Was toying around, managed to make a 20 estate block. I'm pretty proud of it, looking through this thread and various game saves I've downloaded I don't think such a thing has been done in the way that I've done it (except for the bazaar, no duplicates of any building inside the housing loop). It's about 50x50 to stack them and make a dual loop, and because it's a relatively square shape it's easy for the rest of your city to work around. There's a very minimal amount of wasted space throughout the middle. Feedback is appreciated.

Blueprints and notes below:

The blueprints below will get you 40 (2 loops/blocks of 20) palatial estates on normal, they're rock steady from my testing. Barring employee shortages and other city problems, of course.

Coverage from the tax collector isn't perfect, and I welcome suggestions on what could be tweaked to improve it. He gets confused by the pavilion, and he'll miss a little bit of income most years. On a lucky year where he doesn't choose the same route multiple times in a row he might get lucky and miss none, or some houses might miss a lot on an unlucky year where he chooses to go down only 1 side of the block a lot, because the pavilion turns him around.

That's right, only 1 firehouse inside each housing loop. If you want to ratchet up the difficulty, be wary of fires, I turned the difficulty to very hard and in under a minute there was a fire...right next to the firehouse at the apothecary.

The left and right of the block with the entertainment, storage yards, granaries, etc. can obviously be changed to your heart's content, however it is critical to be wary of the bazaar across the street from the senet house in each loop. It is a fire hazard, and you need to have a fire marshal on the outside pass by it, hence the road leading to it but not touching it to the left of said bazaars.

The blueprints, as configured below, contain a sufficient amount of entertainment venues to cover the following amounts of people in the named entertainment categories: 8,000 (jugglers), 8400 (musicians), 8,400 (dancers), and 10,000 (senet). Since 40 palatial estates can house 8,000 people, this makes getting perfect coverage for your city in all entertainment categories a little easier. Assuming I remember correctly that each juggling stall entertains 400, musicians 700, and dancers 1200.

I know it's hard to locate the venues in the glyphs, but they're there, 20 stalls for jugglers, 12 for musicians, and 7 for dancers. You can tell where there's a venue below by looking for the plaza tiles as roads, and 1 garden square in bandstands, and 2 in pavilions. There are cases where juggler's booths are right next to each other, so if you see something confusing, that might be what you're looking at.


The entertainer schools on the right are there so that entertainers travel from the schools to the pavilions on the other side. Just more walker coverage on houses.

There are 8 granaries (2 for each type of food) and 8 storage yards (2 for each type of goods). Some of the granaries and storage yards go without workers occasionally. This seems to not have a significant effect on anything. Labor seeker not so good at the smart making =( While 4 granaries and storage yards would have easily been sufficient, this allows neighboring housing blocks to easily feed off of this block's depot without harm. It also opens the door to an 80 block setup, where you mirror the below blueprints, combining the the supply depot side for each. Doing this in such a way to maintain enough entertainers might be tricky, though.

Speaking of expansion, if you want to add another 20 block loop, you can, as long as you have enough land to work with. Just be wary that the top left palatial estate has a road leading to it, to improve labor access. If you want to add another loop on top, delete both the road leading to it and the medium statue touching the road. Put a large statue there. That road becomes pointless because another loop being made will mean that the bandstand directly to the left of the road you just deleted will have access to labor via a palatial estate that will be touching the juggler's stall, thus making it close enough to a road for labor access. It's hard to explain, but if you just delete the road and medium statue, then replace it with a large statue, and don't understand the rest, you'll be fine. Though only if you're adding another loop on the top, as I said, otherwise keep it.

I left a lot of blank spots on the blueprints, but many of them are filled with shrines, statues, etc. The festival square is actually the dynasty mansion, but I didn't see a code for your mansion in the legend. Since they're the same size I used the festival square. Easily replaced with statues.

I have a working model of the blueprints, I'd put them up for download, but nobody downloaded my last housing block blueprints, so I'll hold off on putting them up unless someone asks, in which case I'll post them here.

