KingJMobile
Active Member
Many of you will have learned that buildings should be placed in a straight line to have the most road-efficient city, touching a neat stretch of road by their shorter side. However, this is only sometimes the most efficient way of doing so, depending on the size of your buildings in your city. Recently, many 1x1 and 2x2 buildings have come into the meta of FoE, and this means that you can achieve much greater road efficiency by creating more road ends to hang your bigger buildings – buildings with both side lengths 4 tiles or longer – on 1 road.
Through trial and error, I have discovered what I call a “staircase strategy” to be able to do this. It is fairly difficult to implement, but it yields a repeated pattern that looks like a staircase, hence its name. It provides a very unique, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing way of combining a range of building sizes into your city design.
I strongly recommend implementing this design if:
General Structure Repeated Unit
In between the roads and the Eagle Mountains, illustrated above, you can see a 2x3 gap, which is where the 1x1s and 2x2 will fit in nicely. As you can expect, the design is also stackable (see my city plan below).
There is also another variant that might be useful: the 1-step variant. This only uses 1x1s and 4xn buildings, in the ratio of 3:1. The 1-step variant yields 140% (7/5) efficiency, but it does require a lot of 1x1s and ignores 2x2s.
You can see that by placing the Eagle Mountains on the incorrect edge, you will use more roads and create a 2x4 gap, which is not ideal.
Through trial and error, I have discovered what I call a “staircase strategy” to be able to do this. It is fairly difficult to implement, but it yields a repeated pattern that looks like a staircase, hence its name. It provides a very unique, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing way of combining a range of building sizes into your city design.
Step 1: Eligibility
Before you begin to install the staircase design, it is important to consider whether your city is compatible with this design. Do not use the staircase design if:- You do not have many 1x1s or large buildings – in other words, most of your buildings have a side length of 2 or 3.
- You do not have enough city space to work with because your road-requiring buildings take up much of your total space.
- The expansions in your city are uneven, or very narrow on one side.
I strongly recommend implementing this design if:
- You have a lot of 1x1s and large buildings.
- You are an endgame player with many of the same or similar themed buildings and with most available expansions unlocked.
Step 2: Choosing the Correct Design
Since most buildings in this game’s meta include 1x1s and 2x2s and 4x5s or 4x6s, I strongly recommend using the 2-step design as illustrated below. This design uses 1x1s, 2x2s, and the big buildings in a 2:1:1 ratio, making it extremely versatile for most cities. This strategy is 133.33% efficient (8 tiles of shorter side used per 6 roads).General Structure Repeated Unit
In between the roads and the Eagle Mountains, illustrated above, you can see a 2x3 gap, which is where the 1x1s and 2x2 will fit in nicely. As you can expect, the design is also stackable (see my city plan below).
There is also another variant that might be useful: the 1-step variant. This only uses 1x1s and 4xn buildings, in the ratio of 3:1. The 1-step variant yields 140% (7/5) efficiency, but it does require a lot of 1x1s and ignores 2x2s.
Don’t do this: the pseudo staircase
You can see that by placing the Eagle Mountains on the incorrect edge, you will use more roads and create a 2x4 gap, which is not ideal.
Some tips when using this strategy
Remember you don’t have to have one massive staircase in your city: it may be better to have a straight path of road beforehand, and then build onto a small staircase design. The staircases are, as I have mentioned, stackable, so it should not be too difficult to jump from a straight road into a staircase.KingJ’s visual layout on Reddit
If you want to see an example of what the Staircase looks like in the city, click on the link below to the Reddit Page (the picture itself is too large to be placed directly in the forum).
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