For a long time, I have wanted to build a windmill-style city inspired by StephAmon's Windmill Waset. So lately I've been playing around with some windmill designs and thinking of ways to harden them for Very Hard difficulty. In todays post, I'm going to talk about one way to make the pavilions a bit more consistent.
In my testing, pavilions proved to be specially challenging. If we put a single pavilion in the core intersection, as in StephAmon's forum post, the windmill panes may not always get dancer service. The main issue is that the quadrambles of the pavilion are shared between the 3 entertainer types, which means that the the dancers don't go around the windmill panes in a clockwise order, like other service providers do.
An unorthodox way to avoid this is to give up on dancer service and rely on a senet house instead, because senet players behave more predictably. It's not as crazy as it sounds if we consider that the senet house is shared between up to 4 windmill panes.
A less extreme alternative for dancer service is to put a pavilion in each windmill pane. It even may be a good idea for city-wide entertainment coverage. However, when doing this I noticed a second problem: One out of every 4 times, the pavilion sends the performer towards the center of the windmill instead of towards the houses. If we add to this the propensity that pavilions have to being out of service and for teleporting performers into odd places, every once in a while a windmill pane may find itself without full entertainment coverage.
But I managed to find one cool workaround! With clever placement of disconnected roads, it is possible to force the pavilion performers to loop around the windmill pane every single time. Consider the following example. For clarity, I only show the dance stage, which is where all the entertainers start their walks from, and as usual north is towards the up-left. The south-east routing centers for the pavilion, fire house and architect are marked by statues; they encounter a disconnected road that is close by the intersection. This causes them to emit a "default walk" towards the north-east (looping around the houses) instead of a grounded walk towards the center to the windmill. We can also do the same for the north-east and south-west quadrambles, if necessary. However, in those cases we'd have to be careful to put the disconnected roads outside the no-road zone of the windmill.
Legend
One downside of this technique is that it requires very precise placement of the roads and intersections. Finding a way to fit a windmill into the landscape is already difficult and this trick makes it even more so. Another caveat is that, because we rely on default walks, the different windmill panes are not symmetrical. A configuration that works for one windmill pane cannot be merely rotated for the other 3 directions. Some directions are particularly challenging, so you may need to get creative.
The disconnected road tiles also place a few restrictions on where you can build buildings in the center of the windmill. However, in my experience there is still plenty of room to put the more important buildings. Also, we can hide the weird disconnected roads if we build a Festival Plaza on top of them.
Legend
In my testing, pavilions proved to be specially challenging. If we put a single pavilion in the core intersection, as in StephAmon's forum post, the windmill panes may not always get dancer service. The main issue is that the quadrambles of the pavilion are shared between the 3 entertainer types, which means that the the dancers don't go around the windmill panes in a clockwise order, like other service providers do.
An unorthodox way to avoid this is to give up on dancer service and rely on a senet house instead, because senet players behave more predictably. It's not as crazy as it sounds if we consider that the senet house is shared between up to 4 windmill panes.
A less extreme alternative for dancer service is to put a pavilion in each windmill pane. It even may be a good idea for city-wide entertainment coverage. However, when doing this I noticed a second problem: One out of every 4 times, the pavilion sends the performer towards the center of the windmill instead of towards the houses. If we add to this the propensity that pavilions have to being out of service and for teleporting performers into odd places, every once in a while a windmill pane may find itself without full entertainment coverage.
But I managed to find one cool workaround! With clever placement of disconnected roads, it is possible to force the pavilion performers to loop around the windmill pane every single time. Consider the following example. For clarity, I only show the dance stage, which is where all the entertainers start their walks from, and as usual north is towards the up-left. The south-east routing centers for the pavilion, fire house and architect are marked by statues; they encounter a disconnected road that is close by the intersection. This causes them to emit a "default walk" towards the north-east (looping around the houses) instead of a grounded walk towards the center to the windmill. We can also do the same for the north-east and south-west quadrambles, if necessary. However, in those cases we'd have to be careful to put the disconnected roads outside the no-road zone of the windmill.
One downside of this technique is that it requires very precise placement of the roads and intersections. Finding a way to fit a windmill into the landscape is already difficult and this trick makes it even more so. Another caveat is that, because we rely on default walks, the different windmill panes are not symmetrical. A configuration that works for one windmill pane cannot be merely rotated for the other 3 directions. Some directions are particularly challenging, so you may need to get creative.
The disconnected road tiles also place a few restrictions on where you can build buildings in the center of the windmill. However, in my experience there is still plenty of room to put the more important buildings. Also, we can hide the weird disconnected roads if we build a Festival Plaza on top of them.
[This message has been edited by smog (edited 11-30-2021 @ 12:49 PM).]