Housing blocks

[MOK]

I'm starting my second run, and trying out some experimentation with how I arrange housing. Previously, I was sketching together quick rectangles of longhouses with thick walls between each, each exiting to the streets. But this time, I'm trying out different concepts, to try to mix it up a bit. I haven't really come to any conclusions about it yet.

The last thing I put together was a big apartment complex style building with rooms that exit to internal corridors, and no walls except the outside. It makes for some pretty weird and inconsistent Isolation values. Probably gonna tear it down and try again, but I haven't yet seen that it's a big problem or not.

So mainly, I'm interested in what some people pursue with their approach to housing. I haven't yet seen much reason to vary the original style of housing blocks, but I'm still trying stuff out anyways.

And, less importantly, I'm interested in how much isolation matters when there's no noise, and why I get such wildly varied values as I experiment with the walls.

Thanks all

[Cian]

I've found that doing longhouses jammed together facing opposite directions with only the outer edges walled works well. I base my entire city layout on this, with streets 12 tiles apart and all my production buildings are 10x5 or so depending on the type and space requirements with a door on each end so that people can walk through them to the next street and occasional roads between the buildings.

So like 10 longhouses all facing north and jammed tightly together with no walls or space between. 10 more longhouses all facing south and jammed tightly up against the ones facing north. This entire complex has a 1 wide wall around it. It houses 200 people before upgrades (360 after upgrades). The little thin interior "walls" (which don't take up a space) keep the homes separate so they can only exit from their own front door and you have to keep them all road connected.

This gives an isolation of 100% despite them all being stuck together. You can't mix them with non-housing buildings though, if you stick a production area in the middle without walls it will wreck the isolation.

[binxmuldoon123]

I just used blocks of longhouses, anything else only gets used to even out space.

[7FOUR]

I'm thinking about taking your approach for a human settlement. An indoor apartment complex sounds kind of fun to try, and might be a good aesthetic fit for humans.

I like to design my housing based on which race I'm playing with. In my first v65 Garthimi city, I visualized them living haphazardly in crags wherever is most convenient, nesting like dauber wasps in small apartments built along or inside the walls of their mountain and around infrastructure or production buildings. Dedicated stretches of housing were apartments arranged in a semi-honeycomb patterns, with a hatchery and basic services between them. Not really space efficient, optimally designed, or even attractive, but it worked conceptually and was otherwise practical.

My current v66 Cretonian settlement has housing more inspired by their love of nature and communal tendencies. I have them living in blocks of conjoined buildings to create big lodges, primarily longhouses with houses and apartments added where conducive to rounding out the shape of the complex or simply introducing variety, surrounding a central road or square containing markets, basic services, and decorations. Here's a couple screenshots, one simply of a town center and the other including a smaller center with some auxiliary lodges nearby.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3241911518
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3241915654

The design freedom in this game is by far one of my favorite features. Kinda wish there were more housing shapes though.

[MOK]

Looks pretty good, Seven Four. I did something kinda similar with my Cretonian neighborhood in my first run, and would definitely keep moving toward what you're doing.
In contrast, the Dondorian majority were all stuck in soviet style longhouse bricks, exactly as Cian had described above. Whether aboveground or underground. It kinda sucked, but there was no clear reason to do anything else. And it was a heck of a lot quicker to sketch in. Getting away from that Dondorian block is what I'm aiming for, but with the hope of finding something that's not overwhelmingly inefficient.

I too would like for some more varied housing mechanics. Roundness is a pretty great start, actually. I like that mechanic. But for the races that don't like roundness, there could be something extra, which would be nice. Or a variation on roundness, so it's more particular to one race.

There is one mechanic that lends toward avoiding the rectangle grids currently: If you want plebs to feed into the main highways instead of moving through the other parts of a grid, you gotta build cul-de-sacs. If not cul-de-sacs, then some other way of blocking off all routing options other than the highway. Although this mechanic is barely relevant since upgraded roads do so little to help transit.

Still, the megablock ideas I'm working on right now are more like C-shaped, with services in the middle, and the center being the only entrance to the building.

Anyone have an idea of how Isolation gets calculated, or what it precisely it affects, other than noise?

[Chaotic Woofer]

I've spent far to much time in regards to planning out districts in this game. It depends on the race, Garth's allow for the most spaghetti chef design where you can just jam anything everywhere and completely lose track of efficiency. Efficiency and logistics are king for every other race. Isolation helps reduce noise and degradation (so sayith the game/wiki). Environment fulfillment isn't really a primary concern compared to service accessibly so regardless of race (besides Garth's because they're just happy to have anything really) I build housing around a central service district. Size can vary but the last dimensions I was playing with was 87x87 outer square (3 by 3 roads being a standard), 67x67 outer middle square, 41x41 inner middle square and finally a 25x25 central square. Central square is the biggest fight pit. Next ring is every service minus one or two, and outer ring is all housing. iirc the city block housed something like 700 provided all the houses were upgraded and due to distance everyone had good access to all their services. Pastures/Farms/Industrial/Etc districts their own blocks around this residential block. Due to houses having a forced blueprint I more or less just plan around that. If houses could be built in a similar manner as every other building I'd get more creative with the aesthetics, until then I'll just focus on being utilitarian and efficient.

[Watereaters]

You have to put houses near workplaces so your plebians actually use them

[MOK]

Originally posted by Chaotic Woofer:

Isolation helps reduce noise and degradation (so sayith the game/wiki).