Once again, feedback is appreciated, especially if you can figure out a way to make the tax collector work better (see third paragraph if you skimmed to here).

***old blueprints deleted to save bandwidth, superseded by design in post 316***

[This message has been edited by Fire Axe (edited 05-23-2009 @ 01:18 PM).]

Fire Axe,

A very nice-looking block, but trouble-shooting walker problems is difficult when the block is not actually in situ on a particular map.

First, the orientation. Algorithms controlling walker behaviour depend on the compass, so the tax collector may take different walks depending which way is north.

Second, the direction which a walker in 'random' mode takes at an intersection can vary according to where on a map the intersection is located. Each tile has a 'random' number associated with it which is a factor in the calculation.

Third, external roads. Walking patterns might be affected by any road tiles that come within 14 tiles of the building's northern tile. Your tax collectors might just be so affected if external 'labor access' roads are placed close to the housing at top and bottom of the diagram (again, depending on orientation)

Tax collectors are somewhat different from most walkers in the game, sharing some characteristics with architects and entertainers from venues. If North is up-left I would expect your upper tax collector's NE walk to attempt to reach the block's northern entrance. He cannot do so because of roadblocks. This causes him to exhibit behaviour unique to this class of walker - he will walk his default walk length then vanish.

There are many ifs and buts, though. I'd like to see this in action but it'll takes too long for me to build it. If you could send me a save (see my profile for addy) it would save me the trouble, and to return the favor I'll take a closer look at your tax collectors

Fire Axe,

In addition to what Trium3 mentioned, there is another difference with tax collectors. While most services disappear 6 months after a house is passed by the appropriate walker, tax registration disappears much sooner (probably in a little over 3 months). So while all houses would probably remain watered even if the water carrier goes around the loop only once in 4 walks, some houses are more likely to lose tax registration if a tax collector does the same thing.

Two things that are likely to improve tax registration (as well as housing stability and fire protection) would be to eliminate the intersection and to shorten the loop length. (Without the intersection, you'd have to provide entertainment coverage differently.) Whether that actually would improve tax registration depends on the exact details, including those factors mentioned by Trium3.

Quoted from Trium3:

If North is up-left I would expect your upper tax collector's NE walk to ... walk his default walk length then vanish.

Wouldn't that occur on both tax collectors' NE, SW, and NW walks?

[This message has been edited by Brugle (edited 05-19-2009 @ 01:08 PM).]

Trium and Brugle, thanks for the info on the habits of walkers, those will be great for me to know in tweaking future housing blocks. I'm not sure I want to make this block any smaller, since I don't see how I could do it without cutting down the number of estates...definitely the first thing to go would be the pavilion, but it lets me fit the senet house and extra bazaar quite nicely.

Zipped .sav file of the template here. The city is about to be hit by an aging populace, so be prepared to potentially nuke some farms and/or delete and replant some housing (the oldest houses are on the opposite side of the river as the estates).

Quoted from Brugle:

Wouldn't that occur on both tax collectors' NE, SW, and NW walks?

Yes. I just picked one example to describe the behaviour. But now you mention it, indeed they each only have one walk that is not 'blockage-shorted'. Since all the other walks are blocked at the same point, I'd expect those walks to be identical. Fire Axe's post #301 suggests that they sometimes vary and I'll be looking at that in the next couple of days. Of course, you discovered yourself that walks do not always repeat as expected.

Fire Axe - sorry but that link is not currently working for me. 'You are not allowed to access this section'

[This message has been edited by Trium3 (edited 05-19-2009 @ 06:09 PM).]

Oops, I picked a random post to host the attachment on that forum and I didn't think to pick a post in one of the public sections, Here it is again

Edit: didn't realize you needed to register to download attachments in posts there. I went ahead and Emailed it to you.

[This message has been edited by Fire Axe (edited 05-19-2009 @ 06:59 PM).]

Hi again, Fire Axe.

I've fixed your lower tax collector, though you might not like the effect on the aesthetics of your block. I'll look at the top one a little later.

