Avoid forcing people to use a single road in the densest parts of the city, or it will always be clogged with traffic. Create double-wide roads or provide alternate routes to alleviate traffic snarls.

Keep the number of road intersections in your city to a minimum, so that you can better predict the route that walking citizens will take.

Spend some time in the early assignments watching Overlay reports to learn how working citizens spread access to their buildings. Later assignments usually require your city layout to be very efficient, and you're more likely to succeed if you learn how citizens walk their routes in the earlier, more forgiving assignments.

Do not place bridges where workers need to cross them repeatedly in the course of their workday – placing farms on the far bank of a river and granaries on the near, or putting a clay pit on one side and workshops on the other, are bad ideas. If you put a raw materials industry on the far side of the river, put its workshops and warehouses there, too, so that only commuters and caravans have to cross the bridge. Better still, plan some housing near your industrial area so that workers need not commute across the bridge.

Whenever you build a new bridge, remember that you are creating a breach in the natural defense that the river offers. Invaders will use the bridge to reach your city center. Do not build bridges that you cannot defend.

Turn fires and collapsed buildings into an opportunity for urban renewal. Instead of simply rebuilding whatever was destroyed, re-evaluate the neighborhood that suffered damage. Would you be better off with a wider road or a new garden where that housing burned? Sometimes less density yields better quality.

Develop a habit of building prefectures, engineer's posts and other essential services at regular intervals between residential areas. Providing regular“service strips” like this ensures that your patrols will be evenly spaced, and that you won't forget to build some crucial structure .

Try to build reservoirs exactly the right distance apart so that their pipe networks just meet, without overlapping. To view a reservoir's coverage, choose the Water Overlay.

Only housing benefits from fountain access, so don't lay out a grid of fountains to provide blanket coverage. Just place fountains to supply residential areas . Overlapping coverage by multiple fountains gives no additional benefit to a particular house.