I have discussed the mechanics and functions, strategies and logistics details in the game in this guide.
Transport, Roads and Walking Range
Most buildings in Tlatoani need road access to function properly, and have range limits on how far they can go to deliver goods and services or obtain what they need from other buildings. If you hover over a building, a preview of that building’s access to the road-network will be displayed:
- Little green dot: can deliver goods or services there
- Little yellow dot: can obtain goods/essentials there
- Little blue dot: the building’s own entrance
Most of your citizens will have jobs working at specific buildings. Workers living in housing will travel any distance to get to work, but bear in mind that long commutes are inefficient and will limit housing development- the Trip Time overlay can help to keep tabs on this.
The workers at some buildings can act at unlimited range:
- Mason Yards and Goldsmiths can help with construction at any distance
- Hunters will hunt at any distance, and deliver to granaries anywhere
- Soldiers at the Barracks can be ordered to maneuver anywhere on the map
- Traders will lead caravans to buy or sell goods to and from other cities
Finally, storage venues (like porter yards, granaries, etc.) will deliver to and from other storage venues over any distance. They will only deliver to non-storage facilities if they are within the usual road-access range.
Construction
Mason Yards are your primary construction facility, and need to be supplied with clay, timber and stone in order to perform their duties effectively. The porters at storage facilities can also help with construction projects, but will only do so locally, so it’s best to have mason yards spread at intervals across your city.
Note that you can mark terrain features such as trees and rocky outcrops to be razed, and a portion of their raw materials will be salvaged- this can be useful in a pinch where you lack construction materials.
When placing buildings, take care not to wall in your workers by mistake, or order construction in inaccessible areas!
Services
Service venues, such as your civil-service, entertainment, health-related and religious facilities, have a limited service-capacity, so as your population grows within a given housing bloc you are likely to need more of them.
Many service buildings, such as shrines, provide supervision to other industries or service buildings, so it may be worth placing them with some thought to synergize well with other sectors of development.
Mason Yards can also patrol local buildings to reduce their risk of fire and cost of maintenance, and Well Dippers also help with fire control, so it’s worth paying particular attention to their placement.
Finally, don’t forget about your Collectors! They can gather tax and Gold from business and industry, as well as your housing areas. This is a key source of revenue for larger settlements.
Storage Logistics
Storage facilities include Trading Posts, Porter Yards, Porter Stops, and Granaries. As mentioned, they can deliver goods to and from each other over any distance, which makes their placement particularly important for ensuring the stability of larger cities (make sure your storage facilities are within range of each other for best efficiency).
How they behave is defined by their storage orders for a given good:
- Getting facilities will actively fetch the goods in question, not just locally, but also from other storage facilities. They will still deliver the goods as needed to local industries, markets or service-venues that consume it.
- Accepting facilities will passively store the specified good if it’s produced locally, and make it available for ‘get’ orders by other storage facilities as well as still delivering as needed to local industries, markets or service-venues.
- Balancing facilities will switch between ‘getting’ and ‘accepting’ behaviors depending on whether more or less than half the stock-limit of the good is present. For example, a granary set to ‘balance’ maize with a stock limit of 20 will fetch maize from other storage sites if less than 10 loads are currently stored, and passively accept it otherwise.
Industrial areas should generally have a porter yard or trading post nearby to store and distribute finished goods or secure raw materials.
Markets also usually benefit from a porter yard to obtain consumer products such as pottery, cloth, furniture and pulque.
Farming areas should have granaries strategically situated in easy range of the surrounding farm sheds, to ensure efficient and prompt delivery, and granaries in turn should be close enough to markets to ensure that food is smoothly distributed.
Porter yards and even trading posts can in principle be used for the same purpose, but granaries store more food in case of famine and minimize spoilage, so they’re generally preferred for larger settlements.
Trees, Crops and Farmland
Crops need to be planted within a certain range of farm sheds, and there is also a limit to the total number of fields a given shed can tend to. Fields will always be assigned to the closest shed within range. Hovering over a farm shed will highlight the fields that building has been assigned for tending.
Most crops can be planted and harvested in the same year without a great deal of preparation, but some crops, like Fruit, Willow and Cacao trees, grow faster when spaced apart from other trees and take years to fully mature. Planting them in rows or small islands is usually the best way to cultivate them.
Some crops benefit from having canals built within range while crops like Maguey require dry land, not near water or canals, though they can be farmed on fertile lands.
Other Raw Materials
The workers at your Sawyers and Stone Quarries need direct access to forest and rocky outcrops in order to harvest and process their raw materials, and when hovered will highlight the terrain features they are ‘tending’ to, in a manner reminiscent of farms.
In contrast, Clay Pits only need to be placed near water, and Obsidian Mines only need to be placed near rocks- they do not need to claim specific terrain features.
Water System
Providing clean water from your cisterns and aqueducts is needed for the most advanced forms of housing to develop. To build a working aqueduct system you will need:
- A fresh-water spring (this is not available on every map. looks like a rock with a small water spring) This must be connected to an initial cistern at the source.
- Another cistern at the endpoint where you need the water, and an aqueduct to connect the two.
- Stone roads to provide plumbing access and connect the cistern to your water-related service buildings, such as the Well Dipper and Sauna. This will allow them to upgrade and improve their services. The House of Healing also needs plumbing access to operate. Cisterns have a range of 15 tiles.
How Symmetry Works
Certain buildings of religious or ceremonial importance benefit from a symmetric layout of other structures around them. A city with a good symmetry score will please the Gods more easily.
If you open the Symmetry information-overlay, or simply hover over possible placement sites for a building that demands symmetry, such as a plaza or shrine, the overall symmetry score and tiles which contribute to good or bad symmetry will be previewed. To go into detail:
- For each cardinal direction/axis, the symmetry routine draws a line through the middle of the structure out to some distance (e.g, 20 tiles for bigger temples)
- The routine then checks whether the tiles on each side of that line, out to some distance, resemble each other (e.g, blocked/hindered/empty, same type of structure. There’s also a bonus for ambience, and the weight drops off with distance.)
- The routine then picks the direction with the best symmetry score and blends that partially (about 1/3) with the symmetry score for other directions. This is the final symmetry-value.
Non Production Goods
There are some goods available in the game that don’t currently have a dedicated production building:
- Amate, salt, fish and jade are only available through imports.
- Feathers are produced by Hunter Lodges as a side-effect of butchering birds (e.g, quail and quetzal.)
- Gold in the form of axe-monies are gathered by Collectors, which also supply gold to your Goldsmiths.
City Planning Strategy
Tlatoani is not Pharaoh or Caesar, and features relatively adaptable citizen AI, so insulated ‘walker loop’ residential or industrial blocks are not as essential as they would be in older games where citizen activities tend to be more constrained. Your city can develop organically, with plenty of offshoot roads and intersections to speed up travel, but bear in mind that keeping travel distances reasonable, leaving room for new services, and catering to symmetry still incentivizes certain patterns of urban development.
You should try to strike a balance between planning and improvisation- have a broad idea of where you plan to place your farming outposts, artisan neighborhoods, defensive fortifications, temple complexes and swanky noble estates, but leave enough space for the fine details to be resolved as the city grows.
If you start a random map- or when starting out in general- it’s a good idea to take a look at the world-info pane or empire map right away and take stock of who your trading partners are, what goods could be imported and what you will have to produce locally for yourself. Tenochtitlan buys and sells everything, but you won’t get the best prices in the capital!
Keep an eye out for potential invasion-points as well! Military invasions are currently disabled by default, but if you turn them on (in the settings menu)… watch out
