Zeus: Master of Olympus VS Banished

"How close do the shops, fountains, and infirmaries need to be to houses?" - It depends on the 'walker' and the path it follows. These buildings will send out a walker who will provide their goods/services to your housing. Zeus Heaven has a page that lets you know how far walkers generally will travel before they return to their building of origin. "I am guessing common agoras for commoners need to focus on food,... Source: 10 months ago

As the other comment mentioned check out https://zeus.heavengames.com/ it's a excellent resource for housing blocks. Also download some people's saved cities in the download section. And check out how a functional city works. Also on here people have full map pictures of cities they have made you can look at. Source: 10 months ago

If you're referring to the animation glitches, that can be fixed through a couple different methods, the easiest of which is the patch available on zeus.heavengames.com in their Downloads section. I personally run that, and another little program that squelches the game's access to CPU so that other animations run a bit better, too. But the patch is good enough to fix the functionality. Source: over 1 year ago

Basically every version of the game has the bug, including the Steam edition, yes. None of the distributors have integrated the fan patches into the game, so you'll always (AFAIK at least) have to patch in the god fix and the widescreen yourself. The god animation patch is available in the downloads/patches section at zeus.heavengames.com. Source: almost 2 years ago

I have been playing this game since the year 2000. Some fans make custom scenarios regularly, available here: https://zeus.heavengames.com. Source: over 2 years ago

Just getting in to Farthest Frontier which is superficially like Banished but there's more and they're creating content. Source: about 1 year ago

What about Banished? Absolutely fantastic game and developed by just one person. Source: about 1 year ago