Forge of Empires City Layout Guide: Road and Grid Efficiency

To improve your city layout in Forge of Empires, minimize the total number of road tiles you use and align buildings so streets serve two rows at once. Road tiles produce no Forge Points, goods, or combat boosts. Every street tile you eliminate frees space for productive buildings.

Connect Rectangular Buildings on Their Shortest Edge

Every structure requiring a street connection only needs a single road tile touching its border to function. Wrapping roads around multiple sides wastes space without adding any benefit.

• Target the shortest side: When placing rectangular buildings, orient them so their narrowest side borders the road. For example, connecting a 4x3 building along its 3-tile edge uses 3 street tiles instead of the 4 tiles required along its longer side.
• Avoid corner wraparounds: Roads should not bend around building corners. Corner turns create pavement tiles that touch nothing productive.
• Keep roads strictly linear: Run streets straight between two parallel lines of structures so both sides of the road provide active frontage.

Group Identical Footprints to Eliminate Dead Space

Placing buildings with mismatched dimensions next to each other creates uneven borders and small 1x1 or 1x2 empty gaps that cannot fit useful buildings. Organize your city into uniform rows based on depth:

• Small structures: Place 2x2, 2x3, and 3x2 buildings along the same secondary branch.
• Event and residential buildings: Align 3x3, 4x4, or 5x4 footprints in uniform blocks end-to-end to maintain straight road lines.
• Large Great Buildings: Cluster massive footprints along the outer borders rather than the center of the grid.

When all buildings in a row have identical depths, the servicing road remains completely straight, eliminating unnecessary corner turns.

Position the Town Hall and Space Parallel Roads

The Town Hall serves as the mandatory anchor for your road network. In early eras, it occupies a 6x7 footprint and changes size as you advance through historical ages. Placing the Town Hall in the dead center of the map often forces four-way intersections and fragmented road layouts.

• Anchor along an edge or corner: Move the Town Hall toward a perimeter border or an offset quadrant. This setup allows you to extend long, parallel road corridors across the city without creating central bottlenecks.
• Space parallel roads by building depth: The distance between two parallel roads should equal the combined depth of two back-to-back rows of buildings. If you place a row of 3-deep buildings back-to-back with a row of 4-deep buildings, space the parallel roads exactly 7 tiles apart.

Push Roadless Assets and Great Buildings to the Perimeter

Structures that do not require road connections should never occupy street frontage. Move roadless assets to the outer edges and awkward corners of your map:

• Chain attachments and set connectors: Run these along map borders where standard rectangular buildings do not cleanly fit.
• Decorative fillers: Place 1x1 decorations or victory expansion edges along perimeter seams.
• Massive Great Buildings: Footprints such as Alcatraz, The Arc, or the Chateau Frontenac require only a single road square touching their perimeter. Place their bulk flush against the map boundaries and run a road tile to just one outer corner. This prevents streets from having to bypass their large footprints.

Rebuild Your Layout Using Reconstruction Mode

Rearranging an active city using basic placement tools often causes gridlock when you lack empty expansion space. Use Reconstruction Mode to clear the entire city into temporary storage and lay down a clean grid from scratch.

If you run out of room while restoring structures in Reconstruction Mode, store obsolete residential, cultural, or outdated production buildings in your permanent inventory rather than forcing them back onto the board. Prioritizing current event structures and high-yield Great Buildings ensures your available grid space delivers the highest possible output.