Good point. Agreed. Usally, I wouldn't stop at that point, either. I was in a scenario where I had to import linen (not even flax), so in practice, they were capped at Spacious Residence. I had just noticed while playing that several of them were being held back by linen, so I checked to see if I could jigger them all around a bit to make them all go. I wouldn't bother to build a block like that -- aesthetically, its ugly, and practically speaking, very tough to build ("OK, count over three squares, put in a shrine, move up one, put in a shrine, then a garden, then a block of 8 houses, then... AAAAHHHH!")
Interesting stuff about the Altar. I did not know that.
Taking your advice, I set about creating a block which satisfies my requirement, and evolves to Fancy. (OK, I didn't quite satisfy my requirements -- I'm 16 people over perfect music stages, but slightly over 2 booths short of perfect.) I'm tempted to replace one of the center SYs with a booth/juggler school/booth -- either that or just slide the bandstand back, add a house, and add another bandstand, fireman and juggler booth, kind of similar to the previous design.
The other criterion I set upon myself was that it had to allow the labor seekers to walk next to the houses, and be fault tolerant about putting SYs right across the street, i.e., the 55 desirability must be on the inside, with a "worst case" SY, so orientation doesn't matter. (If the SY is on the NW or NE side, the inner tile just has more desirability than necessary.) And just to make it slightly tougher, I wanted to be able to place the granaries anywhere on the road in on the left side of the development so to make sure, I developed it with granaries, since SYs can't reach the inner house tile, regardless of orientation. In play, of course, some of those would be SYs.
Oh, and I wanted to incorporate some Brugle Storage Yards, and the VAIA(?) variant. And I included what I was talking about with the roadblocked industry loops. The other thing I wanted the option for was just a long road about 25 tiles long with a work camp and a fireman at one end that tees onto the side of the block. (Replacing one of the industry loops, I mean.) Anyway, I haven't playtested it but everything seems to be in order, so far as I can tell. Any suggestions?
LegendNP, VAIA. That Excel spreadsheet generates glyphs so easily, and I've now incorporated a tiny macro into my text editor to change "tiles/" to "strategy/tiles/" and strip out extra CR-LF pairs, so it literally took longer to explain why it was no problem than it took to repair.[This message has been edited by Thorfin (edited 03-11-2006 @ 07:16 PM).]