IF THIS GUIDE LOOKS INTIMIDATING, DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT!
Most of the spreadsheet is pretty self-explanatory if you know the game well enough.
This guide is mostly just for veterans of the older city builders who are not yet familiar with Nebuchadnezzar but want to quickly jump into their old spreadsheet-planning habits, and as a reference manual for the spreadsheet if something is unclear.
Feel free to skim-read this!

I created a spreadsheet to help plan a Nebuchadnezzar city in detail before or during gameplay.

It is not absolutely necessary to use a spreadsheet with Nebuchadnezzar, as the exact consumption/production rates are already very transparent in the game’s ui.
Nonetheless, it is almost kind of traditional for there to be city-planning spreadsheets for this kind of historical city builder game, so here it is.

It is quite advanced and supports all difficulty settings. The spreadsheet projects your population, finances, required labor, prestige, production and consumption of goods, and so on. It can even roughly project army strength and the effects of some of the global bonuses granted by gods.

For the most part, the spreadsheet should be pretty self-explanatory. But you can refer to this guide if something is unclear, and even for a few general tips about the game.

DISCLAIMER: This is a Google Spreadsheet hosted on Google Drive.
It does NOT work on Excel! It ONLY works on Google Spreadsheets.
Even though the file menu gives you the option, this Spreadsheet will NOT work if you try to download it as an Excel (.xlsx) file.

-Follow this link to the spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bDTjzmcsqoglvcgK5ikZDfoXhTGuYwz18dpr_QgkieA

-You cannot edit this spreadsheet directly (because then no more than one person could use it at the same time, and everyone would overwrite each other’s data).
Instead you need to make a copy of it to your own Google account (any run-of-the-mill gmail or youtube account should work I think) by going to File->Make Copy.
Alternatively you can use this URL to instantly create a copy: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bDTjzmcsqoglvcgK5ikZDfoXhTGuYwz18dpr_QgkieA/copy

Unfortunately Steam seems to have automatically flagged the links as "possibly malicious". I'm not sure why, maybe it has something against Google Spreadsheet links. You can still just copy and paste the links into your browser and get to them that way.

The empty spreadsheet looks like this:


I will explain each section in detail, but first some general usage tips:

• The entire city planning build is done in a single sheet (the other sheets are there for older versions of the game).
  
• If you see a cell with a black triangle in the upper right corner, you can hover over that cell with your mouse to see a tooltip with some extra information.
  
• Only enter values in the WHITE cells. Gray cells contain formulas or configurations and should NOT be edited. (To help remind you, you will see a warning when attempting to edit a gray cell)
  
• When there is some kind of problem with your build (e.g. it runs a deficit, is missing the required goods, etc), the relevant cells will gain a red background.
  When you see cells with a red background, expect your city to not run as predicted, and modify your build until the red cells are gone.
  
• Outside of sandbox mode, it is usually not financially possible to construct the entire city in one go. After drafting what your final city would look like, it may be helpful to make another copy of the spreadsheet and create an early version of the city that serves as a “stepping stone” to make money until you have enough to create the full build.

You can fill out the spreadsheet in whatever order you wish, but I recommend starting by choosing your desired difficulty from the dropdown selection menu in cell F28.

You should see the value in the gray cell to the right of it change. This is just a number that represents the selected difficulty and you can otherwise ignore.

Let’s go to the Housing section in the top left corner of the spreadsheet, where we can configure how many houses we want to have of each type in the white cells of column D.

Note that there are 4 (inhabited) tiers for each of the 3 social classes. (The uninhabited “incomplete” villas and residences are not included in this spreadsheet since they do nothing until upgraded).
You can see in columns B and C how much population and tax income per year (at the selected tax setting) each type of house offers.
Light blue population values represent middle class ‘Townsfolk’, purple population values represent upper class ‘Aristocracy’.

You can see the resulting population values in the Population section directly below. This is the same as your amount of available laborers.
(In Nebuchadnezzar, unlike the old Impressions City Builders, there are no children or elderly, and workforce participation is always 100%. This makes it a bit simpler to plan our city.)


You will also see that the Goods section towards the right of the sheet gets updated.
Here, you will see how many goods your city would need to consume per year in order for all of the houses to maintain their chosen levels, in column T.
Right now your city is not yet configured to import or produce any goods, so the Surplus values in column U are in the negative (and the cells turn red), indicating your current build will not run successfully due to a lack of those goods.


By the way, some housing consumption basics:

• Lower class Peasant Houses and middle class Townsfolk Villas consume 1 of each of their required goods per year (0.75 on Easy and Sandbox difficulties).
  