As we inferred from your diagram, the tax collector only loops one walk in four. On all three of his other walks he attempts to leave the block via the pavilion, bounces back off the roadblock and walks along the SW side of the loop, vanishing near the end. All of the NE and SE sides lose registration during this period. As I posted before, this is due to what's known in the trade as a 'blockage shorted' walk - he's trying to reach a target tile the other side of the roadblock. A possible way to cure this is to 'default out' the walk by placing a disconnected road tile somewhere so that the algorithm finds it before it finds the tile currently being used to target the walker.

This is quite difficult because your block is very heavily built up, but we can 'fix' the NE walk if you don't mind losing a statue (you have way OTT desirability anyway!). Delete the statue that lies directly NE of the tax collector (that's the one on the very end of the 'backbone' between the two blocks. Place a single road tile in that space against the middle tile of the estate nearest the tax collector's office. DO NOT build anything that will box this tile in since it will become the 'access tile' for the estate.

The tax collector now loops twice. He still does the about-turn/disppear routine two walks running and we get de-registration, but not for so long so we should collect more tax.

The SW walk can be defaulted, but it's rather more tricky. You wouldn't want to delete an estate to make room for a road tile, so we delete the shrine that's adjacent to the western corner of the estate immediately next door to the tax office (this is not on your diagram, by the way). Replace it with a road tile (re-build it elsewhere if you need the coverage).

Problem now is that it's connected to the road through the bandstand, so we need to re-orientate this. That means deleting the juggler booth and the other bandstand through which the road exits the block to the SW and re-routing the road so that it enters the block one tile NW of its current route. You will also need to delete the shrines and the fire marshall to continue the road - rebuild them the other side when you're done (this means some shrines are two tiles from the road, but that's OK).

Now replace the two bandstands and juggler booth in the new orientation. The tax collector now loops three times in succession. He still misses on one walk (I can't find a way of defaulting out that walk) but no houses lose registration.

I have not fully tested the effect of these changes on other walkers and I may have introduced other problems. In particular, the disconnected road tile against trhe bandstand might have undesirable effects, but I don't think you're relying on that one for anything. Your main objection is likely to be spoiling the nice symmetry of your block.

On the face of it, it should be possible to fix the other collector the same way - I'll look more closely later (unless Brugle comes up with something better meantime)

[This message has been edited by Trium3 (edited 05-20-2009 @ 05:06 PM).]

I am curious, I would have just built another tax collector. What would be wrong with this?

street: I'm not seeing a place to put another tax collector without expanding the loop, and expanding the loop is a dangerous proposition. Otherwise, I tend to design my loops to hold as many people as possible without any duplicate buildings, so a second tax collector would be counter intuitive to this philosophy. I will make the occasional exception for a bazaar, but otherwise duplicate buildings in a loop are just a waste of employees, and a contributor to walkers towards the data limit.

Trium, wow, thanks! I can't wait to give that a trying when I get home.

I did try simply swapping the tax collector with another service, eg the water carrier which doesn't need to pass by so often (Brugle hinted that this was a possible solution).

While the tax collector works fine in its new location, the water carrier doesn't. I'm afraid that any service building located in that position is not going to do the job because of those roads to the north-west on the other side of the roadblock. The three estates at the southern end of the SW side will devolve.

I should point out that we just got lucky with the way the tax collector goes at the intersection after defaulting out walks. In another map location we might not be so lucky (I don't know yet what the upper collector will do). Also, if his behaviour changes over extended periods of time (as occasionally happens for unknown reasons), we're stuck

street - haven't you a contest results page to be getting on with? Not that I'm being impatient or anything

[This message has been edited by Trium3 (edited 05-20-2009 @ 11:07 AM).]

We got lucky again

This time the SW walk is easy - just place a second road tile in the space you cleared earlier where the statue used to be, this time centrally against the back of the estate on the opposite side of the space.

