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    Your Elvenar Team

Better use of space

Nite1

New Member
My city is badly organized, has too many roads, and the buildings are somewhat randomly placed. I need help fixing that.
 

Zoof

Well-Known Member
I'd started playing around with your city's layout before realizing I needed to go to sleep, like ASAP. Here's your city so far. I kinda put some of the buildings off to the side because I kinda burned out right at the start. You can go play around with it as you like here at this link.

Right off the bat, you should consider demolishing every culture building that's more than a chapter out of date, and rely on your Magic Academy to pull you up. That'll give you a little bit of breathing room for you to work with. After that, teleport out your armories if you need more work space; as long as your troop training queues are full before you remove them, losing the armories won't affect production at all. Just put them back before you start queuing up new batches.

I see that you're on chapter 6, but I don't know how far you've progressed yet. Once you've researched Dwarven Style Residential Buildings, they actually become smaller and easier to fit into your city. Arrange them in rows facing the mountains in order to have the greatest road to building ratio there. You may need to spend some diamonds to upgrade all those Magic Residences up to that magic number. (Actually, even if you haven't researched that thing, you can do that upgrade now. It's one of those things that unlocks at the start of the chapter)

Sorry for the not-so-helpful post. I really did want to help you do some arranging bits, but ... well. It's time for sleep and I really needed to have gone to sleep a while ago >.>
 

Moho

Chef
I'd started playing around with your city's layout before realizing I needed to go to sleep, like ASAP.
I want to thank you on behalf of Nite1. Nite1 and I belong to the same fellowship in Arendyll. I was surprised to find out Nite's city is in the same chapter as mine. I have decided to go really slowly through the chapters, but my city is a Tournament and Spire machine whereas Nite's city is running through difficulties. My advice was that problems should be identified and tackled properly as soon as possible, and I've always throught the Forum is a good place to get practical help and helpful ideas. Of course everyone will make their own decision, but something must be done when one's city is going through prolonged trouble or else the game will turn into a chore. Seriously, it should not be a chore. I felt I was the king of the world when I entered Chapter 5.

I see a lot of good advice in Zoof's post. It all makes sense and if followed adequately I am sure Nite's city will become a jewel. Nite1, be confident your city will become a real citadel if you apply the right counsel adequately. :)
 

Zoof

Well-Known Member
Okay. I attempted to rearrange your city but the need to delete all those inefficient culture items first really put a damper on that. I ended up getting this far before realizing that you actually need culture to do these things >.>

1655816742849.png


Yeah, this here is when I realized I screwed up:
1655816767335.png


And there was no easy way of getting around that aside from advising to grab and deploy only the 2x2 (and smaller) culture stuff from Magic Academy and deploy as needed, and I'm not about to tell you to lose a bunch of manufactories and then sell off the residences to help recover your overstrained culture budget just to backpedal because that was counter to the original (unstated) objective.

I specify 2x2 and smaller culture items because they're far easier to squeeze into gaps and arrange in a grid pattern if needed than most of the larger things, though only 2x2 and larger can be "polished" by your neighbors for a culture bonus.

So yeah, I had a whole writeup with a bunch of screenshots showing the progress and then culture happened. Boo.

More work needed.

---

EDIT: One more thing I noticed about the city last night but edited out before posting (because it sounded harsh and abrasive and I wasn't going to subject people to my brand of sleep-deprived awfulness) was that I noticed a bunch of low-leveled evolving buildings. You can save a chunk of space by removing the ones that have no artifacts spent on them. In your case, Fire Phoenix and Brown Bear. I'm a little more hesitant to tell you to get rid of Echoes of the Forgotten, Twilight Phoenix, and Witch's Hut, since those have had some amount of artifacts put into them. For their size, though, they're not doing you many favors. I'd put them into cold storage and reuse their space for high efficiency culture items. SUBEDIT2: ("cold storage" in this case means the use of the Teleport spell. When you teleport an item to inventory, their Evolution rank is preserved)

It might be a bit harsh, but it's my belief that an evolving building isn't worth putting into your city (with some exceptions based on utility. Polar Bear being one of those) until you can immediately evolve it to level 10 via the use of 9 artifacts. The minor amount of pop/culture versus their relatively large size hurts too much.

