Recently, Plebus showed (in 3 new speed record and 3 new blocks ) how to construct a double block structure by fusing two rectangular housing blocks through a four-way intersection.  His design exploits the fact that roaming walkers from buildings near four-way intersections will travel out all four roads leading from that intersection in reliable clockwise order.  I described this phenomenon in some detail in Quadrambles of service walkers and domains of their buildings near an intersection including an exploration of the rules determining when a building is close enough to the intersection for its walker to behave reliably in using all four roads in order.  The road geometry shown in Fig. 1 carries the exploitation of this feature of the roamer algorithm to an even greater extreme.  Please be aware that none of the housing around or within all four supported blocks (that is vital to keep this community running smoothly) is shown in Fig. 1 to allow presentation of the shorting areas in as much detail as possible.

Figure 1. A windmill block providing sufficient services to permit houses placed around the NE, SW, and NW blocks to evolve to stately manors.  The structure had to be broken in half (duplicating only the road) so it could be uploaded to Pharaoh Heaven.  The block to the SE is not visited by the librarian and will support housing only up to spacious manor.  Rocks mark squares where additional roads must not be placed to avoid destabilizing the block by "shorting out" buildings.  Desert squares show regions in which roads may be placed subject to restrictions described in the text.  The grassy squares show two shorting wings of the courthouse in which "unwalkable" roads have a desireable effect on the magistrate's behavior. North liest toward upper left.

[This message has been edited by StephAmon (edited 06-30-2002 @ 09:48 PM).]

Please do not simply copy the roads shown in Fig. 1 onto the landscape in your next city (tweaking as needed), add the buildings (also with possible rearrangements), and expect your windmill to work properly.  I had the most appalling learning experience starting up my first windmill, and I would like to spare you as much similar pain as possible so you get to enjoy the many benefits that a windmill can bring to your next city.  Therefore, in later sections I talk about design changes that can be safely made, startup procedures, and maintenance.
   Fig. 1. shows the road geometry of the first windmill I ever built.  I laid it out in my default lab and debugged it with dentists, physicians, and temples in all the positions for 1x1, 2x2, and 3x3 buildings, respectively.  All these walkers followed the quadrambles that I was expecting.  I also spot checked the shorting regions (the rocky areas in the figure) to make sure they were of the size and shape shown.  However, these windmills are not just some lab curiosity.  I used three of them in a rather leisurely development of Waset.  I have halted my work on this city while I engineer and debug a preshorted figure-8 block that I have in mind for some unused space on that map, but if you would like to see it in its present form, here is a link to a zipped version of Windmill Waset.  I'll upload a copy of the finished city to Pharaoh Heaven later.