The NE walk is fairly easy too. Delete the statue at the northern end of the row which runs along the back of the estates on the NE side. This time we do have a desirability problem, so pause as soon as it's gone and complete the next steps during very brief releases of the pause key.

Place a medium statue in the space you've just made, one tile away from the estate, and build another large statue in the space due east of this, abutting the existing ones. Place a road tile centrally against the back of the estate - again do not box it in. Job done.

Quoted from me:

Place a single road tile in that space against the middle tile of the estate

Sorry, I meant the middle tile of the 3x3 space you've just cleared. The estate doesn't have a 'middle' tile!

[This message has been edited by Trium3 (edited 05-20-2009 @ 12:02 PM).]

Quoted from Trium3:

swapping the tax collector with ... the water carrier ... Brugle hinted that this was a possible solution ... the tax collector works fine in its new location, the water carrier doesn't

In my defense , if north had been up-right or down-right (it couldn't be down-left with the senet player walking on the main loop) then the water carrier would have circled the loop once in 4 walks (often enough) from its new location.

For the benefit of anyone trying to follow this discussion, I should just point out that Fire Axe's save has a number of differences from the diagram above. My comments were based on his save, so when I said 'Delete the statue at the northern end of the row which runs along the back of the estates on the NE side' there was actually a large statue where the diagram shows a medium one (next to bandstand, top left).

I'm struggling to create a worker block based on my above design, no matter what I do, it seems to be inefficient in some way, though I'm able to cram 45 fancy residences into one loop so far. Are there any worker blocks out there fit for normal that can get up to 50 fancy residences without any duplicate buildings except a bazaar, and also are able to provide perfect health and education coverage? I have, however, expanded my estate block to accommodate 2 more estates! Simply move the senet house to the left one tiles, move each row of estates over to the right 1 tile, and you can then place another estate next to the senet house. In doing this I brilliantly "moved each estate by devolving them to manors (delete a library, mortuary, etc.), then re-evolved them over one.

Obviously adding the additional estates threw off the tax collector again. Is there any particular way to figure out how to alter the route a tax collector takes on each of his 4 routes, or is it just trial and error by placing road tiles?

Here's an updated set of glyphs that show how to squeeze 22 estates into one loop, obviously I left out statues and whatnot.

***old blueprints deleted for your scrolling pleasure, and to avoid taxing the server with so many images, see post 316 for updated blueprints***

[This message has been edited by Fire Axe (edited 05-23-2009 @ 01:19 PM).]

Quoted from Fire Axe:

Is there any particular way to figure out how to alter the route a tax collector takes on each of his 4 routes,

Probably the best way is to read (and understand the implications of) StephAmon's Ambulomancy, an essay linked from the opening post of Predicting Roaming Walks.

Sweet, thanks Brugle

And as you all might expect, I've continued tinkering with it, and I believe I've finally taken this block to its limits...26 palatial estates:


Legend

I made an effort to make the symmetry pleasing with the final product, and I'm quite happy with it. It is important to note that an efficient supply line is absolutely critical with this block. You will note that I had to relocate a bazaar, and this caused that bazaar to not be able to stock goods quickly enough to supply houses, so I had to create storage yards on both sides to supply each bazaar. The house in the middle not directly connected to roads was particularly annoying, because the way I have the block oriented, whenever it devolved from an estate, it would devolve towards the inside of the block and lose road access, causing it to disappear. Once each bazaar had goods close enough to it, the block was very steady.

Sadly, I had to add the extra library, as the estate it's next to wasn't being reached by the librarian. I tried switching the library around with other 3x3 buildings with no success. I decided to double up on the libraries for the sake of helping culture. And since this block will make heavy demands to achieve a high cultural rating, every little bit helps. I'm going to try and build a city with 10 of these blocks once I figure out a good worker block, and then try and get a culture rating of 100. It will be an interesting challenge. Since each block houses 5200 people, that means 13 jugglers will need to be placed somewhere per block for perfect coverage. Libraries are going to be a bigger pain in the neck, it's kinda silly that each one only services 800.