That being said, you should only leave them in if you absolutely cannot live without their effects.
 
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shynner

Active Member
@Nite1 Do you have any transportation spells? If so, you can transport some of your larger bldgs to give yourself some 'wiggle room' to rearrange your city, making sure to leave room for the bldgs that have been transported in order to return them after the 'rearrange' is completed.

Here is a link to your city... https://tinyurl.com/2p98bxjh

On a PC, the 'save/load' icon on the lower right of the page will take you to 4 tabs. You can save your work by clicking on the 'link' tab to create and copy a link of your progress. Then just open and copy/paste in separate tab, then save the bookmark to pick up where you left off. You will have to repeat that process every time you want to save any changes. Hope this helps.
 

Zoof

Well-Known Member
Okay. Let me try this again. This time with all in-place movements with your city as it was when retrieved from the link in @shynner 's post. Which can get very difficult if you're doing this on the browser due to not being able to see all the spots. Trying this (EDIT: Doing the actual move) on mobile is actually a little easier since the app version of the game lets you hide buildings, which allows you to see all the small gaps you otherwise wouldn't have been able to. The first thing I did was to move what was possible downrange to free up space on the upper edge. I then made it a point to move the Magic Academy to the other edge of the map.

1655832601067.png


Assuming you're going to spend the diamonds to finish upgrading those Magic Residences, with just the remaining space and without deleting anything (no, not even roads. Even checked the before-and-after coverage to verify this. Deleting the roads in the interim will make things much easier), I managed to slide a lot of stuff around to arrive at this city configuration.

1655833905133.png


Spent some time to consolidate all the workshops to one side of the map and moved the armories to the other. As you can see, the optimized setup removed the need for a bit over 40 road tiles, many of which were shuffled to the center. As you ascend chapter 6, you should be able to rearrange some of the culture items to make the houses grow downwards and the workshops (should you choose to go that route) grow towards the right. Though this'll mean that your Dwarven settlement would need to be placed in the middle of the map if you choose to do no other changes, but at least this'll give you some growing room.

EDIT: I think some careful thought would need to go towards how and where to move your marble manufactories once the residences start growing downward. The gems manufactories have some buffer due to the (movable) culture items sandwiched between the bottommost gems manufactory and the adjacent silk manufactory. I also made an effort to move like-typed items towards each other for better spatial grouping

EDIT2: Ok. It should be fine to delete as many roads as you need to. Only 280 culture is coming from the 11 cobbled roads you have, so you won't go culture-negative if you do (which would make it hard to upgrade Magic Residences if done out of order). Were all the necessary roads simple paths (cheap and easy to make), you'd gain ~1100 culture from just that move. Changing them all to cobbled roads makes that +2520 culture instead. Going full fancy with ornate roads nets you nearly 4k culture. The possibilities are great
 
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iamthouth

Tetris Master
@Nite1 I could find this example, keeping all your existing buildings, but saving on roads. Delete some lvl 1 roads first to make space to move the buildings around in game, as lvl 1 roads can be rebuilt for free. 70 roads saved. I left room so you can upgrade the remaining gems, and add more buildings as needed. @Zoof 's layout is also good, as is the advice to upgrade culture buildings.
Nite1_20220622.jpg
 

Zoof

Well-Known Member
@iamthouth I was [TODAY] years old when I learned that buildings can be highlighted based on road connection requirements.
I'm feeling a bit silly about how I used to do it: Open another tab, check out the building's stats in ElvenArchitect's building search and memorize whether or not that particular thing needed a road connection or not. And do a LOT of hovering over buildings.
 

iamthouth

Tetris Master
@iamthouth I was [TODAY] years old when I learned that buildings can be highlighted based on road connection requirements.
I'm feeling a bit silly about how I used to do it: Open another tab, check out the building's stats in ElvenArchitect's building search and memorize whether or not that particular thing needed a road connection or not. And do a LOT of hovering over buildings.
Yes, it is very useful to be able to toggle between them. You would have seen culture, population, mana, seeds and set bulidings too as options. I wish there was Orcs and expiring buildings too, and a chapter view on the map for all the culture, but alas, I've learnt to be happy with what we get.

And just for others who may wonder where to see it, in ElvenArchitect, click settings bottom of screen, and select your highlight.

