Hi and welcome to Heaven Rache

Elite houses don't need fountain access. They have their own water supply.

Elite Residences don't need Fountains (they drink lots of Wine instead).

Elite Residences also don't need Infirmaries... apparently all the Wine keeps them from getting sick.

What Elite Residences do need is plenty of the basics (Food, Fleece, Olive Oil), as well as at least 3 Culture / Science (all 4 if you want them to fully evolve), plus plenty of Armor and Wine.

As for Appeal... a little goes a long way. Commerative Monuments (Victory, Conquest, Happiness, etc.) go a long way. Everybody has their own style... I prefer to use plenty of Gazebos on either side, with a Boulevard up the middle. Unfortunately, no matter how you cut it, Elite Residences are going to take up more space than just a Common Housing block will... but in the end it's worth it.

Wolfie.

Can I still achieve perfect hygiene without infirmaries in the elite housing blocks though?

No but why would you need to?? They don't catch plagues?

This one is for SenetEr:

I'm currently using your 71 House Single Service Block (#41) but have found I have problems with the Infirmary. The health walker only does the bottom part of the figure-8 when the top-left corner of the block faces North. It seems that when exiting the cross-road and re-entering the Infirmary, the walker turns to the top first and then enters diagonally down (what would be a westerly direction on my map). I managed to fix this by putting a bench there, but this has forced a very small intersection at the 1-block exit to the Infirmary. Is there any other way to fix this, as I'm afraid the intersection will cause problems for my other walkers over time?

I'm not competent with the glyph tool so here it goes in ascii.
This is the way you designed it:
  HHAR
  HHAR <- Health walker returns from here
IIIIAR <- Health walker is expected to return here
IIIIBR
IIIIBR
IIIIBR
  HHBR
  HHAR
The way I fixed it:
  HHAR
  HHBR
IIIIRR <- Health walker now exits and returns here
IIIIBR
IIIIBR
IIIIBR
  HHBR
  HHAR
H - House, I - Infirmary, R - Road, A - Avenue, B - Bench

P.S. Hi to all, my first post here as I used to play Diablo II and posted on those forums. My wife got 'Great Empires II' for her birthday and we've both been hooked ever since.

I've been playing around with some of the larger common layouts, most particularly Dodecahedron's 56 house block on a single set of services, and I've run into practical problems.

The first and most annoying is that dissent seems to arise very rapidly, almost beyond control. I don't know why, since using the SenetEr/Grumpus block in the same location, the same timeframe before food is available, doesn't produce this.

The second is that it's extremely difficult to keep the block supplied with fleece and oil, to keep it from devolving -- even food is a problem, and the difficulty seems to really be the maximum inflow possible. If supply of any is tight, forget it.

Has anyone gotten these large layouts to work in a real adventure, and if so, how? I'm afraid to even try that 71 house monster...

Been a while since I've been here (I actually got reminded of my screen name by browsing these forums .... it's been a while

Anyway, with SenetEr's 8x32 MCB (post #2 of My Favourite Housing Blocks), are the elite houses taxed? Unless the taxmen can ignore roadblocks in the pursuit of untaxed patri... noblemen, I can't see how the taxman gets around.

I suppose the simple solution is to move the taxman to one of the two houses immediately adjacent to the Elite boulevard, shift the left fountain to where the taxman was, then put another house in where the fountain was.

The other-other option is to run a boulevard behind the houses, with a taxman on the end and gazebos beyond that ... would that work?

Never mind ..... I'm an idiot

Took me a month to clue into it (the fast way would have been to just build the block, but that'd be too easy ) ... once the taxman pops out of the TO and heads out, no matter which way he goes, he'll eventually land up at the far side of the block, from which the fastest way home is past the elite houses .... I bow to SenetEr's block-making skills

I used Modified Da Caesar's Elite Housing Block for my elite's, but I've noticed that the houses down the street from the agora aren't receiving the stadium access. I've watched the competitors, and they go around the long way, then just disappear shortly before getting to a small amount of houses. This makes it impossible for me to have all Estates. Help please!