Update: Actually, it turns out you don't need that extra library. In reading the information on roamers that Brugle linked me to, I decided to try switching the courthouse and library around, since magistrates will travel further on their walks than librarians, and sure enough that did the trick.

Update: finally have a finished worker block to show off


Legend

50 fancy residences fit in there, perfect coverage for everything as usual, though when I made it in game I used a zoo instead of a senet house. No houses lose tax coverage, even =) I was hoping to squeeze in more houses, but I'm still pleased with how it turned out. In particular I'm extremely proud of the symmetry of the block. As you might expect from my previous blocks, those bazaar ladies are pushed to their limit, so if you use this block be sure that each bazaar lady has a good route to everything she will need. And as you might also expect from my previous blocks, if you're looking for cultural self-sufficiency, you're going to have to work hard to surround that block with everything you need, though I did manage to squeeze a couple jugglers into the block.

Bonus: if I'm pressed for space, this block can easily contract. The bazaar could be moved inside the block and the senet house could be dropped, if need be.

Legend

[This message has been edited by Fire Axe (edited 05-23-2009 @ 03:29 PM).]

Quoted from Fire Axe:

Obviously adding the additional estates threw off the tax collector again.

If you didn't alter the road network (including the extra road tiles I suggested) the tax collectors' behaviour should not change. If you did make alterations you'll maybe find solutions in the link Brugle gave you, though I warn you, it's heavy reading! It took a lot of re-reading before I fully understood this stuff.

For you tax collectors (assuming they are still in the same place) the SE walk is fine - they loop. The other three walks all want to go out through the pavilion. To see this for yourself, put your cursor 8 tiles from the northern tile of the tax office to (let's say) NE. Look around it - no roads. Now look two tiles out from your cursor, then three, until you find a road (up to a maximum six tiles away). That is where your tax collector wants to go (there's a little more to it than this - I'm simplifying).

The technique I used was to find a location for a single disconnected road tile that is closer to your cursor than the road that is currently closest. The algorithm then finds that tile first (as it works outwards). Since the tax collector can't actually reach that tile (because it's disconnected) he has no target and walks in 'random' mode around the loop.

You simply repeat the excercise in each of the other directions. Note that it was not possible to cut out the NW walks because you can't get a road tile closer to the the tile 8 tiles to the NW than the one that's already there.

Hope this makes sense.

Oops, I guess it's not obvious since I didn't include any of the supply buildings or beautification. Moving the estates on the left over forced me to rework some desirability things, which in turn forced me to rework the supply buildings, and somewhere along the way the tax collector returned to looping only 2 consecutive times of 4. Rather than continue tinkering with the template I've dived into planning my city with 10 estate blocks. I've got the roads laid for where they'll go, now I just do...the entire rest of the city.

Fire Axe,

While I'm sure Heaven Games (and maybe some readers) will appreciate your respect for bandwidth, removing the glyphs from your original posts makes any subsequent discussions based on them bewildering and meaningless to other readers, who have no idea what we're talking about.

When I posted my worker blocks, it caused all estate images to become a leech notice. When I nuked the old blocks, it reverted back to normal. Is this a regular occurrence?

I'm sure this is nothing new but couldn't find it anywhere so thought it could be worth posting.

I got this game a couple of months ago and have been reading heaps of the advice on this forum. Up to Baki but got bored of constantly laying out perfect (but unrealistic) concentric ring housing blocks, so tried to come up with something a bit different.

The main thing I wanted was to have a block where the random walkers have to walk *through* roadblocks (on the final, destination part of their walk) - instead of having a nice, neat (and boring) perfect circle for them to walk around.

So here's a basic block:























Legend

The roadblocks at the bottom of the block force the walkers up the block, where they round the top and come down the other side. When they finish the "random" part of their walk they head for home - going through the lower roadblocks and providing coverage to the houses at the bottom.

Not all walkers will do a full circuit on every walk - but at least 1 out of 4 walks should be all the way around, which is usually enough.