When clicking report bottom of screen, it appears on the right of the screen as seen in our screenshots in the posts above, and you can click further on the reports to get lists of all the buildings providing say population, or mana, or culture etc, and also what chapter they are from.
image_2022-06-23_190421308.png
image_2022-06-23_190555182.png
 

ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
Looks like a lot of great layouts. Here's mine.


Advantages: Improved use of space, all things consolidated and organized by type of building for easier admin and finding.

Improvements/avoidance of loss
Start Pop 551 end 551
Start Culture 317 end 2,224
Start contiguous space: 76 end 195 (gain of over 4 expansions, all in one place)
Removed: 41 streets
Removed 107 squares of unneeded culture.

Step 1: upgrade your roads to Blossom Streets ASAP. This is over 9K of initial culture gain.
Step 2: Arrange things as shown.
Step 3: Remove excess streets and culture only buildings (except those tucked away here and there in non-contiguous space).

Discussion:

For me the amount of usable space and ease of admin are key. By putting all the AW's together, all the mfr's in groups, all the armories and everything else in groups I can organize each group to use a minimum of space, and then put them into the city. It isn't perfect all the time but usually 95% of the time the same type of buildings are in a group and that just makes it all easier to keep even.

The only real problem you have here is that many of your same type buildings are at various levels of development. I do find keeping them at the same level and raising them systematically helps keep things organized.

Others have given a lot more advice and almost all of it is great.

AJ
 

Zoof

Well-Known Member
Looks like a lot of great layouts. Here's mine.


Advantages: Improved use of space, all things consolidated and organized by type of building for easier admin and finding.

Improvements/avoidance of loss
Start Pop 551 end 551
Start Culture 317 end 2,224
Start contiguous space: 76 end 195 (gain of over 4 expansions, all in one place)
Removed: 41 streets
Removed 107 squares of unneeded culture.

Step 1: upgrade your roads to Blossom Streets ASAP. This is over 9K of initial culture gain.
Step 2: Arrange things as shown.
Step 3: Remove excess streets and culture only buildings (except those tucked away here and there in non-contiguous space).

Discussion:

For me the amount of usable space and ease of admin are key. By putting all the AW's together, all the mfr's in groups, all the armories and everything else in groups I can organize each group to use a minimum of space, and then put them into the city. It isn't perfect all the time but usually 95% of the time the same type of buildings are in a group and that just makes it all easier to keep even.

The only real problem you have here is that many of your same type buildings are at various levels of development. I do find keeping them at the same level and raising them systematically helps keep things organized.

Others have given a lot more advice and almost all of it is great.

AJ
The layout looks clean indeed, though it might be a bit of work to upgrade those residences and retain efficiency, which Nite1 should be quite close to getting. Also somewhat nitpicky: They're near the start of chapter 6; it'll be a whole chapter and a half before they'll have access to Blossom Streets. The best street they'll have access to this and most of next month (at least, without PPing it all the way) is Ornate Street. Which when applied to their existing city, still improves culture dramatically (by over 5k).

Arranging those AWs in that manner, tho. That's a stroke of genius.
 

ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
The layout looks clean indeed, though it might be a bit of work to upgrade those residences and retain efficiency, which Nite1 should be quite close to getting. Also somewhat nitpicky: They're near the start of chapter 6; it'll be a whole chapter and a half before they'll have access to Blossom Streets. The best street they'll have access to this and most of next month (at least, without PPing it all the way) is Ornate Street. Which when applied to their existing city, still improves culture dramatically (by over 5k).

Arranging those AWs in that manner, tho. That's a stroke of genius.
I counted the streets in the pull down macro in elvenarchitect.com but have to admit I may have miss-counted and set them to upgrade to chapter 7 streets. The difference is that he would have to add a few of the 1x1 culture only buildings I took out. He has about 2,000k of culture in them so it should still keep him culture positive while taking a minimum of space. I do wish the chapters would always have numbers and names together. For the first couple years I thought dwarves were number 5 and counted that way.

In any case, you are right about expanding the residences with my layout. But, on the other hand trying to do chapter 6 with the little space he has would make it take a lot longer. The more space will give him room to get the chapter done and, then, upgrade the residences. In the end I think it would come out about the same either way.

AJ
 
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