This is the first city builder I ever saw that seemed so dedicated to scenarios and I'm having trouble here, even with the simple ones. Would it be a wise idea to mess around with the sandbox stuff before moving on to them?

What is the first problem that you run into?

It's little things that I would normally figure out with sandbox, like good and bad housing arrangements, how many squares a well serves, how far something needs to be useful but not hurtful (The Bazaar), how close things like architects and fire houses should be, and time stuff like how long I should wait for a water source to kick in before realizing I under or overdid it.

This is stuff with a game like Sim City I'm used to finding out on my own time whereas with a scenario I always have the goal in mind which kind of takes away from messing around and experimenting.

Good questions. I usually start a City five or six times to answer those questions. I've lined up several roads and had a type of race to see how far each walker went. I guess what I'm saying I used the early episodes as a "sandbox" to experiment. Also, there still exists on the web, various block arrangements created by people with arguments over which has been best.
This page will have some images that will give you a jumping-off place

https://www.google.com/search?q=Pharaoh+block+arrangements&biw=1920&bih=940&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilxtve7_PLAhXDdiYKHXEVA7gQsAQIGw

And I and others who love the game still hang around this Board to answer questions.

Scenarios? So are you playing the custom missions or family history? Family History is definitely the better place to start, since it eases you into the game, by unlocking more and more structures as you go along. I think you are going to have to experiment a bit in the beginning to get a feel for the mechanics, which is ok in the first one or two missions since they don't take that long too complete.

If I may, and please excuse the long post, here are some important things about how the game works vs simcity, which you may already have picked up on (perhaps the game mentions these in the briefings I'm not sure):

- When you construct a new building, it sends out a little recruiting-walker in a random direction that seeks workers for that building. Once he comes across houses, he starts to recruit workers for that building, which means that you can't place buildings too far away from houses. Ok so that's the first thing.

- The second thing is that buildings don't have an area of effect (except when it comes to desirability) and instead rely on walkers to spread their influence. Once the building has enough workers it sends out its 'representative' walker in a random direction to spread it's influence (ie water carrier, bazaar lady, engineer etc.). This person walks for a set piece of time before returning to its building, and then sets out again after a short wait.

- The third thing is that, as far as I can tell, once a walker of any sort reaches a junction in the road, it randomly selects which way to go (except turning around). So this means you have to keep your road system as simple as possible. For example, it doesn't help if you want a temple to have its priest reach a house 15 squares away, but there are 3 or more junctions along the way. Also, no double lanes because that will completely boggle down the walkers.

So road layout is the make or break part of this game, and you'll simply have to experiment with some designs to see what works best (or look up some of the several efficient designs). Not that you have to find the best possible design mind you. As long as your road system operates reasonably well, any level is easily beatable. One thing that works for me is to create 'shells' of varying sizes where I put important service buildings on the inside, like bazaars for example.

Finally, as for how many buildings you need, the overlays are incredibly useful. Use them to see what the walkers effect on a neighbourhood is, and you'll quickly get a feeling for roughly how many are needed.

Oh yes, one more thing. When I first played Caesar, I thought that I could make enough money out of taxes. You can't. You have to trade. One of the first things you have to do is to look at empire map and see what you can export, and build your town close to where you can develop the required industry for the goods in question. The same is true for Pharaoh, unless the map has enough gold deposits.

That's what I'm having trouble with. The Bizarre either gets not business or the other houses refuse to grow because it is too close. :P

I think that might just be because desirability is too low and the houses are simply pointing to the closest thing that has a negative effect on desirability. So all you need to do is to increase the general desirability, instead of worrying about where to move the bazaar. Upgrading roads to plazas(found under municipal/beautification) really helps, but a road needs to be in a desirable enough location (visual clue : road auto upgraded to paved surface) for it to be possible to upgrade to a plaza. To get the general desirability up, build some gardens, temples, statues next to the roads, and keep industry several squares away. Certain buildings reflect the desirability of the area by getting an automatic visual upgrade, and the bazaar is one of them.
Also, perhaps consult the manual or this site to see which buildings have a positive/negative effect on desirability. For the most part it's intuitive. It's mostly industry buildings that have a massively negative effect.

By the way, in case you didn't know, because I sure didn't (or I forgot), the game can be run in widescreen http://www.wsgf.org/dr/pharaoh/en

Desirability is just a number attached to each tile, the sum of nice and ugly around it. You can have the best estate right next to the market if you throw enough pretties at it. Getting walkers to behave is the greater challenge.

To figure out how far a buildings desirability influence goes, build one in the middle of nowhere and check the overlay, like Matewis' second picture. Overlays are the greatest feature to look "under the hood", use them.

Once you're sick of figuring out every single number yourself, register at pharaoh heaven and dig into the forums, this game has been analyzed to hell and back, more than you ever need to know. (registration so you can see the older threads, otherwise you can go back only a year, which is mostly useless) Copying a housing block from someone else and seeing how it breaks when you change things is another way to learn these things, maybe less overwhelming at the start.

