Population Planning
If one knows that their favorite housing block holds 1000 people and the scenario calls for 6000 people, it is an easy matter to plan ahead and make room for 6 housing blocks. With this information, road networks can be laid out at the beginning of a mission, industry areas can be planned, etc... Knowing how many blocks of housing and where to put them can prevent fatal map mistakes later.

Efficiency
Housing blocks can be much more efficient as well. They tend to avoid duplication of bazaars, fire and police, watersupplies, etc... This means less money spent early in the game and more employees available for export industries. Almost invariably, the site for the first housing block is chosen where it can supply labor access for an export industry and a dock.

Your first housing block can bring in a stable happy population to supply enough labor, in the right place, to allow your city to make money fast.

Control of Housing Evolution
Novice players tend to try to build too much, too soon with respect to evolving their housing. Culture and Prosperity ratings are important at the end of the mission only. You will reach a point where you want to either: increase your number of workers, increase your ratings, or (later in the game) decrease unemployment.

Housing blocks can help control evolution of housing as you can logically add things to them to precisely control each step in housing evolution. If you need more workers, evloving the housing in a block allows more people to move in. If you want to increase your culture, you can add to the block what your culture advisor says you are lacking. If you want to increase prosperity, you can gain fancier and fancier housing. If you want to control unemployment as your population gets larger, you can change your peasants into scribes.

Control of Ratings
A few stately manors can do wonders for your prosperity rating, even if the rest of your housing is poor. A block can sometimes make it easier to evolve housing to the scribe level.

Especially tough to do in later missions is obtain a high culture ratings. Blocks that are designed to balance entertainment, education and religion with the number of people they hold are invaluable to later game missions that demand a high culture rating.

There are quite a few different blocks out there that are 'perfect rating' blocks. A good site to reference to is Grumpus the Elder's Site, Which Way to Thebes. It has a very detailed list of instructions for building a housing block. I will try to do a similar turn here for my favorite block.

Laying it Out
Minimum space required for this block is 25x11. It is helpful to leave more room on the top and bottom for industries, storage yards, granaries, dock etc, more housing, templex complexes, etc... Extra space on the sides are not necessary.

Lay out a 19x9 ring of road as shown below. Leave 3 squares on either side for future 3x3 buildings. The picture shows gardens in these corners. Lay the inner road and it's roadblock now if you want or you can leave it until you want to provide some entertainment.

Choose an entrance to allow entertainers, delivery men and market ladies access into the block. I chose my entrance in the lower left for no particular reason. You can place the entrance anywhere that makes sense for your city. Note: we will be turning the entrance into a bandstand later so don't place any buildings right up against the road leading out. Also, if you place the entrance on the side of the block, place the entrance road on road tile 2, 5 or 8 so you can fit 3x3 buildings beside the bandstand later.

Adding Houses
The purpose of a housing block is to hold people. The next picture shows where to place the houses in this block. People will stream in and build crude huts.

A firewarden and police station are placed to keep crime and fire under control. These are infrastructure buildings. I have placed a water supply so that the housing can develop to sturdy hut. When full at this stage of development, the block holds 336 people.

I also add an apothecary if malaria might be a threat (lots of green grass around) and a physician. This block will stay stable and disease free for a year or two without food, longer if overall city health is good. You won't leave it without food for that long I hope.

The tax collector is added as soon as you have a city palace. Tax is important, even early in the game and at low housing levels. If this isn't your first block, adding the tax collector immediately will keep your tax roll high and keep your entire population happier.

Adding Food and Religion
Time to take your city from 'foraging' to 'flourishing'. This is done with food. It also should not be done until you have your first export industry set up and running. Money is more important than having lots of fed and happy people. The right amount of unfed and unhappy people is generally better.

If this is my first block at the beginning of my city, I will provide a temple to the patron god, and maybe a shrine to the others very soon after I give water. This is not to evolve the housing as temples come after food. It is to keep those pesky gods happy. This is one instance where you will build 'out of order' with respect to housing evolution (the other was the physician).