You can throw in a bandstand or pavilion without much trouble - because the walkers will ignore it enough of the time. (I also ended up swapping the Firehouse and Engineer for the Dentist and Apothecary once adjacent industrial blocks were providing fire & damage protection to the lower houses)

On Baki I tried a few levels of housing up to Stately Manors (13) and with a bit of tweaking (different orientations allow different layouts) it can be as solid as any enclosed loop block. (Be prepared to muck around with overlays to get it going though).

There's probably very few practical uses for this block - I just like making things unnecessarily complicated

You can use it to create a perfect grid city though - lay out a grid system with the roadblocks repeated, have at least every third one as housing, and you've got a controlled-walker grid city with 4-way intersections.

4 x 17 blocks work for Ordinary Cottages
5 x 15/16 blocks (as above) work for Common Residences
6 x 15 works for Fancy Residences and Manors
I haven't tried Estates yet

[This message has been edited by gazzaj (edited 10-26-2009 @ 06:16 PM).]

Hi Gazzaj, welcoe to the forums.

Your block is an interesting idea, there have been designs like it that I have seen, the idea of forcing walkers round in a specific direction is not new, although not really dicussed. I think I remember seeing a similar design of forcing walkers round one way in Max's Waset but I'm not certain.

Just acouple of points though:

Quoted from Gazzaj:

Not all walkers will do a full circuit on every walk - but at least 1 out of 4 walks should be all the way around, which is usually enough.

Which difficulty are you playing on, because at higher difficulties having walkers circling only once in four could lead to dramatic problems with housing devolving or buildings not getting sufficient coverage etc. Also, I'm not sure whether the housing on the indide of the block would have sufficient desirability to evolve to fancy residences, again higher difficulties would require you to rethink your design abit.

Quoted from Gazzaj:

Up to Baki but got bored of constantly laying out perfect (but unrealistic) concentric ring housing blocks

Quoted from Gazzaj:

You can use it to create a perfect grid city though

So, do you like 'perfect' designs or not?

Effectively your block is a circular block (using the term 'loop block' would be more correct) but with many more connections to the rest of the city. I think that having as many connections into you block as it does have (eight in total) could cause difficulties and, most important of all, reduces the amoung of housing and desirabilty boosters each block can contain.

[This message has been edited by Cantique (edited 10-30-2009 @ 06:50 AM).]

Hi Cantique, cheers for the reply!

Quoted from Cantique:

Which difficulty are you playing on, because at higher difficulties having walkers circling only once in four could lead to dramatic problems with housing devolving or buildings not getting sufficient coverage etc. Also, I'm not sure whether the housing on the indide of the block would have sufficient desirability to evolve to fancy residences, again higher difficulties would require you to rethink your design abit.

Playing on Hard. Yep, there are definitely problems with walkers occassionally not passing houses, which meant having to relocate a couple of buildings. But it seems to work for *most* places and once it's stable, it stays stable (just finished Hetepsenusret in 620 months and had 3 of these blocks going for over 50 years).

Desirability on the inside of the block is fine on Hard with a single row of gardens (and all roads plaza'ed) and a few shrines for Common Residences, other Residences work with a row of medium statues down the middle. Obviously keeping granaries etc a fair distance away, using schools and libraries etc. I'm sure Very Hard would be different.

Quoted from Cantique:

So, do you like 'perfect' designs or not?

Ha! Touche. I actually like it to be as "random" as possible, so like terrain limitations (On with several different islands was probably my favourite mission).

After thinking about it a bit more, there's not really any situation where this block would give you anything other than unnecessary headaches. :-)

Not to be deterred by mere practicality though I came up with Mark II: (sorry about this gap, I can't figure out why the HTML is doing it..)






































Legend

It's 1 water carrier, 2 firehouses, 2 temples, 2 tax collectors, 1 courthouse, 1 apothecary, 1 physician and 1 mortuary working on 4 blocks of common residences. Each block needs its own bazaars. Used this on Hetepsenusret with Culture 80 needed so I threw in a lot of schools and libraries - so I'm not sure if you'd need one or two for the whole block.

