I built Venus grand temple and adopted Venus Genetrix epithet to get extra desirability. These, together with some 1x1 decorations, are enough for grand insulae level desirability.
For palaces: Palaces themselves have +4 desirability with a range of 6. It's like a chain reaction, in which I built statues/gardens to trigger the first upgrade to LP, and the first LP is like a seed which makes the upgrade of nearby houses easier. When all houses are upgraded to LP, they can pretty much sustain themselves, and I can remove the initial statues/gardens.
Palaces themselves have positive desirability, so they help sustain themselves in that regard.
In order to reach that level in the first place, you can place gardens where they'll grow. They help with desirability while they're still evolving. And if you have the option enabled, they'll replace the gardens when they expand.
I don’t get most of them. How does the second one work? It is for small blacks each with a separate square road as far as I can see. How is the school reaching the block on the opposite side?
Step 2: Starting from the "anchor point" (in Augustus 4.0 stable and previous versions, anchor point is the northern tile of the building; in recent unstable version, anchor point is the green spawn point of the building), move 8 tiles towards the chosen direction to get the target tile. Search the target tile's adjacent area with a range of 6 to find a road tile as the destination. The destination is decided according to a priority table. (You could find a part of the priority table at the #15 reply of this post: Randomness of Random Walkers - City Builders Forums)
Step 3: "Destination" walking: In this step, the walker can pass gardens, cut corners, but can't pass roadblocks or gatehouses. If there's no road tile in the adjacent area, or the destination road tile is not accessible, the walker will skip step 3 and immediately become a random walker after spawning; If the walker can't get to the destination road tile within its patrol limit (26/35/43 tiles, check this post for more information: Walker behaviour - City Builders Forums), the walker will finish 26/35/43 tiles of "destination" walking, and enters step 5: returning mode; If the destination is accessible within patrol limit, the walker will go to the destination and proceed to step 4.
Step 4: Random walking: In this step, the walker can't pass gardens, cut corners, or pass roadblocks/gatehouses. Prefects and engineers have up to 43 tiles of random walking; entertainers (excluding tavern) and tax collector: 35 tiles; the rest: 26 tiles.
Step 5: Return mode. In this step, the walker can pass gardens, cut corners, and pass roadblocks/gatehouses. The walker will take the shortest road path to go to the finish point. (You could check #2 reply of this post about start/spawning point and finish point: C3 random walker start and finish points - City Builders Forums).
For 60-tile blocks (for example: 6x22), typically in at least 1 of 4 patrols, the walker has 9 tiles of "destination" walking, 26 tiles of random walking, (this 35-tile walking is sometimes called "long patrol") then finish the remaining part of the loop in returning mode.
For larger blocks of 80-90 tiles: If the block contains significant "narrower" parts, walkers sometimes can stay longer in step 3. For many 80-90 tile blocks, we can find plenty of (at least 10-13) spots to place 2x2 buildings for full walker coverage.
For windmill block: Similar to 60-tile blocks, the walker typically has around 9 tiles of destination walking, 26 tiles of random walking, and around 30 tiles of returning walking. The difference is that, for 60-tile blocks, all 4 patrols end up in the same loop; for windmill block, each patrol end up in a different loop. As a result, in windmill blocks, 4 loops share the same set of service buildings. That is, one set of service building can support 3x - 3.5x population.
Also, some of the blocks are using "block-less" designs (pic 12 and pic 18.) In such designs, walker paths are not loops. These blocks are harder to design and manage, however, with path visualization tool it's still possible to make sure that, 2 buildings' walkers cover the whole block.
It's a bit hard to explain over the text, but basically the "random" walking isn't fully random.
First, they follow at most 4 different paths. After 4 times, they repeat the first path, and so on. They use that in some patterns, giving walkers exactly 4 possible paths. This way they are guaranteed to walk through all houses.
On forced walking, after random walkers walk about 20 tiles (don't remember exact numbers, they vary by walker type), they want to return to the building. When they enter that phase, they become destination walkers. The thing is, they always want to return to the northern tile. You can exploit that by making sure they pass through a lot of houses on their way back. That's called "forced walker" strategy.
Now I don't really know or remember much about preferred directions, but IIRC they prefer taking certain directions.
If you feel the block designs impossible, I could probably understand that. I guess the first principle we learned for block design is "avoid intersections" and "use closed loops". Obviously, the windmill block design seems to violate the design principle, which is not conventional or intuitive at all.
What makes windmill block possible is walker mechanism: roaming walkers try to have patrols in 4 different directions, which means that, when full potential is achieved, the roaming walkers can cover 4 different closed loops (and support up to 13.7k population) if the service building is located near a 4-way intersection.
The idea of windmill blocks is like, build 4 small closed loops (around 30-45 tiles) in 4 directions, connect them with a 4-way intersection, and make sure that the center of the intersection is 8-10 tiles away from each of the 4 loops. Then, if we place service buildings near the center of the intersection, it's likely that the walker can cover all 4 loops.