I'd finish at the very least the predynastic missions before thinking about sandbox maps, but learning by playing all the missions in order works quite well to the end.

What difficulty level are you playing on? I recommend new players to play at Easy difficulty to get a feeling for the game mechanics. A lot of it is trial and error, you will also learn a lot by playing the first two dynasties, which cover the basic aspects of the game (building, farming, making money and military).

Reading information from websites is fine for learning some stuff, but I don't recommend Pharaoh Heaven unless you are interested in the advanced details of playing the game: a lot of information there is not very useful to new players of the genre and will just serve to confuse you with details that you probably won't be interested in until you play on a harder difficulty.

You will develop your favorite ways to counteract the negative of a market with adjoining enhancements. I usually used religious structures adjacent to my markets to keep the desirability of the surrounding land up.

I would, in Pharaohs, get in the habit of right clicking your markets and shutting down everything but food stuff. Then as you want the population to grow and the neighborhood to get better housing, start allowing the markets to purchase better items. Population will be important in this game. Populations age in the game which means you need to slowly increase the number of citizens to maintain a set work force. Also, if luxury items such as pottery or beer are spread too thin, you will see your residential areas build and collapse in cycles that are annoying to say the least. By controlling the market goods, you can slowly improve areas to keep up the population and limit the cycling of your housing between wealth and poverty.

Finally, markets are more of a problem in the early tutorials than in the main game. Early on, you don't have access to "road blockers." Road blockers are special road tiles that keep certain walkers from using the road. A market walker can be kept inside the housing block that way. Without road blockers, the walkers wander any and everywhere. Makes you nostalgic for Caesar 3. Once in a while a walker will go renegade and ignore the road block. It's funny but not useful. (You might even have to relocate the market to get the walker to keep on the right path.) You will also need to keep warehouses with appropriate goods nearby for your markets to find re-supply. The farther the warehouse, the more markets required to keep up with neighborhood demand.

Re: wells, I wouldn't spend much time on it. You will probably never build another after you get water supplies.

Re: bazaars, put a firehouse or other necessary undesirable right next to it. It's OK if it goes to an improved bazaar in some of the early games, but by Saqqara or so, you will want to avoid the teleporting walker bug. Water supplies, on the other hand, you want to improve as soon as possible. Basically, put services in the first couple tiles from the bazaar, then houses outside that range where you actually get positive desirability from the bazaar. Be wary of putting too many houses close together, as huts and shanties are quite undesirable in themselves.

Most of the rest of the advice is quite solid. I'd advise getting off Easy as soon as you understand the basic concepts, though, unless you are planning to play just casual games. You get into way too many bad habits that are hard to unlearn.

Campaign is a perfect place to learn the game, it teaches all the basic aspects you need to know. The only necessary knowledge you need to learn outside of campaign is how to build housing blocks which is very easy. The game is very repetitive though (finished playing Cleopatra three days ago).

One way to counter low desirability is to build religious structures, statues, and flower gardens.

Right. If I am going to advance the blocks to residence, I generally put a house plot on the northernmost tile of what I want to be a 2x2, one every 3 tiles, with the intent to put a shrine and a dentist/aopthecary/engineer/garden/shrine/statue between 2x2s. Even though it's not needed yet, place the temple. Then start the plaza creep. Once the plaza gets past the house, you can go ahead and put in housing plots on two of the other tiles in the eventual 2x2, reason being you get immigrants based on structures, and 3 1x1s draws 3 times as many immigrants as a single 2x2. Once you are ready to start supplying pottery, or no longer need the fast immigration, go ahead and fill in the 4th residence tile of the 2x2. About half the time, it will merge into a single building, saving you on pottery and, later, beer and linen. (Whether it merges is based on the northernmost tile of the 2x2, so putting that one in prevents merging where you do not want it.)

I think the simple answer to this question is no.

I'd suggest re-starting a new family history and set the game to easy.

For a simple structure, build homes which are contained in a block structure surrounded by road then link this to the main route.

Those facilities which relate to your populations needs: Bazaar, Water, Temple/s, etc., need to be in close vicinity to the homes. Place these on the road closest to your block of homes. Ensure that services such as Architecture, Firehouse and Police are linked to your block of housing. Use Roadblocks to prevent walkers wandering off the map. Experiment with Roadblocks to find out how they function.

Granarys and Warehouses need to be a short distance away, as do Work Camps for farming and monument building. Industry slightly further still - best to designate an area for industry.

Increasing the desirability of your housing area becomes a crucial part of the game. There are several videos on You Tube which demonstrate ways of playing the game and incorporating gardens, statues etc., to assist your housing areas in becoming desirable. As the game prograsses, I build blocks of housing with gardens and medium statues in the centre.

I hope this is helpful - enjoy your game :)