When and why you might want a windmill.  A windmill quadblock is tricky to start up, requires monitoring and maintenance, and (in its present incarnation) forces you to leave a lot of roadless space on the map (all those rock-filled squares in Fig. 1).  Why would any sensible, multiple-god-fearing nomarch allow such a road structure in his or her city?  Because it supports 20 stately manors and about 4000 other citizens in a mixture of common and spacious residences with a single water supply, physician, dentist, mortuary, school, and courthouse.  Servicing all those residents with the health-care providers, in particular, has real advantages for your culture rating.  Unlike religious, entertainment, or educational coverage (in the words of Nero Would in Got your Culture right here!), "the Coverage Index for each health service does not depend on the number of buildings, it is simply the percentage of your population that lives in houses passed by the appropriate walker."
   Windmills are also very musical.  I'm sure most of us hate having to allow the little stub roads needed to put bandstands or pavilions in our housing blocks, because of the instability that they produce in the behavior of the service walkers.  Consequently, if we are going to allow a stub road, we tend to want as much value from it as possible.  So, we use that stub to site a pavilion, not a bandstand, in case we ever want to evolve the housing in the block above common residence level. As a result, we get cities with high dance:music ratios in the opinions of our culture overseers.  Honestly, you heavy hitters, when was the last time your overseer of culture complained about insufficient dance? Music? I thought so.  One windmill with four bandstands can balance things out quite nicely.  There are also 12 perfectly good corners available on which you can install booths, although the central pavilion and four bandstands will shoot out enough jugglers to keep everybody happy without extra booths.  Who cares that I cannot tell you how to control and ensure the regularity of the walks of the entertainers from the pavilion and bandstands; the ordinary citizens will be so stupefied and amazed that a senet player has passed their door (and he will pass everyone's door) that they won't remember if they haven't seen a juggler in a while.  In Windmill Waset, no manors ever devolved for want of jugglers, music, or dance, but they did notice when I idiotically let the senet house skip their turn.  Wow, Ugly! (See operating instructions below on "labor recruiter suppression".)
   Education is also easy to optimize with a windmill.  The school shown in Fig. 1 services all four housing blocks.  The library services three out of four, making a counter-clockwise loop around the NE block instead of visiting the SE block.  If you want statelies in your SE block, put a library in it.  libraries smell great, and your culture checker will approve.  Similarly, if your culture kvetcher wants more schools, plop one in a housing block; they smell nice, too.
   You sure as heck don't want to use a windmill if you are playing on some postage-stamp-sized competition map where the object of the game is to fit as many souls into as little space as you can.  A windmill is perfect for whopping big maps where you are trying to put housing near widely scattered valuable resources, like sites for ferries, waterlifts, mines, and utterly useless chunks of desert perfect for monument construction.  Don't you feel a little bit guilty about those occasional crude huts (w/ physician access) that you've been forced to build to keep mines or meadow farms in operation.  I hate having to rely on them.  Their occupants are always the first to emigrate if anything goes wrong.  Windmills are perfect for alleviating the need for nasty huts.  See Windmill Waset for examples of how to solve problems like this with the road structure I describe here.

Want to give a windmill a whirl?  Here are some details about how to get one to fit on your map.

Design Alterations

Building rearrangements.  The water supply, school, physician's office, and mortuary may be freely interchanged with one another.  All of them will continue to use all four roads from the central X intersection in regular, clockwise order.  Please do this, not only to get your water supply onto a grassy square but also to get it into as desirable a location as you can.  You want to boost/evolve that thing as soon as possible.  The apothecary, dentist, architect, and both firehouses can also be freely interchanged.  In fact, you have to do swap them around to get your windmill started up properly. (See Start-Up Procedures, below).  The bazaar on the right can be exchanged with the tax office right next to it if necessary, e.g., for desirability.  All the bazaars can be moved around a little bit, but if you do this, make sure to keep the three-way intersection with the bandstand within the domain of that relocated bazaar.  The bazaars in Fig. 1 servicing the NW, NE, and SE blocks have been positioned to send three walks of their quadramble into the block they service.  I couldn't figure out how to do this for the bazaar at the bottom of the figure, but at least half of the green girls' walks will stay inside that housing block.
   The two tax offices in the north quadrant of the X intersection in Fig. 1 should not be swapped with any of the other 2x2 buildings.  Both of these offices have their north squares at a distance of 5 from both the central X intersection and from the nearest three-way intersection.  Unfortunately, the nearest T intersection happens to lie further to the north than the central X for these buildings. Accordingly, the tax office on the left of Fig.1 does not use the road running vertically (NE) from the central X for the NE leg of its quadramble.  Instead, its collector uses the vertical road inside the housing block to its left for the NE leg of its tax collector's quadramble, and he never visits the uppermost block.  Similarly, the collector from the uppermost tax office never visits the (SE) block on the right.  Thus, in one iteration of the tax collectors' quadrambles, the block on the left gets visited twice by the nearest tax collector and once by the tax collector on the road to the NE.  The NE block at the top of the figure gets visited twice in quick succession only by the collector from the office nearest to it.  The block on the bottom gets visited once per cycle by each of these tax collectors.  Without the tax office above the road to the SE (on the right), the SE block gets visited by a collector only once per cycle.  The SE tax office is really only justifiable if you are going to put high value housing in the SE block. If you use the SE tax office, he will visit the SE block for three walks per quadramble, and his fourth walk will take him to the four-way intersection at which point his behavior cannot be predicted (at present) since it lies outside his domain.
   The two temples that look the same in Fig. 1 should be dedicated to the same god. If the upper temple is omitted, the block near it will have access only to two gods.