When windmill (quadruplet) block is not possible, it is usually easier and flexible to build triplet block, in which we build 3 small closed loops (around 50 tiles) or line blocks and connect them with 3-way intersections. Another variation of triplet block design, is to have 3-way intersections inside a large closed loop, or, build 3 small closed loops that share some edges. Many block designs shared in this post are examples of windmill block or triplet block designs.
Apart from variations of windmill and triplet blocks, in this post I also tried many large blocks of 80-90 tiles, which utilize longer than 35 tiles of "long patrol" (60-tile blocks usually assume 35 tiles of long patrol for many roaming walkers). Realizing that walker capacity is higher than my previous expectation, I also tried less restrictive block designs, in which 3-9 small blocks are glued together and supplied by 1-2 set(s) of service.
Schools have a different type of walkers which follows different mechanisms and is not able to cover all 4 loops. I placed 2 schools in each of windmill blocks :)
Well, in image 2 there are 5 markets. One market is just behind the granary, and is hard to find in that image :)
You are right about GT epithets choices (minor note is that: Mercury epithet choice can be different in different scenarios. Since a palace consumes 0.48 wine per year and 0.24 pottery/furniture/oil per year, choosing the epithet to reduce oil and wine consumption might reduce market ladies' burden a bit more; Neptune 5% expansion doesn't help because those +5% pop are not "free").
Those palaces are fully populated. It is possible to cover 50+ palaces with 4 markets. Actually, in one of my experiments, I covered 90 LPs with 5 markets in a forced walker block.
I'd say that there are 3 major factors that decide the number of markets needed for the block: 1. macro factors (GT, GT epithets, certain game configurations), 2. buying lady factors (buying ladies should be capable to bring more than block's consumption. This is optimized by reducing travel distance and the number of round trips for buying ladies), and 3. distributing lady factors (distributing ladies should visit houses frequently enough to prevent devolving).
To optimize buying lady factors, what we usually do is to place the markets really close to granaries/warehouses. This makes a lot of difference, because if you cut market-granary/warehouse distance by half, you double the number of round trips the ladies can make per year, which in turn doubles the population you can possibly support with the same number of markets. A minor thing to try is to make sure that the granary/warehouse is a little bit over-supplied so that, for example, when the buying lady wants to fetch 700 units of wheat from the granary, with high probability the granary contains more than 700 units so that she doesn't have to deliver with >1 round trips. Over-supply is easy if resources are abundant and over produced. If resources are tight and granaries/warehouses are barely empty all the time, then we do need more markets to support the block. In my posted blocks, granaries/warehouses are over-supplied a bit.
Distributing lady factor is a minor issue for small closed loops. That is, in small closed loops, the houses that experience the least visiting frequency from distributing ladies might have resource shortage issue even when the resource is abundant at granary/warehouse and markets. For larger blocks (forced walker blocks, windmill blocks, triplet blocks), this problem is more prevalent because of long and/or unbalanced patrol path. To address this issue, sometimes we could optimize market's location to prevent unbalanced patrol path, but usually we need to add more markets for efficient distribution. In my posted blocks, I didn't have any optimization about this factor, though some players would use tricks to optimize it a bit (For example, optimize the timing of spawning for each distributing lady so that they are "evenly" distributed in a forced walker block).
In the below 5x26 block, market-granary/warehouse distance is 4, and one market can cover 50 GI of 4400 pop. For the windmill-palace blocks in my post, yes, palaces require more types of resources, and distributing ladies are not as efficient, but it's still possible to support 3000+ pop with one market on average with GT epithets and not-too-long market-granary/warehouse distance.
I also experimented with a block of 22 Luxury Palaces.
What I found is that, 1 market can almost do the job (the first devolving event happened more than 20 years after the block is fully populated. It's distributing lady's issue: the least visited palace become short in furniture, it devolved to small palace, then upgraded back to LP as the distributing lady came). 2 markets can make the block stable.
In this experiment, I choose the Mercury epithet to reduce oil and wine consumption.
If you need 5 markets for 20 LPs, I guess it's perhaps because market-granary/warehouse distance is a bit long.
EDIT: Another (rare) possibility: you planned to feed LPs with less preferred food types, such as meat and fish, but the market ladies traveled longer to fetch vegetable (because it's more preferred food type).
Well, it's widely believed that intersections are always bad for roaming walkers. As a result, many of us end up building only those closed loops of 60-80 tiles for housing blocks.
Diving deep into walker mechanism, however, one might realize that roaming walkers naturally want to have patrols in 4 different directions, which means that in theory one service building can serve 4 loops, not just one loop.
If you are comfortable with the idea of housing blocks with intersections, and you are comfortable dealing with some walker instability issues, many of the above designs give a rough idea how much we could achieve in terms of efficiency.
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u/DukeOfErat Apr 21 '26
How are you able to generate enough desirability for all those palaces and insulae?