The idea is that the "central" services will send out a walker down each of the four directions in turn. When it gets to the roadblock it either turns around and comes back, or goes through the roadblock back home.

It (sort of) works with a single firehouse on Hard, as long as you don't mind your huts catching fire every now and then. Also works with a single Architect's Post in the middle, as long as you don't want any shrines.

Theoretically you should be able to get 90-odd Common Residences (7200 people) served (just) by a single water carrier. I used the block on Hetepsenusret and was only up to 67 Common Residences by the end, but there's no reason why it wouldn't have kept working with more.

What's the point? Well, the water, fire, temples, courthouses, apoth & physician for four individual blocks would need 200 workers, and this does the job with 70, for a 130 worker saving - which definitely helped with employment in the endgame. The expense is having a rigid layout and all your workers in the same place.

Quoted from gazzaj:

Theoretically you should be able to get 90-odd Common Residences (7200 people) served (just) by a single water carrier.

The "Hammanat" Pharaolympic event was a contest to have the most people served by the single water carrier on the starting map. The winning entries used a "windmill" block somewhat like yours. Mini-maps for the better designs are in the Competition Corner thread Hammanat-Results.

(Not too long after that, we found a technique, "long walks" (or "forced walks"), which could serve even more people from a single water carrier.)

Quoted from gazzaj:

It (sort of) works with a single firehouse on Hard, as long as you don't mind your huts catching fire every now and then.

On Hard difficulty, I'd expect a single firehouse would allow a variety of buildings (not just huts) to catch fire fairly often. StephAmon studied windmill blocks and used them in an interesting "family history" Waset, described in Windmill quad blocks. He mentioned having problems with a pair of firehouses, which (unless he was very lucky) would take different amounts of time to complete the cycle of 4 walks and therefore eventually be walking close together, so (unless he intervened) many buildings would have a long time between passes by a fire marshal. (I'd expect the same problem with tax collectors, although losing tax registration may not be as much of a disaster as a fire.)

By the way, a hut has less fire risk than any other house poorer than elegant residence of the same size (under the same conditions). A cottage has worse fire risk than any other house (under the same conditions).

Quoted from gazzaj:

The idea is that the "central" services will send out a walker down each of the four directions in turn.

If I didn't make a mistake, without any other roads nearby, your block will only work as advertised (providing coverage for common residences anywhere) if north is down-right. If north is up-left or up-right then the magistrate (and physician) will not go out the left wing. If north is down-left then neither priest will go out the right wing. (However, if north is anything other than up-left, the embalmer will not go anywhere except the down wing--did you have another roadblock beside the mortuary?) If there are other roads nearby then walker behavior could be different.

[This message has been edited by Brugle (edited 11-17-2009 @ 12:27 PM).]

Cool, I figured this would be nothing new! I'll have to look up forced walks, I haven't seen that anywhere yet.

Quoted from Brugle:

If I didn't make a mistake, ...

You didn't. North is top left, the physician misses the NW wing and the embalmer misses most of the SW and the last bit of the NE. Together they cover the whole blocks though which is fine for Common Residences (could have used 2 physicians instead but the Mortuary was needed for Cultural Rating).

Having another look I had used a second courthouse, so obviously the magistrate was missing one wing.

Taxes were a mix of 91-125 debens/year at 9% so some of them are missing about 30%.

Quoted from Brugle:

On Hard difficulty, I'd expect a single firehouse would allow a variety of buildings (not just huts) to catch fire fairly often.

Yep. It's a bit of a nightmare even with the two central ones in sync. I didn't check to see if the firehouses were different from my original plan and it turns out I added a few more during the game. So... skimping on fire protection is probably not realistic.

Interesting point on housing vulnerability to fire - I had assumed that higher levels would be less vulnerable.


Anyway, seeing as this has all been done before I might have a look at some other people's ones (from years ago!) as I'm sure they're far more polished than mine. 20,000+ people off a single water carrier is pretty amazing.