Thanks, I looked it up. I've seen videos of him before. Mostly of Emperor though, for some reason.
His 3 row block was mostly to get more people in one block, I understand. It doesn't really control the merging though, he waits until they get to grand insulae (as I suspected) (edit: wait, I should've said large insulae. I didn't think - large insulae of course are also always 2x2) basically to maximize efficiency. You still end up with medium insulae of course at the front row, that's unavoidable with this design. It is quite efficient though as it can fit a lot of people, it has a good control of random walkers and it looks pretty as well.
(Edit as I'm watching the video some more: not as efficient as I thought apparently; he's constantly demolishing and rebuilding as the houses keep devolving and then evolving again in the wrong direction. That would be a problem however you try to control direction of evolution though: you'd better be very sure the block is stable before you do that, or you keep busy rebuilding. Zack's experiment is certainly interesting. And I still stand by my remark that it looks very pretty :-) I'm curious how your 3-deep block fares, though.)
Did you manage to win the mission yet at Mediolanum? I always enjoy the Mediolanum a lot, I think after Valentia it's the map I've re-played the most. Together with Londinium, I think. Have you been able to remedy the problem that was caused by your fountains losing pipe access, or did you have to go back? I understand you weren't in a habit of making many saves; I hope you didn't have to start all over again?
[This message has been edited by Heleen (edited 12-21-2018 @ 01:40 PM).]