• Upper class Aristocracy Residences consume 3 of each of their required goods per year (2.25 on Easy and Sandbox difficulties).

Goods production is where the spreadsheet gets tricky in Nebuchadnezzar, compared to other city builders.
This is because of the game’s flexibility, where each building has a certain amount of labor slots, which you yourself can choose how to divide them between:

• Workers that actually do the building’s main intended job (produce resources, distribute services or goods to population, etc)
  
• Haulers that fetch the necessary resources for the building to function, and/or pass any resources the building produces along to warehouses or other buildings.
  
• Empty slots (to save laborers if you don’t think they’re needed here)

Because of this, the actual amount of buildings doesn’t matter for this spreadsheet. What matters is the amount of workers and haulers!

For each normal production building, each worker produces 4.5 goods per year and consumes 4.5 of each of the required input goods per year (if the building has a constant supply of the prerequisite goods)
For example:

• Each worker at a Fishery produces 4.5 fish per year.
  
• Each worker at a Bakery produces 4.5 bread while consuming 4.5 wheat per year.
  
• Each worker at a Luxury Ceramic Shop produces 4.5 luxury ceramics while consuming 4.5 ceramics AND 4.5 dye per year.
  
• A Bakery with 2 workers will produce 9 bread and consume 9 wheat per year, with 3 workers it will produce/consume 13.5, etc…

Livestock and Crop Farms are an exception to this and we’ll get around to them in a bit.

The haulers do not affect production, and they are purely there to fetch and deliver resources to and from other buildings. If a building is placed a bit out of the way, then it might need multiple haulers so that the flow of goods doesn’t become a bottleneck.


Anyhow, if you’ve played the game for a bit then you probably already know all of this, don’t you? Let’s go back to the spreadsheet.
For each building type you need to input the total number of producers and haulers you expect to have across all buildings of that type combined, in the white cells of columns M and N.

You can see for each building how much labor they need for a worker in column L (this changes depending on the selected difficulty setting), and of what social class (using the same color coding as in the Housing section).
For haulers, the required labor can be found at the top of the Production section in cell N1 and is the same for all buildings.

You can figure out the required amount of workers (producers) by increasing the value in column M until the Surplus cell of the associated goods type is no longer red (but you might want a few extra to be on the safe side).

The required amount of haulers is less of an exact science and depends on your layout. Most production buildings have 4 slots and I find you can usually safely configure those to have 3 workers and 1 hauler, or 2 workers and 1 hauler if it’s a bit out of the way.
It’s also possible to have no haulers, and depend on the haulers of other buildings to deliver/retrieve the goods.
Personally I like to not use haulers in my mines, and place the workshops that need their raw goods right next to them and let the haulers of those workshops fetch the goods.
Suffice to say there are many viable strategies for haulers and it’s very layout-dependent, so you’ll need to make a rough estimate yourself of how many you expect to have.
It’s better to have planned for too many haulers and end up with some labor leftover, than to not have enough haulers!

Also of course note that not every map has access to gold, copper and stone mines. Always check if the map has those outcrops available, otherwise you will just need to import the goods. (We’ll get to that in step 5)

Anyway, when we start configuring our production, we will see the Production and Surplus values get updated in the Goods section.
However, we might also see new Consumption and negative Surpluses appear, due to the raw materials needed for production. You can set up production for these new goods as well.


On the left side of the spreadsheet, we will also see that our Required/Surplus labor values get updated. If any of the Surplus values get a negative number, then you don’t have enough laborers of that type and your city won’t run as intended. (The cell’s background should turn red to indicate something is wrong)

When it comes to the production of Wheat, Milk, Dates, Barley, Sheep, Linen, Fleece and Grapes, in Crop Farms and Livestock Farms, things work a bit differently.
Here, the production is determined by the amount of fields of each type that belong to that Farm building, with each Farm requiring 1 worker for every 18 fields that it has.

Each field produces 0.5 of its resource type per year. Note that sheep pastures produce 2 resource types (sheep and fleece) at 0.5 per year each.
So, a Crop Farm with 30 Wheat Fields, 14 Barley Fields, 10 Date Palms and 3 workers (which can together tend to 3*18=54 fields, which is exactly enough in this case) would produce 15 Wheat, 7 Barley and 5 Dates per year.

In the spreadsheet, it would be impossible to configure each farm individually. So we just configure the total amount of fields we have in our city of each type.
We do this in the Farming Config section, in cells L33-L39.

In the Field Capacity segment to the right of the field amount input, we can see how many fields can be tended to in total by our current amount of farm workers.
If we don’t have enough workers/producers at the Crop Farm/Livestock Farm in the Production section, then we will, again, see a negative ‘Surplus’ value with a red background.


