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aWizardOfManyColors
New Member
1. INTRODUCTION
This is an edited down version of an old guide which was written sometime before the Halflings chapter was added. After many years of experience I can confirm that the Spiral is very effective in the first 8 chapters of the game. Once you hit Woodelves, when culture buildings require road connections for mana production, it arguably becomes even more effective (and that's when the roads actually start to look like spirals). Whether you're a beginner or intermediate player looking for ways to produce more goods, supplies and coins, or you're a top player looking to maximize your number of buildings to climb the rankings, this guide is worth reading.
The premise for this guide is that as long as your streets offer less culture than your buildings, you should want to minimize the number of street tiles in your city by maximizing the use of each street tile.
2. BASIC GUIDELINES
These are very general, and not specific to the Spiral Design, but they will inevitably lead to some sort of spiral when followed closely.
a) Place the narrow end of buildings facing the street.
b) Avoid junctions; keep your roads long and straight until you hit a corner. Use both sides of the road for buildings.
c) Larger buildings are often good for outside corners, e.g. some Ancient Wonders and the Barracks.
d) Place buildings that don't require road connections at the center of your city.
e) Place your biggest building(s) at the end of the road(s).
f) The Main Hall almost always sits on the edge, and often in a corner.
g) It usually makes sense to expand your city in a perfect square. Sometimes a rectangle is preferable. Avoid expanding very narrowly.
3. PRACTICAL EXAMPLES
Early Game Demo:
Here's my current city on Ceravyn. I'm near the end of the third chapter, having just unlocked my Tier 3 Manufactories. I've just reached a perfect square (5x5) for the first time, but since I know what I'm doing I'm planning to expand southwards into a rectangle (5x8 at least), since the residences as well as most of my boosted manufactories in the next 6-7 chapters are West-East, recquiring my longest streets to go North-South. In-game I mostly use event buildings for culture, but I've replaced them with regular culture buildings for the sake of this demo. I kept the Ferris Wheel and Carting Library in, since they're integral to my build.
As you can see I've gone for a double spiral (well, either road is only a spiral by hypothetical expansion, but still: you can see the start of two spirals if you really try). The big space-savers are my Magic Academy (using 1 tile) and my Barracks (using 2). My two southernmost residences waste a tile of road each, but all the other buildings are placed efficiently. It doesn't look great with the string of small culture buildings along the southern edge, but these will be moved or replaced as I expand southward very shortly. Since I don't have many Wonders yet, I've used a 3x3 culture building as well as my 2x3 Builders' Hut as corner fillers. You will often have to make compromises as your city continuously grows.
Late Game Demo:
I picked an arbitrary top player's city. I didn't want to spend hours on it, so my demo isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. However, the benefits are plain to see.
Original City:
The Result:
We managed to turn 91 street tiles into empty tiles. And we "defragmented" the empty tiles so that they're easier to fill with more Guest Race buildings, Fellowship Adventure production or just more residences, manufactories and workshops.
I didn't check exactly which of their event buildings needed road connections, but if I made any mistakes that's a small detail and irrelevant to the guide. The general principles are what's important.
4. CLOSING WORDS
In both of my examples I went for a "double spiral" (although one of the "spirals" was always just a straight road). In a perfect world, a single road (or a single spiral) is the most efficient because the Main Hall is then only in contact with a single street tile. However, road ends are very useful as well - either at the cost of an extra Main Hall road connection or at the cost of a T-junction. It's a give and take situation. However the point remains that a single road (without junctions) is theoretically the most efficient use of space, assuming that all the buildings fit nicely around it.
You should note that using such a space-efficient way of building your city also comes at the cost of flexibility. While your city is going to produce more than others of the same size, it's a high maintenance style of play. You'll have to do major redesigns very often as your buildings change dimensions, often once or twice per chapter. But if you enjoy puzzles, that's really just a bonus.
Thanks for reading, I hope this guide can be useful to you.
And you raise a valid point about building types/clusters; my demonstration was whipped together quite hastily just to provide an image of larger scale than my own city could provide.