Supply food to your block by setting up farming, granaries, etc., outside your block. How you do you is your concern. I have shown the location of a 'feeder' house in this picture. Labor recruiters walking along the lower road will pick up access to the labor pool by this outer house. The road does not touch it but it does pass within two squares and this is all that is required. In our example, this lower road below the 'feeder' house is ideal for storage yards and granaries that the market ladies need access to.

Build a bazaar, preferably close to the entrance to cut down on travel distance. The shorter your market ladies have to travel, the more stable the block. Temples are placed on the side of this particular block. The temple is the only building built so far that has the potential to collapse, so it is time to place an architect's post.

Once food is supplied and a priest passes the houses, the block will evolve to rough cottage. It will hold 624 at this point which is almost double the pre-food block. Make sure you can soak up some of the upcoming unemployment.

Some strategic garden or statue placement behind the houses may be necessary to get all the houses to rough cottage.

That's Entertainment!
Next comes the tricky part. There are two strategies regarding entertainment so I will try to separate them and explain them both.

Strategy 1 Entertainers
To evolve to ordinary cottage, you need to provide some form of entertainment to your housing block. The simplest and cheapest method is to build a venue and supply the entertainer by building a training school. Using entertainers works well. Build a bandstand at the entrance to the block and build a juggler school outside your block. A juggler will walk to the stage and the bandstand will send a walker throughout your housing block, supplying entertainment on the outer road loop. Your houses will become ordinary cottages and you'll bump the block up to 720 people.

Strategy 2 Venues
If you know you are going to need a high CR, it is often to your advantage to jump the gun a bit and build venues. If you have perfect ratings for venues in any of the 4 venue types, every home in your city receives 5 bonus entertainment points. If you build enough stages for dancers, jugglers and musicians to get perfect coverage, you receive, three times five equals, fifteen bonus points. This will be the same as providing a musician and juggler walker for every house in your city, even those outside your blocks.
Note: With perfect senet house ratings, you get a total of twenty bonus entertainment points allowing evolution to modest apartment level without a single training school.

It is a more expensive strategy but you have to spend the money sometimes. It is also handy when starting up your next block as you might not have to put in any venues until the block begins to fill up and your venue ratings are in danger of slipping from 'perfect' to 'very good' because of population growth. I like this 'venue strategy' as housing in other areas need only one temple, food and a water supply to evolve past pottery.

The picture here shows all the entertainment venues in place, except a senet house and all the beautification and shrine locations. Once the block has entertainment it will ask for pottery, a musician (not required with the 'venue strategy') and then beer. This is modest apartment level and the block now holds 864 people.

[This message has been edited by SenetEr (edited 03-28-2000).]

Further Evolution
After the housing block is supplied with pottery and beer, the people will ask for a courthouse. I generally leave my whole city pre-courthouse unless I need higher prosperity and culture ratings. It is usually pretty easy to provide pottery and beer and I can reach this level of housing without entertainers.

To reach fancy residences, you need to supply entertainers, a courthouse, a school (which requires a steady supply of papyrus), a second food and a dentist, linen, and visits from a priest of a second god. The additions are shown in position in the next picture. The police station can be replaced by a shrine as soon as the courthouse goes in.

Note: You will also need a lot more desirability at this stage. I don't show all the roads covered with plazas in my exmaples as it makes it too hard to see the important stuff. I show only the entertainment venues covered with plazas to make it easier for you to see where they are. By this point all your roads are probably going to need to have plazas on them. You will need the precise garden and statue arrangement shown behind the houses if you are going to allow scribes to move in your neighborhood (but more on that later).

At fancy residence level this block holds 1104 people. This will exceed the inherent entertainment coverage of this block so you will need another pavillion somewhere if you want to continue to use the 'venue strategy' for the rest of your city.

Now is a good time to talk about 1x1 housing versus 2x2 housing. For reasons I won't get into, mainly because I don't know all the reasons, 2x2 housing is preferrable to 1x1 housing. At the common residence level you can get rid of all your 1x1 housing with the following trick. The picture shows all the housing in the 4 quadrants as a row of three 2x2 apartments. Your houses may not have evolved that way.
They may look like this:

Or worse, like this:

Deleting the 2x2 houses in these examples will allow the 1x1 houses to expand into 2x2s. The top example is easy as you need to delete one house and the 1x1s will expand towards each other and close the gap. Instant fix! The bottom example needs two houses deleted and results in two 2x2s with a gap in the middle. This 2x2 gap needs to be seeded with a 'for sale' sign and you will have to watch it evolve from crude hut all the way to residence.