We need to go back to the Production section to make sure we have enough farm workers and haulers.
Let’s increase our amount of workers at the Crop and Livestock Farms until our Field Capacity Surplus values no longer show a negative value with a red background.

The amount of haulers is, again, less of an exact science.

Farms have 5 labor slots, so you can theoretically have 4 or 5 workers in a farm. However, a farm can only till fields in a 3-tile radius around it, which is 72 tiles, of which you’ll need to reserve at least 3 for a road connection.
This means any farm can realistically use at most 69 fields, meaning a 4th worker could never be used at full efficiency (and 4 workers to 1 hauler might create a logistics bottleneck), and 5 workers is downright useless.
In practice, most of my farms end up using 2 or 3 workers, and 1 or 2 haulers depending on the distance they have to travel.

I like to plan for farm haulers at ⅔ the amount of farm workers I have, to be on the safe side. I usually don’t end up needing that many in my layout, giving me some surplus labor for extra caravans or emergency services.

Your city will not be able to produce certain goods itself, namely Ivory, Papyrus, Wood, Olive Oil, Dye, Tin and Iron, and potentially also Copper, Gold and/or Stone.
You will need to import those goods to fully develop your city.
You might also need to import some normally available goods if you are lacking in space or labor, and you will almost definitely want to export goods in order to raise prestige and make a profit.

So far, so obvious. What is less obvious about Nebuchadnezzar is that the prices of goods aren’t fixed. Not only are prices affected by your relationship with your trading partner, the prices of goods vary per mission and even between different trading partners in the same mission at the same relationship level!

What this means is that the spreadsheet has no way of predicting the price at which you will be buying or selling goods. You will need to go into the in-game Trade and Diplomacy window to find out which goods you can import and export, and the prices at which you can do so.

Then, for the goods that you are planning to import or export, you will need to go to the Goods section, and put the price per unit for that goods type in column W (when buying the goods) or X (when selling the goods).
Then put in the amount of goods that you wish to import/export per year of that goods type in column Q (when buying) or R (when selling).

You should see the Surplus and Profit for that goods type update to reflect the changes.


The import and export prices might shift in-game as your relationships with your trading partners change.
You can update the prices in the spreadsheet as the game progresses, or you can just leave them at their initial values since they are the most disadvantageous to the player, and will just cause the spreadsheet to err on the side of caution.

To complete our labor configurations, we should now set all our caravanserais, emergency services, and the remaining buildings required to upgrade our housing.

This works very similarly to the Production section, and with some of the buildings we again have to consider the worker/hauler split.

First let’s go to the Services section to configure the last buildings needed by our housing.
For markets, in the smallest cities you may only need one worker for each goods type that your city needs, in order to deliver the goods to the houses.
Usually, however, you will need multiple workers for the same type, each making smaller trips to specific subsections of housing, rather than attempting to cover all your houses with just one worker.
Otherwise, the distribution of goods would be too slow for all but the largest cities, and the market lady would not be able to keep up with the rate at which your citizens consume their goods!

Again, this isn’t very exact and depends on the layout of your city, but a good rule of thumb is:

• For Peasant Houses and Townsfolk Villas (Poor and Standard Markets), use approximately one worker for every 30 houses, per goods type.
  
• For Aristocracy Residences (Luxury Markets), use approximately one worker for every 10 houses per goods type, since they consume goods 3 times faster.

Obviously markets also need haulers, and lots of them! I personally like to use 3 workers and 2 haulers for a market even if they have only a small distance to travel.

Wells, Priest’s Quarters, Administration buildings, Libraries, Lawyer’s Offices and Observatories all work very similarly to markets. I recommend using the same amount of workers as for markets, so:

• For Wells and Administration buildings, 1 worker per ~30 Peasant Houses
  
• For Priest’s Quarters and Libraries, 1 worker per ~30 Townsfolk Villas
  
• For Lawyer’s Offices and Observatories, 1 worker per ~10 Aristocracy Residences

Administration buildings, Libraries and Lawyer’s Offices also require haulers. You can think of these as special markets that distribute Tablets, Papyrus and Seals respectively.
I prefer to use the same amount of haulers as workers for these buildings, purely because they don’t have as many labor slots as the markets.


Next, there’s the Caravanserais. Obviously, how many you need depends entirely on the layout of your city. Keep in mind that longer routes may require multiple caravans for an adequate flow of goods.
You will need to estimate yourself how many caravanserai workers you think you need. As usual, it is better to plan for too many than too few.

