Anno 117- Best City Layout
Building a good city in Anno 117 means ticking a few boxes. You want to expand in order to accommodate more population, but not to the point of harming your health and fire hazard stats. Ideally, you will keep most things contained in a limited area, too, so you can reap as many bonuses from all buildings you place down.
READ: Anno 117- Best Land Units
Following the excellent blueprint highlighted by SiNKiLLeR in his nearly two-hour long video featuring over 50 tips. Here is how to create Anno 117's best city layout, maximizing building bonuses without skipping on defensive measures.
The Power Of Planning
Anno 117 allows you to plan your city in advance, and that is exactly what we'll do. This means that you can pause your game and plan the entire thing without spending a single resource.
Planning requires you to have unlocked the building you want to plan with, even if you don't have the resources to build it yet. While you can plan Anno 117's best city layout without having unlocked most of the building types, you'll want to at least have access to the Governor Villa blueprint.
So before you get started on this build, unlock the plebeians by playing a new campaign for 5 to 10 mins and once you have unlocked the Governor Villa, let's get planning.
Anno 117 Best City Layout
You need the Governor Villa blueprint to make everything work because you are building your entire city around its area of effect. So the first thing you need to do is go get your Governor Villa, got into planning mode, and find an area on your map in which you can build inside the entire influence circle of the building.
If you are planning on using this layout in multiplayer games, you might have to sacrifice building space in order to keep your Governor Villa safe. You'll be looking for high grounds away from the shores, ideally with a chokepoint as its single point of entry.
Once you've found that spot, place down the planned Governor Villa, press the dirt road, and press your Governor Villa to build a road all around it. Remember that planning mode does not work on roads, so you'll be wasting some coins every time you mess up with a road and have to demolish it.
After that, you'll want to draw dirt roads from all four corners of the Villa that go until the edge of the building's influence circle, like shown in the image above. With that done, we get into the nitty gritty of it.
We'll be planning this entire thing using residences for starters, before replacing some of those with other useful buildings. You'll want to finish a quadrant (doesn't matter which), which you will then copy and paste into the three remaining quadrants by using the copying tool.
You always build two rows of buildings followed by a road. Doing so ensure that the Governor Villa will impact every building with the exception of those that are furthest away at the center due to how much road the influence has to cross, but that's fine.
If you're going for near-perfect symmetry, just copy paste the design to all quadrants (you can copy the roads and the Villa, everything that is stacked will be ignored when pasting), and you're ready to fill in with public service and food.
Completing the absolute min-max build requires you to follow SiNKiLLeR's approach instead, which will factor the later-game Aqueduct right into the foundation of the city.
To make this possible, you'll want to do the exact same thing, but the top and bottom quadrants (or left and right, whatever you prefer) will be placed two tiles further away to allow for double roads all around, like so:
Doing this will allow you to, once you have access to the Aqueduct, destroy one of the double roads to plan for the aqueduct, which will cross right through the middle of the city. For now, just leave it as it is.
If you are in a new save, the only buildings you'll have access to at this point will be the Market, Tavern, and a couple of production buildings. You'll want to place those at the center of every quadrant. The Market and Tavern can be placed in the middle of the third layer of the city, while the production buildings will be left at the second layer. Doing this ensures maximum coverage.
Once you're done with all of that, you are set for a smooth early to mid game, just keep removing residences and replacing them with buildings as you get access to them in the future. Our advice is to build a single quadrant at the start and expand as you get access to more buildings, as you won't need as many residence houses at the start.
Having this circular design not only maximizes effectiveness of building bonuses, it also makes defensive capabilities very easy to achieve. Once you have access to the Wooden Palisades and Gates, you can just surround your entire city with a circular wall sprinkled with a few towers for extra protection.
A finished product will look something like this, which is SiNKiLLeR's completed build (pre-Aqueduct).
READ: Anno 117- Optimized Settings
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