Scribes and Manors
After the fancy residence stage, your people will ask for luxury goods. This is a very dangerous stage but it is what this block was designed for. Welcome to easy street!!!

Before you release luxury goods into your block ensure that the two little statues are sitting in the right place behind the central house in each quadrant. These are your 'scribe switches'. If you remove one for a house that holds luxury goods it will turn into a 3x3 manor before your eyes.

Manors are lovely because they hold scribes who pay a lot of tax. They are also unlovely because they hold scribes who do not work! You are about to create the idle rich so make sure you have some unemployment before you make scribes.

Once again, make sure your switches are in the right place so you can control which house becomes a manor and which direction it expands to.

To get stately manors, you need to add a mortician (which needs linen), a library and a third temple, and a senet house. I've shown two libraries in the next picture as it is an culture requirement that is hard to achieve without duplication. If I'm okay for libraries I may build a block with the bandstand/entrance in place of one of the libraries.

Notice also that the libraries, school, bazaar and mortuary are situated close to the entrance. This cuts down on delivery times and makes the block more stable.

In this picture one of the switches has been removed and the topmost left has evolved to a manor. Remove switches one at a time so each manor can evolve before you try to evolve it's neighbor. This block allows very precise and orderly control over unemployment by use of these switches. This control and the culture ratings it gives are what makes this a block worth building.

Advanced Use of the Block
I have purposely left the top row open for use as a location for desirability buildings such as the Temple Complex, Festival Square, City Palace and Dynasty Mansion. It can also be used to place palatial estates if the mission calls for them. In the picture belowI have added a back row connected to another pavillion. This area can be use to hold estates (4x4 luxury housing) if the desirability is high enough. I have used statues in this example, but the statue location is also ideal for the Temple Complex, etc...

Palatial estates need a second luxury good as well as a third type of food. If I build a block this way, I will generally add a second bazaar and specialize them in two types of food and goods each. One buys food type 1 and 2, the other buys food types 1 and 3.One buys pottery and linen, the other buys beer and luxury goods.

In this example, the top row of houses have been switched to stately manors and the bottom row has been left at fancy residence.
Note: My esteemed colleague kabouter has a special enhancement he uses when he knows a block will not be evolved to manors. The shrine below the bottom road square of the inner pavillion is changed to a architect's post and the gardens and statues behind the houses are chaged to shrines. This is an excellent place for shrines if you need more.

The road to the left is useful in this example to hold storage yards, granaries, and entertainer schools needed by the block.

Note: Although scribes do not work, they still allow recruiters that walk past the scribe housing access to the labor pool. This is because, although they do not work, they do know people who know people. In this example, any recruiters who walk the road behind the estates will find employees from the overall pool the same as recruiters walking under the 'feeder' house at the bottom.

Thank you for paying attention during this long housing block essay. Even if you never use this particular block, I think the concepts presented will help you design and use your own block. If you do use this block, I know you will enjoy it. It does it's job well and is easy to make, nice to look at, stable and easy to control.

[This message has been edited by SenetEr (edited 03-28-2000).]

I'm thinking of using Babelfish to translate it to German and then back to English. Can you tell if I've already done it?

[This message has been edited by SenetEr (edited 03-26-2000).]

Again, very nice block SenetEr.

Hasta!

There was another SenetEr-block thread where everyone could post comments.

Stark, the reason for people leaving the granaries and SY's out is becayse they themselves, don't have a fixed location for them. Everytime I construct my regular block (link here) I tend to change it to fit in with the enviroment.

Some times a road is absolutely necessary somewhere, depending on the rest of the city's layout, and you are forced to change something in the layout.

And basically, people seems to be able to figure this out on their own, or they just sit there wondering what's missing...

Moquel

The trouble with being punctual is that there's nobody there to appreciate it. " -Franklin P. Jones

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