Optimal Building Placements

By Asophix

What is the most efficient building placement scheme? How can you squeeze a few more bows and spears from your weapon producers, or get more bread and wine from your food industry? Come and explore this question and possibly be surprised by what is found.

What is Covered

In this article, we are endeavoring to find the optimal placement for production buildings. The topic of most efficient castle design is beyond this particular article as the different production rates of goods must be taken into account to figure the best total castle layout, and those rates have not yet been recorded. Thus questions like 'How many woodcutters are needed to support the weapons industry?', or 'How many wheat field, mills and bakeries are needed to maximize food production for 100 peasants?' are outside the scope of this article.

The questions we will have answers for are of the variety, 'Given I have plenty of WOOD, what layout should be used to maximize BOW production?' Substitute BOW for any weapon, and change WOOD to IRON, or replace with FLOUR and BREAD and you will see how the general theory can be used in many different instances.

A Little Theory First

Most people intuitively know that the shortest route between two points is a straight line. So things should be kept as straight and as short as possible. Cases that meet this description are those whose worker picks up material at the stockpile and then delivers their product to the stockpile as well. Examples are ale production, cloth creation and flour making. Example is that a brewer picks up a bucket of hops from the stockpile and then returns a barrel of ale to the stockpile.

So you must simply try to bunch these buildings around the stockpile that has the required resource (wool for cloth production, hops for the ale production and so forth) to maximize the production efficiency.

But what about three points? A triangle results when you need to travel between three points, like a fletcher moving from the stockpile for wood, to his workshop to craft the bow, and then to the armory to deposit the bow, and then back to the stockpile to start again. Keep this example in mind as we will return to it often.

So to have the most efficient setup, you want to have the smallest triangles for the workers to walk in. Below are six fletchers, the stockpile and the armoury in a very common layout with the basic travel triangles drawn on. As you can see, every one of these triangles shares one leg, namely the one from the armoury to the stockpile (the WHITE line in the illustration). Here lies the key to a better way!

What You Wanted to Know

To make the most efficient production loops, making the common leg as short as possible is required. Thus, in this example the stockpile and the armoury should be placed next to each other. The next step is to place the fletchers (or any other weapon producer) around these two buildings. Keep in mind that each building has a side with the actual door on it, and those doors should be facing toward the stockpile/armoury center.

Below is a nice graphic that displays this layout. The color coding represents the order the buildings should be placed, going from green (at the start) to yellow to red (at the end). Notice the door placements and even the wood location has been taken into account as a possible factor.

The gains may be small for one particular fletcher, but over many game years, that could be 20 or 30 bows ready to sell for gold or to be used by archers. Here is an example from the game.

Full buildup.

Moving Beyond Fletchers

Obviously there are many applications for this concept. Any weapon producing building can be substituted for the fletcher in the above diagram. Reality is such that fletchers, pole turners, tanners, blacksmiths and armourers could all be distributed around the stockpile and the armoury. The possible combinations to explore for the prime output of an army varies by need and situation, and thus is beyond the scope of this article. But the basic layout would be just as above.

The next mostly likely application would be that of the bread making industry. Just replace the armoury with the granary and the production building with a bakery. Again all the bakers must stop at the stockpile to pick up the flour, and drop off the finished bread at the granary.

Thus the most efficient layout, as with the fletchers, is found by placing the granary and the stockpile next to each other, with the bakeries surrounding them. This gets a bit more tricky as other food producers must be near the granary to maximize their output, as well as the honor gained by multiple food sources. Again, the myriad of ways to maximize food production depends upon the available food types and the current situation, so we will not explore those vast possibilities now, though an entire tutorial may later be devoted to maximizing food production in terms of both the actually quantities of food and in the honour gained from the granary.

Here is a possible layout for a generic situation.

Three stockpiles are utilized. The small spaces between the stockpiles contain the tiny buildings like the bee hives and falconer's posts. The rightmost area is the typical armory, stockpile and weapon shop layout. The leftmost stockpile is utilized for food production with the granary next to it, and the middle stockpile is used for hops and ale production as well as wool and cloth production. This layout was fully self sufficient, feeding the population of 60 people at double rations, will producing a fair amound of bows, spears and swords.

By utilizing the Stockpile Leapfrogging trick (adding and deleting stockpiles until they are placed further from the original position), more open area around each stockpile can be made available, expanding the operations of each industry.

Some Other Notes on Efficient Placement

Obviously we have not covered every production building yet. Here are the findings of the authors concerning these other buildings.

Stone and Iron mines obviously must be placed on the resource, so there is no option. The other building that is needed is the ox tether to help transport the iron or stone. The ox and handler walk up to the stone platform, and bingo, all 16 stone are loaded as if by magic. If there's not enough stone they will wait or visit another rig with stone available. When loaded, it is off to the stockpile to unload and back to the quarry (or iron mine) to load up again.

Behavior will change somewhat, however, based on how much stone is waiting to be picked up at the stone platforms. If there's enough for a full load they seem to head back from the stockpile directly to the rig to load up, and do not visit the tether. If there is not enough stone for a full load, however, then they will visit the tether first before proceeding to the stone platform and either wait for a full load there, or visit other rigs with stone available to make a full load. If other ox tethers are already at the rig they may wait at the tether.

Here is an example of one ox tether oscillating between two iron mines picking up the new iron bars as they become ready.

So it's not necessary to locate ox tethers next to the quarry or iron mine. They can be located in the castle or off to the side, wherever you like. We still would recommend putting them somewhere nearby the rigs, but it doesn't seem to be necessary. Actually, placing them somewhere not in line with the path from stockpile to quarry or mine could be a useful tool. No trips to the tether may mean you need another ox since there is always an excess of stone or iron. An occasional trip to the tether would indicate that your oxen are keeping up with quarry/mine output. A lot of lingering around the tethers would indicate you probably have more oxen than you need.

At first glance, Saw Pits have a three legged production trip (trees to saw pit to stockpile), but they don't really fit in with the fletcher example above. The reason is that the trees are fixed (more or less). Thus to keep the triangle the smallest, the saw pit can be placed anywhere directly between the trees and the stockpile (on that straight line we keep talking about). The trouble is that the tree line will move as trees are cut down. This moving tree line may make the wood production less efficient over time.

The two best solutions according to the research depends on a few circumstances:

If there is a vast forest and there is a low likelihood of being attacked, then place the saw pits out next to the forest. This is done to conserve land near the stockpile. As land is cleared away you can delete the saw pits and replace them closer to the forest again. Below is a pic of the tree line moving away from the woodcutters.

If the trees are sparse and distant, or if there is a high likelihood of attack, then place the saw pits near to the stockpile. This is done to make it easier to protect them, or if the destination of the trees keeps changing, then the saw pits are still efficiently placed.

Happy Castle Building!