Easy road tweaks.  You can safely rearrange in portions of the housing blocks any roads that are not touching rocks or desert squares in Fig. 1.  This is useful if you are pushing one of the "housing blocks" up against a bunch of mines (which are never lined up all nice and straight!) or dodging some obstacle on the map.  However, you must strictly maintain the 32-square circumference of the perimeter road around each of the housing blocks.  Any longer, and some of the short walkers may not loop that block.  Any shorter, and the long walkers become (even more) unreliable (than they already are) in the block shown in Fig. 1.
   You may freely add roads in any of the empty space in Fig. 1 (i.e., the area not filled with rocks or desert squares).  You may freely connect those external roads to the housing-block roads through road blocks located on squares shown as empty.  You can put roads in the grassy areas provided that you connect them to the nearest road block shown in the figure.  You can safely put roads in the patch of desert near the top of Fig. 1, only if you connect such roads through a really short path (and via a roadblock) to the housing block on the left. Similarly, you can put roads in the large area of desert to the southwest of the rocks in Fig. 1, if you connect those roads through a short path to a roadblock up against the lower-most (SW) block in the figure.  Road squares are O.K. in the three desert squares at the extreme right of Fig. 1 if they connect directly to a roadblock on the lowest of those three squares.
   The six desert squares just to the right of the uppermost (NE) block are a special case.  If you must put roads in those squares, for the love of all gods, don't connect them through a roadblock to the NE block.  Instead you must connect them to the SW block (on the right).  If you want to know what all this concern over roads in the desert squares and where they must be connected is about, then you will want to read Unwalkable roads short out roamer quadrambles.  Please pay special attention to the replies in which a distinction between "defaulting" and "shorting" is drawn.  You want to "short out" (not "default out") bazaars with roads in the desert squares.  Incidentally, the two roadblocks shown in Fig. 1 really do help improve the reliability of the courthouse, which I would be happy to explain if asked.

Intermediate road tweaks.  You are not limited to 6x8 interior spaces for your housing blocks.  In Waset, I used 7x7's, 8x6's, 5x9's, and at least one 10x4.  Your blocks do not all have to hang off their roads from the X in the clockwise fashion shown in Fig. 1, either.  One of the "housing blocks" that I used for farms in Waset went the other way, and I think I reversed another block in that same windmill.  However, if you rearrange the roads, you will have to remap the shorting wings, i.e., the areas that must be kept free of roads, if you want your service walkers to continue visiting all the housing blocks. I describe how to figure out the sizes and locations of the shorting wings of buildings in the unwalkable roads article cited above, which you really should read before you do any serious alteration of the housing block roads.

Advanced road tweaks.  There are a couple of rather radical possible changes to the roads shown in Fig. 1 that can be made, if you are prepared to learn a little quadramble theory.  You could increase the distance between the X intersection and one of the three-way intersections by a square or two.  However, for each square of road that you add between the X and the affected T, you must reduce the circumference of the block-perimeter road containing the T by two squares.  You can also change the orientation of the T intersection through which walkers from the central area enter one of your blocks.  In Fig. 1, all the three-way intersections present a walker arriving from the X with two choices: go straight or turn right.  You can change the direction of the T so that his choices become turn right or turn left.  However, if you change one of your T's to the turn-left-or-right variety, you will need to understand the consequences for walks of some of your service providers. If we move the block on the left side of Fig. 1 down by 4 squares so that the road from the central X intersection hits it right in the middle of one side of the block, then the tax collector and temple furthest to the left send their roamers on three out of four walks to the block on the left and the remaining walk goes to the block on the right.  Those roamers will never visit to the upper or lower block.  How the algorithm chooses which intersection to use for each leg of a roamer's quadramble is described in Predicting roaming walks near two intersections and roadblocks, which will help if you want to make any of these advanced road alterations.

