I'm enjoying Nebuchadnezzar but there are some significant mechanical changes from Pharaoh. For one, we no longer have walkers who will randomly roam all accessible paths, but player-defined routes. This hugely changes the building layouts you need. (And sadly makes the blocks I've had memorised since the early 2000s less than useful.)
Just as some context, this is my beloved Flexi-Block in all its original forum glory. I found this via a more recent Reddit post, and I'm so glad I did, because it's the page I referenced at the time. I also had a small notebook where I'd copied down relevant details (ie total number of path squares a particular kind of walker could walk before returning home, that sort of thing) from various fansites that I could reference while playing.
Unfortunately some of the images have died in the meantime. It's so lucky the forum used its own system for showing building layouts, as these were modular and based on a shared library of images.
The basic layout with paths and entertainment venues displayed. This could be laid out according to available space as long as the area squared within the path was preserved. The block would be stoppered with a roadblock, preventing radiant walkers from leaving the set loop.
This is what it looked like with fully upgraded housing. The houses around the edges are palatial, so no longer workers, and I would ring the regular houses with a statue-garden-statue-garden pattern of decor so that I could strategically remove a statue to allow a house to expand into a palatial estate if I wanted to decrease unemployment (houses would expand over gardens but not statues). If you ran the block with regular houses, you'd put a feeder road around the outside of the block leading to an industrial area, kept far enough away to avoid desirability impact, but close enough that the industry's radiant walkers would encounter the houses and therefore be able to hire workers.
I would sometimes remove the entertainment venues from the block if it was experiencing instability (randomly happened due to Pharaoh's pathing engine) and put them on their own external path around the back of the houses.
This, btw, is what the game actually looked like while playing, courtesy of Wikipedia. Though this person's city looks like a dog's breakfast (to be fair it seems to be a tutorial). I did play it on a larger, rectangular screen eventually, and it was still a great looking game years after release. I'm disappointed the 2023 remake has changed the artstyle to a more cutesy, cartoony direction, since in my mind the original was perfect.
I will have to talk about building block strategies for Nebuchadnezzar in a part 2 since I apparently wanted to talk about Pharaoh more than I expected.
