City/District orginization help

[CampyBastard]

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to organize my cities to make-sense/look nice. How the rest of you who make nice cities think through it in your head? Should I draw something on paper?

I always end up just slapping stuff down. I get to about 3.5K population and I start to hate looking at my city and restart. I want to stop and be more methodical but I don't really know how to go about it. Anyone have tips or suggestions?

[Haethei]

necessity is the mother of invention. if you cant find a way to enjoy making organic cities, doing some research (your own, and some help from discord maybe) to figure out very efficient layouts is a good way to feel good about what you're building

figure out a plan for logistics for each industry as you unlock them, think long term and make sure everyone has access to everything they need to work with, and efficient routes for getting them to/from storage buildings.

mixing convenient storage, work places, housing and services isnt that hard to do organically and still have a functioning city, but it is quite hard to make them truly efficient. basically work on your skills as a player instead of stressing about making the city look fancy. this will help give you a strong foundation to start being artistic without having problems with the actual functionality

that is just how i like to play the game, though. if you just need artistic inspiration and design ideas you never considered before, try joining the discord and looking through the gallery channel or just paying attention to the chat and see how people play the game over time

[Haethei]

certain races/cities also have problems looking nice. for example, tilapi and cretonian use wooden buildings and natural harmony, but their upgraded services still have fancy cut stone flooring. this is an issue i made my own mod to solve (graphical mod) but im not really ready to release it to public yet, its not implemented for many buildings

if you want a city that is guaranteed to look nice without a ton of effort, i usually prefer humans for that. they have cool cut stone infrastructure, square buildings that you can use the diagonal tool on, no annoying requirements like proximity to fresh water or ugly dirt roads

[Spiffy]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I like to just build 100x100 blocks in a grid with 15 tile wide roads inbetween giving me plenty of room for markets, the odd storage or service building wherever it's needed.
Use the planning tool and go nuts with it til you've got something that pleases you.

[Mdgrim]

My current city originally was fairly organized around one centralized max size auroch pasture. Human housing on the left, Dondorian housing up top in the mountains (where all of the ore resources happened to be), Cretonians on the right, farms + fishing down below. Storage centralized around my original throne room, labs on the bottom left, refining buildings on the bottom right. However after about 1000 pop the organization started to fly out the window, and now at 3k it's all over the place lol (plus the city is taking up about half of the map space)

[failsafe]

Im looking for good idea as well. So far Im trying to balance my city so that it does not spread too much but also delivers some space inside.

Just started building new city, and so far it looks like this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3263511349

Im clustering houses and trying to place most of the services nearby, as well as regular jobs. I still need to place bathhouses, guardhouses and many more things, but these need bit of a progress. So Im just leaving some space here and there. Also, in general Im building almost all my roads 2-block wide, with additional one spare empty block on each side, so that I can add benches, lights, small statues, trees and other stuff later.

At the end of the day it is not a "look" that is important, but logistics. Once city really grows distances are big, and even working chains may stutter. I try to counter this with many warehouses - except one (first) warehouse, I mostly use small or medium size warehouses that store only few goods, maybe except wood and stone, since I add these to storage almost everywhere. Typically I have warehouse for grain, other for stone and cut-stone, another for wood, furniture and charcoral (since I produce furniture and charcoral in same area) and so on.

[wagenricht]

I think it somewhat depends on the race(s) you play. Since i play Garthimi, i build my whole settlement around meat production. Since the meat fields are quite huge, i fill the spaces in between with small streets. Then i add canals for the meat farms and a moat for dread and swimming. As you can see in the top row which i started to build later, i changed the streets that i only need one moat instead of two.
When in between is a mine or i just need more space, i just build one farm less or one more if i don't need the space.
I planned the basic layout on paper and then just go with the flow.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198018823110/screenshot/2485504096000316917/

[Rasho Macuin]

Heres my layout, inspired on historical roman forts:

(Warning: This is a flexible, yet expansive style of layout. This relies heavily on the use of transports, wich is usualy my 3th-4th tech objective.)

I recommend using the planning tool to keep the grid in mind and build it as you need.

1) Draw a square of road with your throneroom in the center.

(Throneroom is rectangular so it will have thinner sides on East and West, but make it square nontheless) I recommend it being 20x20 tiles wide. You can modify this wideness to fit it better to your layout, you will see why later. Delete the road filling it so only the edges of the square remain (only 1 tile)

2) Draw 2 roads from each corner of the square, 1 tile wide, into the 4 cardinals, making 2 paralel roads with 20 tiles separation between. This will efectively cut your city in 4 quarters.

3) Every service (wells, hearths, food stalls, temples, fighting pits, etc) AND warehouses (wich are the only exception allowed) goes BETWEEN the roads, and nothing else is built there. Homes and workplaces are built OUTSIDE the roads. Noisy workplaces are asigned to 1 individual quarter.

4) Now every possible noice is contained in that quarter (the services/warehouses arround it isolate the noice from the adjacent quarters)

5) Services will ALWAYS be between homes and workplaces. Pawns will never backtrack when they go to a service on their way to their home/work and backwards. They always take the most optimal route, no mather wich service they need that day.

6) You will always have space for the next workstation. You will always hace space for the next housing block. You will always have space for a newly researched service. And none will never be on the wrong direction.

