before).

I had a little more patience with this one: it runs without any intervention at all for at least five years without any housing devolving. The only problem is a favour rating that's getting dangerously close to the basement. I really should have programmed a request or two into the scenario

Alan

Quoted from Brugle:

My original cunning plan^TM also involved importing all 4 manufactured goods and perhaps one or two food types for luxury housing. Unfortunately, I ran into the limits of the empire states built-in to the editor.

Only one empire state (Caesarea II) allows you to buy all four finished goods. And you can't buy food of any description there. I eventually settled for the compromise location of Tarracco II, as I felt that gave me the largest pool of available workers.

This was probably the one aspect of my planning that was weaker than it might have been. I initially ruled out some empire states on the basis that they had limited land trade, which was somewhat shortsighted.

[This message has been edited by Caesar Alan (edited 05-19-2004 @ 08:20 PM).]

One cheat/feature that isn't mentioned as far as I know, which could ruin this challenge, is that of overlapping houses. If you have a MI and a LI next to it, delete the LI, let the MI expand and undo the delete, you eventually end up wit two LI occupying 6 tiles only. The buildings overlap, and so do their images. The process may be repeated to give a whole row of LI, each overlapping with the one next to it, so effectively you have (almost) all LI occupying only 2 tiles. You may have some graphical distortion, and you must be careful as buildings may expand over roads and other structures, but I have managed to build a functioning standard 9x9 block with many overlapping LI in it. Available upon request if you want to have a look at it. It's a spoiler obviously, for this and any other contest involving high population density challenges.