Initial Start-up Procedure

Do you have roads for a windmill, and you want to start it up? Starting up a windmill in a real city is like trying to eat a rootbeer float on a skateboard going downhill fast; You're having fun, but you've got to pay attention or there's going to be a crash and a godawful mess.  My first attempt to start up a windmill in my default lab was an unqualified, unmitigated, eschatological (= "...of or pertaining to death or the end of the world.") disaster.  I wiped the grime and soot off my face and came up with the following start-up protocol to save you some of the pain I suffered.  This process worked a treat for my second and third windmills in Waset. (I still had magistrate problems in my first windmill in Waset - fixes for which are now in this protocol.)  Be advised that these startup procedures have never been test driven at Very Hard difficulty.
   To crank up a windmill, you need "abundant" housing in your four housing blocks all of which is about the same age so none of it burns before a fireman gets to it.  A road geometry that allows labor recruiters to pass over two roads squares, each of which is within two squares of housing is the minimum for service-providing walker dispatch; it is not "abundant" enough for labor recruiter suppression, which is what we need.  Here's how to get housing that even a magistrate would call "abundant:".
   From the design you have in mind for your housing in the blocks, select 10 squares of housing for each of the four blocks in the windmill.  These 10 huts must touch the housing block roads.  For the next step, you must know the direction from which the immigrants are going to enter your map.  If you don't know, then save the game, crank speed to max, see whence they enter, and reload.  Put for-sale signs on your 10 squares reserved for road-adjacent housing in the block within the windmill that is furthest from the immigrants' point of entry.  Next, put for-sale signs at the locations reserved in Fig. 1 for housing on the road from the X leading to this most inaccessible block.  (Always put the for-sale signs on the block-access road when you put the signs in the block that road connects the X to.)  Now, put 10 for-sale signs each in the two vanes of the windmill that are about equally distant from the immigrants' point of entry.  UnPause for a bit, and then position the final 10 "for sale" signs in the block that the immigrants can reach most quickly from their entry point.  UnPause, and let some immigrants come in and pop up their huts.

Out-of-phase Firehouses, etc..  Your windmill will get torched if you have only two firemen following each other closely around their circuit.  It would be much healthier for your block if one of your firemen headed northwest (NW) from the four-way intersection at the same time that the other fireman went SE, i.e., in the opposite direction.  Here is how to get a pair of these out-of-phase firehouses.
   Once about 10 houses have occupants, save your game, because you'll need to reload it shortly.  After saving, put 1x1 structures like firehouses and dentists (it doesn't matter which - but do this one building at a time so you don't get confused) on each of the spots shown in Fig. 1 to be occupied by the apothecary, dentist, architect, and the two firehouses.  Record the initial direction (NE, SE, SW, or NW) taken by the first labor recruiter emitted by each building.  If the recruiter heads away from the four-way intersection, then you see his initial direction instantly.  If he heads towards the X, then you must wait to see which way he emerges from the X before you know his "formal" initial direction.  If you delete one of these 1x1s and replace it with another building of the same size, the new building will launch its first labor recruiter in the same initial formal direction as the one taken by the first recruiter from the building you replaced.  In earlier posts to Pharaoh Heaven, I called this phenomenon "initial recruiter invariance".  While you're at it, you should record the recruiter launch directions for 1x1s at the positions occupied by police stations in Fig. 1.  These are supplementary (not primary!) firehouse and architect locations, because they will neglect the block lying clockwise from the road they are on.
   Now that you know all the initial recruiter directions for your 1x1s, it should be child's play to get two firehouses to send their walkers in opposite directions.  Reload the game.  Consult your notes and find a pair of 1x1 building locations that have opposite initial recruiter-launch directions, either SE-and-NW or NE-and-SW, drop game speed to minimum, and in quick succession place a firehouse on each of those two locations.  You now have a pair of firehouses that will reliably stay more or less out of phase for about two game years.
   The probabilities are good that out of the five 1x1 locations near the X that you tested, at least one pair of them will have opposite initial recruiter launch directions.  You may not be so lucky, however.  I wasn't.  If you don't have opposite launch directions for a pair of your 1x1s, try swapping the water supply with the firehouse above it.  If this still doesn't get you the needed pair of 1x1 spots, you can rearrange the pavilion, school, mortuary, physician, water supply and all five 1x1s that can see the X in their domains pretty freely, provided that you don't move any of the other buildings.  Don't touch that courthouse!  You will be happier if you can find a second pair of 1x1 sites with opposite initial recruiter launch directions for architects.  If you want to know more about out-of-phase firehouses and initial recruiter invariance, check out reply 17 (Experiment B) in Directions and travel distances of labor recruiters near intersections.  As mentioned, the two police stations shown in Fig. 1 mark places reserved for auxiliary firehouses (or, possibly, architects). You are going to have to destroy and rebuild your two main firehouses periodically, and it's nice to have some redundant firemen to cover the interval when your out-of-phase firehouses are in their initial labor-recruitment period.
   Now that you have gone to the trouble of establishing a pair of out-of-phase firehouses (and, with luck, a similar pair of architects), do take a moment to wander over and pay your Overseer of the Workers a little visit to let him know that you will have him dragged out onto the road and shot in the head if he makes anything other than infrastructure his top priority.  If you fail to do this, one of your firehouses will use the first occasion when your city has too few workers as an excuse to replace a walk by a fireman with a walk by a firehouse recruiter.  If you ever see a labor recruiter near the four-way intersection after all your service buildings have been up and running for a while, that's an alarm siren.  That recruiter is following a route that should have been taken by one of your service-providing walkers.  Fire, collapse, starvation, thirst, illiteracy, or some other excuse for devolution will swiftly follow.  Total suppression of labor recruiter emission was the reason you had to put so much housing in all four blocks before starting up the windmill.  When you eventually add the courthouse, take some thugs and thumbscrews with you when you drop by for another friendly chat with your Overseer of Workers to be sure he understands that government is now his third priority (after infrastructure and health), so he knows you're serious.  It had not occurred to me that I need to make health a high priority until a whole block of manors turned into common residences.  All gods help me!  The dentist's office (employs two!!!!) felt that it needed to emit a labor recruiter.  Who'd've thunk it?  That's not the worst thing that failure to keep health a high priority will do to you with a windmill block.  Trust me.  You would rather have your organs in canopic jars, myrrh and nitre up your wazoo, and linen wrapped tight all over your body than have your water carrier skip a beat by emitting a labor recruiter.
   Eventually, your housing in the windmill will evolve to level high enough to make it worth your while to tax the nice people.  Save the game and (one at a time) put physician's offices where the tax offices are shown, so you can record the initial recruiter-launch directions for 2x2 buildings in those positions.  It does no good to have multiple tax collectors if they are all in phase with each other.