Competitors take the shortest route to the stadium, which is probably what's happening to you. You may need to add another gymnasium on that side of the block to service those houses.

The block is a square. The stadium is in the upper right hand corner, the gym in the upper left. The competitor goes down, then left, then up so that he's halfway up the the left hand side.
Picture:

G------------S
*======X
*======X
X======X
X======X
XXXXXXXXX

Legend:
G is the Gymnasium
S is the Stadium
- is the agora and other buildings, that don't neeed access
X is the route that the competitors take, that are estates and doing just fine
* is the houses that don't get the competitor, because he just kinda disapears
= is just to fill in the spaces

[This message has been edited by taysel (edited 11-02-2005 @ 06:07 AM).]

Taysel, it's a little hard to say without seeing the actual block layout, but I'm guessing that you may have a distance problem.

It may be that the competitors simply can't reach the houses which aren't developing. They leave the stadium as random walkers, turn left, go around the block, but reach their distance limit before completing the circuit, so they turn around and go back to the stadium. I think the ones that turn right stop when they get to the gym.

(When they leave from the gym to go to the stadium, they are destination walkers, so they take the straight route along the agoras to get to the stadium.)

I haven't used this block at all, so I don't know for sure. I usually use Caesar Allan/SenetEr's elite block, which needs two gyms to assure coverage.

This is my first post, but I've used about ten block designs in the past week, mostly just as a test. I have been playing Zeus (off and on) for a few years, so I'm not new to the game...
Recently i felt the urge to see Nero Would's 54 townhouse block in action. So I built it, with the top left corner as north, and it doesn't work. The idea is amazing, but the waterbearers, healers, and agora deliverymen think different.
Yhe waterbearers/healers go about half-way down that first side, then they turn around. Don't get me wrong, they still enter and exit from the spots they are supposed to, but they just turn around and take the other road back to the enterance spot. So the entire left side and the lower right houses dont have access to healers or water. same happens with the agora delivery guy, he goes about to the end then stops... and returns to the agora. I'm sure the problem is the fact that they go the wrong way first, they go towards the gym instead of toward the houses. Is there any way to make them at least stop going the wrong way?

*edit* DOH! I forgot the avenue that should connect the road to the theatre/infirmary. with the agora, i just moved it back and moved the tax office forward and it started working fine.

[This message has been edited by sertrbl (edited 08-04-2006 @ 12:24 PM).]

Hi sertrbl and welcome to Zeus Heaven.

Glad you were able to get the block working.

Thanks! I was worried this thread was abandoned, since the last post was in 2005 and all.
Oh well, looking forward to new and innovating housing blocks!

I finally discovered this game a couple of weeks ago and boy am I hooked.

I am pretty late to the game, but I posted my first block to the Favorite Blocks thread, post 159. It is mostly academic since I've found that it's much too unstable to actually use. It is a single service 85 89 91 townhouse block, inspired in large part by SenetEr's amazing 71 townhouse block. I have tested, and with gazebos lining the outside of the block all 91 will evolve to townhouses on Olympian.

The optimizer in me is really disappointed with how unstable these designs are. Everything will be going just fine, until one of the walkers decides to go down the same side a few times in a row and then half my houses start devolving. Fires are also frequent at higher difficulty levels.

In response to suggestions by DMZ XVII,
(1) I can't run a boulevard on the left, top, or bottom in this design because it makes the path just barely too long for the tax officer or culture walker to make it around - they decide to turn back instead. Believe me, I wanted to because it would have allowed me to squeeze in an extra house or two.

(2) The agora walker isn't the limiting factor, it is the tax officer/culture walker. Placing them along a stub road with the agora was the best way I could figure out to have this many walkers entering the block in the correct two squares - everyone has to come into the loop on one of the two squares directly in the middle, or else they start walking down one side only. If you can find a better way to solve this, though, that would be awesome.

DMZ XVII's comment did get me thinking about whether I could move the agora to shorten the stub the tax officer/culture walker walks down and eke in an extra row. I moved it off the stub and managed to get it from 85 to 89 townhouses.