Yeah I read that, but it's not clear what degradation really means. They consume chairs and stuff faster, maybe? Or it strictly relates to abandoned rooms? And I thought I saw some satisfaction modulation based on isolation, but I'm just not sure.

[Chaotic Woofer]

Originally posted by MOK:

Originally posted by Chaotic Woofer:

Isolation helps reduce noise and degradation (so sayith the game/wiki).

Yeah I read that, but it's not clear what degradation really means. They consume chairs and stuff faster, maybe? Or it strictly relates to abandoned rooms? And I thought I saw some satisfaction modulation based on isolation, but I'm just not sure.

I'd assume the bit about degradation is for buildings in general. Houses don't have degradation so the only point of isolation would be reducing noise. Houses can share walls with no issue at all, for example when you increase the blueprint size with Q. While there is no *wall* structure between the houses, the housing plot itself generates it's own paper thin wall while still resulting in 100% isolation. There is no fulfillment value related to isolation, so it's purely to reduce noise and prevent accelerated structure degradation. This *maybe* taken into account at some point regarding the urbanization fulfillment value in the future but currently to my knowledge this value isn't implemented.

[MOK]

I just caught the in-game tooltip for isolation. It claims that furniture in homes degrade more quickly, and that rooms require more maintenance.

What's unclear from it's wording is three things:
1) whether that's the same thing - meaning just more janitor work using an occasional component,
2) or whether those are separate things - where residents consume stuff faster in addition to the extra janitor work & components,
3) and the scale of impact.

It's enough to spook me away from the apartment complexes I've been messing with though. To some extent you can put houses next to each other without tanking the isolation. But I haven't gotten a sense of how to ride the line, how much wiggle room there is, how to roughly calculate it.

[Cian]

Just sticking them all together with walls around the group gives 100% isolation, so I would definitely focus on keeping isolation at 100%. I have blocks of 20x2 long houses with no isolation loss. Like so:

XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX

With the top row facing north and the bottom row facing south and walls around the whole block and no walls in between them. 100% isolation and you can stretch it as far as you want, but you want to break it up a little to allow travel past it since your people can't pass through it from north to south.

Could do it East-West too.

In this way you can make housing sections with amenities and jobs in between, like say a row of housing and a few rows of something else and another row of housing.

[MOK]

Yes, its effective. It's what I used to do, and seems to be most popular. As mentioned though, this thread is about alternative layouts.

It's interesting what does and does not alter isolation though. And it'd be good to somehow figure out the extent of impact that low isolation creates, since the in-game tooltip suggests it's about more than just noise. But it seems quite difficult to measure. At the moment, the only thing that really pushes us to keep isolation at 100% is the assumption that less is particularly bad in some way. But we don't actually know. Either that, or a reflexive aversion to numbers that are not 100%.

[Chaotic Woofer]

Isolation is another value we really don't have the raw data on to make a judgement outside the game saying it's bad. I never noticed the tool tip stating houses would use more furniture, if that statement is true regardless of the increase to furniture usage I'd avoid low isolation like the plague. In theory testing isolation shouldn't be too difficult using developer mode so I'll give it a go to get an idea what the rough percentage is.

[Chaotic Woofer]

Originally posted by Chaotic Woofer:

Isolation is another value we really don't have the raw data on to make a judgement outside the game saying it's bad. I never noticed the tool tip stating houses would use more furniture, if that statement is true regardless of the increase to furniture usage I'd avoid low isolation like the plague. In theory testing isolation shouldn't be too difficult using developer mode so I'll give it a go to get an idea what the rough percentage is.

Test concluded. So basic start in temperate climate. Only buildings throne, basic warehouse, well, speaker, hearth, market and a single mud long house. Spawned in food and wood. With 10 human plebs each set to use 5 wood as furniture with the stockpiled wood totaling 1251. The only difference between the control and test being the walls of the mud long house were removed resulting in 4% isolation. Start of both tests: 18:17 Day 1 of Summer, Year 1 of the First Age. Fast forward on both tests to end at 02:34 Day 1 of Spring Year 3 of First Age. The control test resulted in 178 wood consumed for furniture, the low isolation test resulted in 190 wood consumed for furniture. So in conclusion the 100% isolated house resulted in consuming 14% of the wood, where as the 4% isolated house resulted in consuming 15% of the wood. While a 1% difference isn't exactly a huge difference, this is 1% of resources sent to the void simply because "This house has no walls.". In other words, ya I'd always make sure my houses always have 100% isolation because until you're in end game receiving regular resource taxes from regions, every single resource is valuable and mitigating resource loss is the name of the game

[MOK]

That's pretty fascinating. I'm not so familiar with the game to use those tools, so thanks a ton!

So if those ballpark numbers basically hold up, it looks like housing items consume Up to, and Under ~7%.... Assuming all housing items spoil rate is modulated evenly. Which perhaps they don't.

But it's enough of a look at the magnitude that another conclusion I'd draw beyond yours is that if there is a little bit of inconsistent isolation loss here and there, don't sweat it. 85% isolation for example might translate into perhaps about 1% more items spoiled in that one household. The amount of resources lost to tearing a section of a building down and fixing that problem could easily eclipse the isolation's impact.

Thanks again, @Chaotic Woofer, this heavily informs how I'll experiment going forward.

[Lantantan]

I'd like to see more examples of housing blocks that actually look nice please? Share more screenshots!