Then, there’s the Emergency section. Again, this is a very inexact science and depends greatly on the layout of your city, as well as the city’s risk levels and other factors.
It is difficult to get a good rule of thumb on this, and you will again need to estimate yourself how many workers you think you will need. It is better to plan for too many than too few!

Note that Healers and Hospitals do the same thing, and are only needed for housing. Fire Stations and City Watches are needed for every building.

Some tips for very small cities:

• Fire events don’t happen until you have at least 1100 peasants. If you have less than that amount, you don’t need Fire Stations.
  
• Disease events don’t happen until you have at least 1600 peasants. If you have less than that, you don’t need Healers or Hospitals.
  
• Crime events don’t happen until you have at least 500 middle class townsfolk. If you have less than that, or you don’t have any villas at all, then you don’t need City Watches.

Let’s go to the Finances and Risks sections in the bottom left of the spreadsheet.
The Finances section is pretty self-explanatory. It shows your income/expenditure for wages, taxes, and trade, and allows you to set the Tax/Wage settings from the dropdowns in C25 and C26.

Our total yearly income is then displayed in the ‘Total Balance’ field. If this is negative, the cell will turn red to indicate that you are running a deficit.


The Risks section is slightly more annoying. This is because the ‘base’ risk values (before the effects of tax/wage settings) differ from mission to mission.
In the open-play scenarios, all risks begin at 100%. In the campaign however, the base risk values start very low and gradually increase to be more than 100% by the last missions.

This means you will need to manually enter what the base risk is of each type for the mission you are playing, in the Mission Default column (cells B31-B33).
You can find this out by opening the Risks menu in-game, and noting the ‘default mission risk’ values.
(The values in the in-game menu are initially blank and you need to wait a few days to get them to appear.)


Once you have correctly set the Mission Default risks, you will see the resulting risk values of your tax/wage and difficulty settings in the Real Risk column in cells D31-D33.
If the Real Risk is 100% or higher, the cells will gain an orange background. This isn’t a problem per se, but just a reminder that the game might not be very forgiving when it comes to the required amount of emergency services.

Next let’s go to the Prestige section in cells F30-I38.

We should already see our prestige from trade automatically calculated.
Prestige from population has been calculated as well, but there's one last detail that we have to set here before we can be sure that the calculation is correct.

We must set what the highest available level of housing is in this mission, for each population class, in cells G32-G34.
In the open play scenarios, the highest possible level of housing is always available, but in campaign missions some of the higher levels of housing are unavailable, with more and more levels of housing being unlocked the further you progress in the campaign.
(A quick way to see in-game what housing is available is to look at the 'Production Chain' window, which will only show production chains for the levels of housing available in your current mission.)

This matters for our prestige calculations, because in missions where higher level housing isn't available, the game actually compensates by making the lower levels of housing worth more prestige!

Prestige from monuments must be set manually, because the prestige values of monuments aren’t fixed, but vary from mission to mission.
A temple in the earliest missions is worth only 40 prestige, but in the last mission it is worth 250, for example.

We need to again look within the game itself with the mission loaded, to see how much prestige we can get from monuments on this map.


And then we enter in cell I37 the total combined prestige that we would get from any monuments that we plan to build.
We would of course need to produce or import some bricks in order to construct these monuments, but there is no rule for how many Brickworks you need. Less Brickworks just means slower monument construction. It entirely depends on your patience.

We can then see our total expected prestige (towards the mission’s end when all houses are fully developed, all monuments are fully constructed, and all trade is fully set-up).

Note that the prestige from trade will fluctuate a bit as relations with trading partners change, and due to the timing of when trading ships spawn.

It is entirely possible to skip this step and just treat the bonuses from gods as nice little extras that help your city to run a little smoother than predicted.

Let’s go all the way to the right side of the spreadsheet, in columns Z - AD.
Here, we have a list of all of the gods. With what types of global and local bonuses they give.

Note that a few gods may have different names and portraits in certain settings. For example, Enlil becomes Ashur when playing an Assyrian city. In such cases the ‘God Name’ cell of the god will include both versions of the name (e.g Enlil / Ashur)

A city can worship 4 gods, one of which is the patron god, which depends on the mission and cannot be changed. (You will need to look in-game at the Gods menu to find out who it is for your mission)
The other 3 can be freely chosen from among the other gods.

Gods with green names are foreign gods that can only be worshiped after establishing trade with a city that has it as its patron god.
Note that there are many foreign gods, and each mission only has a few of them available. You will need to look around in the Trade and Diplomacy menu in-game to see which foreign gods are at all available in your mission.

We can set the relations that we expect to be able to maintain with each of our 4 chosen gods, in the dropdown selections of the cells in column AB.
For gods that we are not worshiping, we choose the N/A option in that dropdown.

