Housing is one of the most vital aspects of building a city in Black & White 2; all of your villagers need places to live and sleep. However, they like to do so with a modicum of comfort, so if you're playing as a Good god, you'll need to carefully consider the placement of various buildings around your houses, as well as the types of buildings that you build. If you are a Good god, try not to place homes extremely close together if you can avoid it. The presence of a house will have an oh-so-slightly negative effect on the happiness of nearby buildings. In point of fact, though, it's all but impossible to avoid clustering houses together; just try to break up the monotony with happiness-increasing structures such as wells, lamps, and stores, and you should be able to counteract the unhappiness that comes from being crammed into a Levittown.

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If you're Evil, and you don't necessarily care about the comfort and well-being of your citizens, you can stow them in hovels or just force them to sleep on the streets, but that's not nice!

Overall, the best way to avoid unhappiness in your homes is to build them around structures with large happiness bonuses, such as temples or baths. Keep in mind that skyscrapers, although they're efficient at saving your village space, will eventually grow into slum conditions if you build too many of them atop one another. You can still safely get away with skyscrapers of five or six stories, though, especially if you build them near extremely happy-making buildings, such as amphitheaters.


On the opposite side of the coin, make sure that you avoid building structures that your citizens find unpleasant near their homes. Armories are the prime culprit here for Good players, as they have a markedly bad effect on the morale of people who live in nearby homes, but so do industrial buildings such as the granary or the smelter. Try to build them in a separate section of town, if possible, to mitigate their negative impact on your town. You can tell whether a building will have a positive or negative impact on the happiness of another building by just holding the mouse in place over where you're going to lay the foundation.

Of course, if you're playing as an Evil god, you don't have to worry very much about the happiness of your citizens; you need to focus on their productivity, which can often actually be boosted by scaring the crap out of the townspeople. Putting up sacrifice pits in the middle of a residential block will remind your peons what fate awaits them if they don't shut up and work, as will erecting a bunch of spikes with decapitated heads on them. You can be a lot more practical in your city designs than the goody-two-shoes city planners, if only because your only real concern is to ensure that your citizens don't starve to death. Beyond that, you don't really have to care about them!

Lastly, keep in mind that different kinds of homes will get you either Good or Evil bonuses, depending on what you're building. Building the worst kind of home, a hovel, is an automatically Evil act, while building a mansion or a manor will usually earn you Good points.