Windmill Maintenance

On a vast, pure X of straight roads, a pair of out-of-phase firehouses will stay out of phase for game decades, or until fire breaks out elsewhere in the city and one or both of your little red chuckle-heads wanders over to help put it out.  This happy situation does not exist in a windmill.  Firemen in a windmill head into a housing block with instructions to travel for between 45 and 57 squares from the four-way intersection before they are allowed to think about heading back to the firehouse.  This is easily a long enough trip duration to allow them to go through the bandstand, all the way around the housing-block perimeter road, and back to the bandstand with several road squares of travel before turn-around left in their orders.  If the firemen were foresighted, they would use those left over squares of travel to get a head start back from the bandstand toward their firehouses.  But, these are Pharaoh walkers: Not Smart!  Eventually, one of your beautifully out-of-phase firemen is going to make his final bandstand turn towards the central road X when his buddy on the other side of the windmill chooses to turn away from the four-way intersection as if he were going to loop the housing block again.  When their wristwatch alarms go off signaling it's time for a coffee-and-doughnut break, the first fireguy will be quite close to home, while the second fireman will be quite distant from his firehouse.  The first fireman will be all relaxed, refreshed, and relaunched on the next leg of his quadramble before the second fireman even gets back to base.  These two walkers will not perfectly out of phase anymore.  What's a nomarch to do?  Reset the firehouses.  You won't notice when this happens, but on average it will happen a time or two every couple of years.  If you are running a windmill, you should keep an eye on it by popping up a fire overlay every few months.  If the houses in one of your blocks all look more flammable than usual, then your firehouses are getting too close to being in phase for comfort.  If you followed my advice and carefully identified two 1x1 sites with opposite initial recruiter launch directions for your primary pair of firehouses, getting your firehouses back out of phase is easy.  Destroy them both, drop game speed to zilch, and rebuild them both in quick succession.  Now, you're probably good for another couple of years.
   Don't be a cheapskate.  If you stick mines or a temple complex on a windmill, put an extra architect nearby.  At hard difficulty, a single architect simply isn't enough to keep a windmill healthy.  If you are wondering why Windmill Waset is set to normal rather than hard difficulty, it's because I got sick and tired of having shrines fall down, and lacked the necessary records to put a pair of architects out of phase in all my windmills.  I'll do better next time.  Call me superstitious, but when I put a palace or a second library in one of my windmill-powered housing blocks, I add a firehouse nearby.  Firehouses are cheap, and it's nice to have useful work for a few of the vast army of the unemployed that a windmill can very quickly create.