Note that only the patron god can have a relationship of -1 (in which case the global bonus turns into a penalty). Relations with the other 3 gods will never sink below 1, and are always just a nice bonus.

If the text in the Global Bonus Type cell is in blue, it means that this global bonus has a visible effect on the other values in the spreadsheet when you set the relationship value with that god.
Other global bonus types don’t directly affect the values of the spreadsheet in a predictable way, but you can still use the spreadsheet to plan your pantheon with them nonetheless.

The spreadsheet can’t calculate the benefits of local bonuses as it is entirely dependent on your city layout. The local bonuses are only listed to help you plan your pantheon at a glance.

NOTE that there is effectively no point to having two gods with the same global bonus, as only the one with the highest bonus counts - they do not stack



If you do use religious bonuses while planning your city, then of course you need to make sure to actually maintain those relation levels at all time by holding the required festivals - otherwise your city won’t perform as well as predicted by the spreadsheet.

Be sure to produce some extra goods so you can hold the festivals.

The spreadsheet now also supports the military features added in 1.4!

A new military section has been added to the bottom left of the spreadsheet. I've put it a little bit out of the way, because not every mission requires its usage.

In the first block from A42 to B48, we can define how many barracks we want to have of each type.
The recruits overview right below, in A50 to D54, will update accordingly to show us the amount of available, used and surplus recruits and officers.
Just like with labour, if the surplus recruits cells go into the negative, then your army won't work as intended and the surplus cells will become red to indicate that something is wrong.

Some basic notes on recruits and officers:

• The amount of available recruits is always a 3rd of your population. So if your city has 3000 peasants, 1000 townsfolk and 300 aristocrats, you will have 1000 peasant, 333 townsfolk and 100 aristocrat recruits.
  
• You always start with 15 free officers. Additional officers can be acquired through the officer building (in the Services section of the spreadsheet, cells F13-I14), at a rate of 2 officers per worker.
  
• Note that the game has 2 different officer building types! The only difference is the type of labourer used, and only one of the two will be available in any mission. Earlier campaign missions when aristocracy isn't available yet will allow you to use the first type, which only requires townsfolk. However, later missions will force you to use the second type which requires aristocracy labour.

All barracks will require weapons, and some types will also require mechanical parts and/or wheat. These must be provided to them by the 'Military Supplier', which is essentially a market that services barracks and, like markets, is included in the 'Services' section of the spreadsheet (F12-I12).

Notes on military goods:

• Peasant barracks (light infantry & archers) consume 2 weapons per year.
  
• Townsfolk barracks (heavy infantry & engineers) consume 2.5 weapons per year. Engineers additionally consume 2.5 mechanical parts per year.
  
• Aristocracy barracks (horsemen & chariots) consume 3 weapons and 3 wheat per year. Chariots additonally consume 3 mechanical parts per year.
  
• Like with the officer building, there are 2 types of weaponsmith buildings, with earlier missions using the first type and later missions the second. The difference here is the required input goods, with the first type requiring copper and tin, while the second type requires iron.

The troops now have their basic goods, but they'll be stuck at 0% morale unless you also give them some food and/or drink (which is also done through the military supplier).
Here, Nebuchadnezzar is flexible, and you can decide for yourself what combination of goods to give to your troops to boost their morale.
Cheaper goods, such as fish or milk, give much less morale than expensive ones such as wine.

So, you will have to configure which morale goods you intend to give to your troops in cells F42-H50 of the spreadsheet.
You will see the effect on morale in column H, and of course the resulting consumption/surplus of goods will be calculated accordingly in the 'Goods' section of the sheet.

Notes on morale goods:

• Peasant barracks (light infantry & archers) consume 0.4 per year of each type given.
  
• Townsfolk barracks (heavy infantry & engineers) consume 0.5 per year of each type given.
  
• Aristocracy barracks (horsemen & chariots) consume 0.6 per year of each type given.
  
• Fish, dates & milk are worth 20% morale, bread is worth 40%, beer and meat are worth 60%, wine is worth 80&. So, a combination of fish & wine would yield the full 100% morale, and so would a combination of beer, fish & dates, or meat & bread, etc...
  
• After reaching a morale of 100%, there is no benefit to giving your troops even more good types.

Finally, the sheet will predict the strength of your army in cells A56-D58, based on your amounts of barracks, their morale, and the global bonuses of certain gods.
A god can boost your army in either offensive or defensive situations, which is why offensive and defensive army strength are given separately.
Strength is projected at several different experience levels, though in practice some companies will gain experience faster than others and experience is slow to be earned anyway, so it's safer to count on the values at level 1.