LoU Tweak & City Planners

Credits to Stonehammer

Every city you build should have a specific purpose and an efficient design.  There are several tools available to help you.

The most important thing you can do is ask questions!  Ask me, ask the leaders or ask any officers.  We are here to help.

You need to install LOU Tweak.  I can't stress this enough. It gives you access to the city optimizer and your share string.  Go to the scripts forum and install that puppy.

Once installed and you refresh, make sure you are in the city window.  Under the Building Queue there is a little P and a little L button.  The L is for lay out.  Click that and you have 3 sharestring options, you can also open your current city in either city planner 1 or city planner 2.

Click the Open in Flash City Planner 2 and you will see what your city looks like in the flash city planner 2.  Here is were you will design your layout.

Once you have designed your layout, click the export button in the designer and copy the long url back into LOU.  On the City Layout box where you opened the city planner from, now click the overlay layout tab, past the long link, and click apply layout, and ok.

Now you will see icons where your buildings should go to match your design.

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To move your city into the planner without LOU Tweak, click the city notes, then click city planner, and confirm.  However you need tweak if you wish to overlay your design over your city map.

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To convert any sharestring from city planner 1 to city planner 2, or back, replace the following in the url address;


http://www.lou-fcp.co.uk/map.php?map= in city planner 1
http://city.louopt.com/?map= in city planner 2

Everything after the "="is the same.
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[b]Instructions and Tips[/b]

1. You should have LoU Tweak installed.  Go to your city and click the L button.  Select City Planner 2 to open your city in the planner at [url]http://louopt.com/[/url].  You may also copy the link or sharestring and paste it into the Import/Export box.

2. Click Lock all Resources if you do not want to demo resource nodes.  You can usually increase production by doing this, but it takes time in the game and can be a pain in the planner.

3. Input the number of buildings to add at once in the Add box.  You will have to add warehouses, marketplaces, etc. manually.  You can add 10 at a time or 90; it's up to you.

4. If you do not select Lock all Resources, add many buildings at once, and do not remove buildings and then add more, otherwise you'll lose resource nodes in the process.  Use the Undo button instead.

5. Adjust the weights based on which resources you wish to produce in the city and which resource nodes are available and can be used to produce the most.

5a. Townhouses do not produce much gold.  Many good players raid and attack for gold instead.  Set the weight for gold to 0 to raid and/or build gold cities separately.

5b. Farms produce twice as much food compared to other resource buildings.  A weight of 0.5 food, which is default, is equal to 1.0 for stone or wood.  Food should not be produced in offensive military castles, as a result, most players end up needing a lot more food as the game progresses to feed their troops.  Food is often built separately for this reason.  Set the weight to 0 to build food separately.

5c. Many good players build cities with all types of resources, exluding gold, including some extra food cities.  Other good players build cities with only one or two types of resources based on the nodes provided.  Over many cities, you will likely sacrifice a little production by producing only one type of resource in each city, but it can be easier to gauge your production and possibly to manage your empire.

5d. Small changes to the weights can have a big impact.  Start small and use Undo or Remove and Add buildings.

6. If you do lock resources, you can sometimes improve production by removing some buildings and then adding more.

7. Hold the shift key to see which buildings are producing the least and consider changing.

8. Replace resource buildings with cottages if they will produce as much or more.
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Resource Layout Guide:

[url]https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11PAhCWqY-kQWdOLpS3qCm_YR8gA0tH7BLx2fB6t2T3A/edit#slide=id.g21d69ec_0_78[/url]

Military Layout Guide:

[url]https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18oGlkm6XZL5ZS2bnvUOmnxqpNelQ0iS05zy9qu8VBA0/edit#slide=id.g2186eba_0_0[/url]

Thanks to Qwao. Some changes to note: mage tower = moonglow and the author clearly didn't mean to castle a hub. Other than that, the basic points to this are good.