I cannot remember having more fun in a recent Pharaoh city than I did in Windmill Waset.  I hope a windmill gives you at least as nice a time as mine did for me.

[This message has been edited by StephAmon (edited 06-30-2002 @ 10:05 PM).]

Fascinating! I doubt I'll try a windmill in the near future, but I loved reading about them.

Now I've seen Windmill Waset, and it looks great!

[This message has been edited by Brugle (edited 07-01-2002 @ 00:58 AM).]

Excellent presentation.!

I will study the design and try to incorporate it when I start my next city.

Thanks, StephAmon!

Thanks, Guys.

Brugle, I know perfectly well that on normal difficulty you would have had a far better city up and running in nothing flat.  I suspect that I am going to have trouble interesting many of the regular contributers to Pharaoh Heaven in trying out a windmill until I get one that's pretty solid at hard difficulty.  Once I get one worked out, I'll come back to this thread to post it. It is likely to be quite a while before I can get one cranked up on very hard to dangle as a temptation in front of you and Tryhard.

Octavius

I'm delighted a fellow player has decided to try a windmill.  I report so many apparently insane things to this site that I'm not at all convinced that most visitors will believe one of these things actually works until someone else confirms their reliability.  Please, let me know if I can be useful by offering to spot check any design changes you are forced to make to get one of these on a map, by way of offering some reassurance that you have not stepped on a shorting wing or anything else that would doom your first windmill.

Unfortunately, I'm going to be out of town until next weekend.  I'm taking my daughters to visit my folks, and, alas, they aren't wired.  So, please accept my apologies if I fail to reply to any comments readers might tack onto this thread before then.

StephAmon:

One quick response to your intesting post(I'll post more later when I have checked your Wasset):About the out of phase firemen,I have an easier way which practised many time in Meidum and C3 giant cities.To reset the phases of fireman,just delete/undo the fire houses,it will reset the firemen to their initial leg of walk.Also at the early stage of the block development,I would like to put one fire house in each of the rectangle of the quad(either neart the intersection or on the far side to the intersection),because huts are too easy to get fire and I don't want to check the fire risk too often.When the houses are over the homested level,you can place the 2 fire houses near the intersections.In my C3 cities,these two fireman(called prefects) will never need any adjustments as long as no houses have devolved from small casa,and they can always come to rescue the houses from fire when the overlay shows a red column(i.e.very close to fire breakout).

You are perfectly correct about the shine/architects. Temples are fine because they have 3 tiles touching the road but shines have only one,althoug the collapse risk for these two kinds of buildings are the same.Situation will be worse if you put the shines one tile off the road,which we usually do in a normal block.

[This message has been edited by Plebus (edited 07-19-2002 @ 04:18 AM).]

Plebus:

I like the delete/undo trick.  A couple debens here; half a dozen debens there - pretty soon you're saving real money.  Honesty also compells me to admit that I was forced in many cases to follow exactly the advice you offer about adding extra firehouses to the blocks especially when the housing was still at low levels.  I also want to record my jealousy for the reliability of your C3 fire guys.  The only time my out-of-phase firemen stayed out of phase for decades was when I based a city on a pure X of long straight roads.  As soon as I bent the roads around to form blocks, I created the three-way intersections that let the firemen make different directional choices, and I wound up having to reset them every year and a half or two.  At least it won't hurt so much now that you've told me how to do it for free.  Thanks!