7) You can make the main roads turn 90º to turn a quarter into a block, and isolate it from another side, so you can build more housing close to it.

8) You make a network of transports connecting your warehouses through your main road.

[John Moridin]

I'm currently in the process of figuring out a design I like.

Right now, my plan is to create a city of 13x17 blocks with three tiles of space between them for roads.

Inside that block, I can fit two 30-resident longhouses, one 13x17 workshop, two 13x8 workshops, or four 6x7 workshops. Or I can combine two blocks and make a 31x17 workshop.

[Ravensblade]

Originally posted by CampyBastard:

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to organize my cities to make-sense/look nice. How the rest of you who make nice cities think through it in your head? Should I draw something on paper?

I always end up just slapping stuff down. I get to about 3.5K population and I start to hate looking at my city and restart. I want to stop and be more methodical but I don't really know how to go about it. Anyone have tips or suggestions?

Actually, there is nothing preventing you from rebuilding whole city. It takes some time since you need to be careful about what you shift at what moment. But that's all.

I rebuid some parts of my city often, and whole city at least once, when it's get clear what i want to do. At some level you have enough money income to deal with some industries not producing for year and two becouse i want to shift some building 10 squares left.

Unless you play the game many times it's hard to plan everything from the beggining.

And later on your city centre will shift from the starting one, as at the beggining you want to be much closer to food and other basic resources, later you shift to other industries and admin that takes more and more pop as you city grows. And the land where you started is usually great for extending your farms area after fully getting into irrigation.

[CampyBastard]

These are some awesome responses. I ended up creating a 5-wide highway system that goes in the 4 cardinal directions. I put myself in a cold mountain pocket for my donorian city. I used a 5-house-wide block system that had been working well for the beginning. Feels natural and works well. Although, now that I have 1.2K pops I’m going to have to pivot and start knocking down my small production buildings and making big ones.

There’s an interesting thing that has to happens to the city when unlocking new Services and increasing in population. For the human pops: they hate noise so putting their housing far from noisy production makes sense.

But, for the Dondorians, they want that noise. So I guess, on a side note: what do you all do for those guys? I’m considering not using walls underneath mountain workshops(really let that sound pollute), or even putting their homes right on a wall leading into a workshop so their house fills with noise. Thoughts?

[John Moridin]

I have a Humans as my primary race (1k) and Dondorians as my secondary (200). I made a "industry distinct" where all my noisy buildings are and put Dondorians-only houses inside the district.

I put the warehouses and services outside to to make sure Humans only entered if they needed it.

Considering Humans are at 28% noise and Dondorians at at 38% noise, it doesn't seem to be working that well. But I'm not really sure what count as good numbers.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3265135277

If the situation was the opposite Dondorians primary and Human secondary then you could do the opposite. Make a research district for Humans with no noise and have the rest of the city as noisy as possible.

[Ravensblade]

I think for multi race it's best to not build single industry sectors but build small independed sectors. By making something like industrial district as separate thing you ultimately force all your pop to travel around to and from it.

They don't have cars to travel, and spent time traveling and there is no way to cover diffrent preferences for roads, roundess, space etc.

For example i build smiths then housing around it (dednorians) then basic services like markets, wells etc so pop working in smith don't travel to much unless they visit something like temple or arena.

My other industry can be in totally different part of city. For example i have iron smelters on the other side of the city and use transports to effectively transport it to smiths. It's just few pop for transport but all my workers have house and basic services close to each other so they don't spend less time traveling

Of course achieving some higher levels is hard, for example for my dendorians i build houses around noisy industries and make additional "doors" just to let noise out.

My 300 dendorians have something like 60% noise (but some of them don't work in dedicated district. I still see some ways need to improve noise coverage, by changing layouts and opening some spaces. I also made a mistake by opening the smith cluster from several sides so my other pop start using it as shortcut.

[wagenricht]

I haven't played Dondorians yet, but to avoid noise i came up with small squares to have minimal noise.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198018823110/screenshot/2485504278350356747/
I added double walls at 3 sides which will be sealed off and the "entry" are the warehouses that keep only the goods needed and produced. They block the noise from the entries. The 2 field space in between warehouse and production is for lighting and so on.
The one line space in between the carpenter and the tailor i only have because it's Amevias and i want to add a canal there later, which of course is not needed for other races.

Neither the tailor nor the Carpenter are fully staffed atm., but once i expanded the buildings (or probably add another tailor for clothing and a papermaker soon), and they are fully staffed, i expect the noise level to be at around 10%.
At the moment it's 1,3 % with 36 Amevians working there.

EDIT: I think something similiar, but bigger could be done to keep a minor race away from the other races, but of course it's harder for the services and the noise level would be shared somewhat more.

[John Moridin]

Originally posted by Ravensblade:

I think for multi race it's best to not build single industry sectors but build small independed sectors. By making something like industrial district as separate thing you ultimately force all your pop to travel around to and from it.

Yeah, you aren't wrong.

The problem is figuring out the right balance.

It can be useful to have all related crafting building area since they produce and use the same goods. They can share the same warehouse and the same import/export depots. Since the use the same noise cancelling walls, you can just keep extending the walls, you don't have to redesign or build new areas with new noise cancelling walls.

For example, in @wagenricht case, he's got a really constrained area and two huge warehouses for just 2 small crafting workshops. That's really impractical on a large scale.