The City is the main part of the game. You have to construct a variety of building structures to provide citizens, produce resource, and eventually build up an army. The city is composed of a large area of square grids. At the start, the arrangement of the buildings does not seem to matter much, but in the later game, the building area's limits become more constricting, and the player has to choose what type of buildings they should build or remove and how to place the position of buildings in order to maximize the efficiency.
The Reconstruction Mode is likely the simplest way to design/redesign your city layout.
Here are several suggestions that may help you to arrange your buildings:
- Move the Town Hall anywhere except a corner, since it is the hub of the city and all roads must connect to it. When you are required to have 2 laned roads, have your 2 laned roads down one side of your town hall and normal roads down the opposite side.
- Arrange your buildings in columns or rows, and put all buildings with the same width together. For example, all the buildings having (3x3) area should be in the same column or row.
- Also, every building needs to be connected by a road to the Town Hall in order to function. Make your road as straight as possible; the less turns it has, the more efficient it is.
- Decorations don't need to be connected to the road; use them to fill up the leftover empty space.
- Always sell outdated buildings to free up space or to replace them with new and more efficient buildings.
In this example, the buildings are arranged in rows and the buildings with same size are put together, like the 2x3, 3x3 and 4x3.
- You can also use FOE City Builder to automate the whole process https://foe-city-builder.web.app/ Tutorials are available https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPE_VtAUR2CqFHdrvIEdtrQ
"Roads are space" method[]
Another method employed is anything to reduce the number of roads helps.
In the very early stages when you are required to have decorations, not decorative buildings, a positive move is to place decorations in a line behind the town hall. I.e. the town hall is as above, but the first two lines of space (on the top left) are reserved for decorations.
As time goes by and one requires less decorations, one should sell them and move the town hall to the end of the screen. At this point when one considers roads to be taking up valuable real estate, the best method is to employ the above idea, but:
- have one main road down one edge
- all other roads come off of this one like a comb
- place the town hall over a junction
- have the widest buildings on the side
- put the largest buildings in the corners
Try to get two rows of everything in between roads, and try and plan so you can be variable, e.g. have rows of 4, 5 and 6 squares so you can have two rows of houses, or a row of houses and a row of shoemakers (3 squares wide) etc... In the picture you can see the near side has goldmakers (4 wide), then 2 rows of 4 squares wide, and then a 5 wide row before the final 3 wide row.
The town hall above sits over a junction and so removes the need for 9 pieces of road, useful when space is at a premium.
The first method above using a single track is a quality one for small to medium size towns because the edges make up a larger proportion of your land.