I also didn't realize that some corner houses can be off the main road and still receive services, as long as they have access to some road. I added in the extra 2 houses to get 91.

Another observation that makes this an even more intriguing block is that the only reason a road connection to the outside is needed is for philosophers, since the agora can use its back door. Then by replacing one of the corner houses with a college, we can get rid of the access road and create a completely closed circuit single service 90 townhouse block. I ran into some problems getting the back door to work, but solved that here.

[This message has been edited by oivey (edited 04-21-2009 @ 11:08 PM).]

This is about DMZ's common block on page 7 of the favorite housing blocks:

What is the weird 2x2 glyph below his blank space at the top where the infirmary and water is supposed to go?
I didn't find this glyph anywhere in the legend and I'm sure it has something to do with getting the healer and water people down to the housing blocks below because otherwise they're blocked by the roadblocks he has at the top of the houses and no water or healers can make it down.

Anyone help me on this?

EDIT >>

Nevermind - they're towers. But still I can't get the healers and water carriers to go down to the houses with his design. The roadblocks prevent it yet dragon's post didn't seem to show this problem. Any ideas?

[This message has been edited by mercerjt (edited 07-27-2009 @ 03:35 PM).]

All these different blocks seem very interesting to me. For what its worth, when I used to play Zeus as much as I play Caesar III now, I would always just use a 22x6 design (for plebs), whereby I would have 2 columns of 10 houses and then on the surrounding loop would place all the cultural and maintenance buildings and, if any gaps occurred, would fill them in with more houses. All the walkers would make a full lap with each round they made, apart from water carriers (so I would usually just have two per block). Desirability would be easily increased by avenues and a flower garden or two if needs be.

Maybe I relied too much on the tutorial and could have been more creative. Anyway, my ten cents on the matter.

The agora, podium and fountain have positive appeal and don't take up space like the theater, so they are worth putting inside the loop.

The water bearer emerges from the earliest "hour" measured clockwise from 1 o'clock, but it returns to the road square north of its northern point (12-o'clock), so careful placement can drive it all of the way around a 10x2 house loop. You can even add a stripe of columns down the middle of those two rows of houses, and the water will still make it around.

Painted with avenues and having larger service buildings hanging off the corners, such a block can have 42 townhouses and a road emerging from each corner.

If your city has a stadium, then a common block needs only two cultures. Usually that means no theater is needed.

Um, let me cut and paste some info on taxes and appeal from my notes. I hope it makes sense. Might scramble some housing block designers.

base build rate = (build type mult) if (build.0x86== 0) else ((building type mult) * 110%) (integer, round down)
total build rate = base build rate * people * 2 * (4 if visited by a blessed tax office)
TL = tax level (3 = very low, 6 = low, 9=normal, 12 = high, 15 = very high)
appeal mult =
if (appeal > 80) 10 * TL + 30
if (appeal == 61 to 80) 10 * TL + 25
if (appeal == 41 to 60) 10 * TL + 20
if (appeal == 21 to 40) 10 * TL + 15
if (appeal == 11 to 20) 10 * TL + 10
if (appeal == 1 to 10) 10 * TL
if (appeal <= 0 ) 0

diff rate = 5(always, regardless of difficulty level)
tax collected = appeal mult * total build rate * diff rate
possible tax collected is calculated before appeal mult

if appeal on fountain square < 30, effect labor % divided by 2, so produces walkers more slowly.
ranges from -100 to 100
+10 appeal near water

Appeal for buildings is the appeal of the highest appeal square. So short range decorations won't have much effect on elite housing because the effects area of the ones on 1 side won't overlap with the ones on the other.

First time here, but been playing Zeus a long time. I thought I would share my 58 townhouse block. The joy of this block is no distribution center is needed, and they fit together like a puzzle, so you can plop one next to the other, as long as you have room.


Legend

[This message has been edited by RTiger (edited 06-13-2012 @ 11:35 PM).]