Talk:Tips and Tricks/@comment-4107034-20110701000422/@comment-76.93.52.155-20110702074144

A building needs a road going to it in order to be built or to be placed. You can't move a building to where there are no roads. But once you've placed the building, you can then get rid of the road. So say you want to put a hot dog stand in a corner. The furthest it can go is where there are four squares for it to sit in your property line. So build a road to the corner, and make a road that's only three squares long--where it's just to small to fit the hot dog stand. Now you want to pack in buildings so say your going for a row of hot dog stands right behind the one in the corner, no road in between. Build a road parallel to that first road nine squares away. That leaves eight squares in width between the roads...enough for hot dog stands back to back. Demolish any road that connects the two roads, that will get in the way of placing the stands. Then, put the stand in the corner. Then place the row of stands behind the corner one (depending one your lot size, maybe three stands?). Then, demo the roads around the stand (click on the eye icon first), and you have a structures back to back with no roads around them. You actually don't even need to demo the three squares of road in the corner, because you don't have a building to put there, but you can always put windmills or plants or something there that isn't road.

Make sense now? It's a bit of a pain, and involves either having some free land to put stuff on or putting some stuff in storage, or building that way as you go, but the roads really ad up.

I personally recommend leaving some road on your island until your pretty set. I've built my island so that most buildings are set against some road. There are only a handful of buildings that if I picked then up and put them into storage I wouldn't be able to place again until I built a temp road for them. Roads can be built further on the shore then buildings placed so you get "free" road that way. I also have road in corners that I can't build on. And there are naturally occurring gaps where things don't quite fit that I take full advantage of. For the buildings that doesn't work for, I place rows of buildings back to back, and then have a road. If I have a road every two rows of buildings all the buildings face road and I only have four roads on an almost fully expanded island. Since I'm still changing my island around a lot, those roads are worth the extra row of 4x4 buildings I could get in exchange.