When I first started playing Caesar 3 and Pharaoh, I had no concept of housing blocks. I just put down my roads in one long strip, threw some housing on either side, and then tried to cadge the required services in as best I could.
It was ugly.
At some point I decided to try and improve my strategy, and to make a long story short, I discovered places such as Heavengames, which lead to the discovery of housing blocks. The rest, as they say, is history.
Recently, I've designed a housing block for Pharaoh that has not only turned out to be incredibly versatile (you can use it for a worker's block of nothing but Ordinary Cottages, or you can use it to make Palatial Estates), but has also proven to be very flexible in a morphological sense (i.e. you can change the shape of the block and still retain most or all of the features of the block). So I thought I'd throw it up for public consumption.
Following the convention that North is to the upper-left portion of the image, here is the Flexi-Block in its undeveloped form: And, for comparison purposes, a shot from "in the wild." I call the end with the "prongs" the "tail." The other end is the "head." The length-wise roads are 20 tiles long, with 4 tiles between them. The purpose of the tail should be obvious: location of entertainment venues. Note that, above the Pavillion, we have a handy spot to place a Firehouse, an Architect, and a Police Station. If we need to, we can also place a Dentist there. And finally, there's a space between the bandstand for an Apothecary if you're playing on a Humid map. The nice thing about this layout is that it handily accounts for the odd location requirements for the entertainment venues and simultaneously accounts for all five of the possible 1x1 service buildings. [This message has been edited by Afterburner (edited 02-04-2002 @ 08:50 AM).]