Alright
@Norman Da Gear
After you posted the world you were in, I found what your city looks like, and yes, we have a lot to learn about good city organization.
One of the tell-tale signs of a poorly optimized city design, is a lot of dead space, messily circled in red:
So this dead space shows that you aren't using the best out of the land given to you.
You also placed your expansions (squared in red)rather poorly. You should always work your expansions in a neat square, or rectangle, especially in the beginning of this game, in order to make city layouts more efficient and easier since it's more viable to cut out the dead space through a rectangle than a blob with jutting arms.
So you have decorations, which are not really good in providing happiness since they give less when polished, and eat up the valuable aid actions from your friends, neighbors, and guild members for their smaller size. I would get rid of them and replace them with cultural buildings.
So you have one long stretch of road running on one side of the town hall, and your town hall is hiked up to the northern edge. This is rather inefficient because you are wasting the other side of the road connected to the town hall, when it can be connected to other buildings. Good road placement (as will be seen later) requires that roads stick out from the town hall with only 1 or 2 road pieces of the road actually touching the sides of the town.
You also have roads (circled in red) that are bordering the edge of the town, which is a red flag for inefficient city layouts. You are wasting that valuable road segment by having it run on the edge of the town, and only having 1 side touching a building, and the other wasted by touching nothing.
Now this is a very problematic section of roads that are circled in red Your hunter and potteries in between those two rows are connected by two sides of roads, which is inefficient because you've wasted one side of road. Also, you have connected the hunter with the long side of road, which should be connected on the shorter side (as a general rule) to save up space. Your longhouse also breaks this "place roads on the short side" rule too. Also, general advice is that if you have a corner/turn in a street, put a 2x2 on the corner, as that reduces the amount of space wasted from the building covering two sides of street.
You also have stilt houses, and huts, which might produce more coin, but really, you want to stick with only chalets, as chalets provide a lot more population for their space, and while you can get more coins from guild hopping and other sources, you will always need more space, so stick to only houses with the highest population densities so you dedicate more space to production buildings, military buildings, etc.
Also, one last thing I forgot to mention is that you have this big loop, which is inefficient because you're just connecting buildings on two sides in multiple occasions. Avoid doing loops, as long winding roads generally are the better option.
So I did some rearranging with your town on the city planner to give you a general idea of how just how much space you save from optimizing your city layout.
And it looks like with a more efficient city layout just by rearranging what we have here., we have about 4 expansions worth of extra space. How neat is that!
So here are a couple of pointers and general things you can learn just from this layout:
So the most efficient city layouts consist of all sides of the town hall being used to have branched out roads, and each road touches the town hall with only 1 or 2 pieces of road.
Notice how we have 8 buildings (circled in black) in this layout only connected by one piece of road (sections labeled in red), and we have saved up a lot of space as a result.
And we also connected some of our buildings on the short end and saved up road as a result.
And we placed our memorials away from roads and into inconvenient areas because they don't need a road. Later in the game, you don't want decorations, and dead space is best used then to put in watchfires or victory towers.
Hopefully this city layout stuff is beginning to make sense, and feel free to ask more questions if needed.
P.S. You'll need 2 spearfighter barracks and 2 slinger ranges to fight the Iron Age Continent Map.
@xivarmy also provided an excellent guide on city layouts here:
https://forum.us.forgeofempires.com/index.php?threads/a-model-for-evaluating-layouts.24204/