In this section we'll see several things to have a more efficient village, especially for unit pathing.


When building farm and farming tiles, you should keep in mind that villagers have to work from the entrance of the farm to the tile, back and forth, each time they have to plant, water or gather 1 food item. Therefore you should minimize this walking time. You should especially avoid any obstacles such as these:

Villager does not walk between building when built too close. They have to walk around, resulting in a greatly reduced food production. This may seem obvious, but when lacking space, or when a type of soil is spread out, one can be tempted to build farms in weird designs.

You should plan farm building well in advance in order to have enough space. This kind of setup is optimal:



When recruiting a large amount of soldiers, villager wait outside until a weapon is deposited and a spot is free. Villager stand still somewhere around the military training ground. It means that villager can stand behind the building :

This leads to a slow down of the recruiting process because villager have to walk longer. If the training ground is surrounded by other building, what we saw previously for the farm can happen here: a villager waiting behind the trainging ground will have to walk around a group of houses or industry to get to the recruiting ground.

This does not happen if the back of the training ground is fully built.


therefore, you should block the back of your trainging grounds and leave an empty space in front of it. This is not a big concern overall, unless you want to train a large group of more than 10 soldiers in a hurry, wich happens a lot when playing harder difficulties.

Placement wise, it's advised to build some houses close to your training ground in order to reduce walking time from villager.


On a side note. I think there's something to fix here from the devs. When recruiting large amount of soldier, i sometimes have 10 villager waiting outside and only one inside the recuiting ground actually getting trained into a spearman/soldier. There might be a priority issue leading to calling into training villagers far away from the training ground while some are already waiting outside. I don't know how to avoid that, maybe by manually recruiting groups of 3 ?


Previous advices apply to other buildings:



A heavy work load on a building can cause road block and slow down the whole village. A simple fix it is to have your building not facing directly on your main roads. This way it gives a buffer of 2/3 villagers. In this exemple, the main road goes from bottom to top. The building placement on the left is optimal, contrary to the right one:

Contrary to forester and trees, crops rot if not gathered in time. If it was not the case, you could overbuild tiles and you'd naturally reach the maximum yield after some time. In the tutorail, they advise you to build 15 tiles, but the lack of information trough the game made me question this number.

We want to know how many farming tiles are needed per crop in order to have the most food production using as few tools/space as possible.


Crops have different growth time:
(*a bit odd but ok)

Soil quality does not change growth speed. Depending on soil quality, crops might directly die after reaching 100% growth. Crops grown on maximum quality soil never die, but they can still rot. All crops take 4 minutes to rot after reaching 100% growth. If a farmer starts to work on a crop, it cuts it down into 4 food item they can pick up, which can no longer rot.

Crops require to be watered. Failing to do so kills it around 80% growth.
Similar to trees, when a crop require water, its growth speed does not decrease.


For the rest of the analysis, farm were build this way:

Crops were directly in front of the farm to reduce villager travel time. Warehouses were built next to the farm with several houses to ensure there would not be storage issues slowing the process.

What was clear from the start was that for every kind of crop, 15 farming tiles were too many, as several tiles would rot before farmers could gather them.



Having crops rot means farmer time was wasted to plant them and water them. Therefore, aiming for the maximum food production equals to aim for 0% rot. We'll first take a look at the maximum tile amount for a given crop, the least tile amount and then the optimal amount. They are different.

There's an average dead-time per farmer and per crop of:

• 50sec for planting+watering
  
• 2min to gather all 4 food items

This amounts to 2min50sec of work (not continuous) during which a farmer is 100% focused on 1 tile and cannot work elsewhere.

Because crops take different times to fully grow, and thanks to the 4 minute time window before rotting, we can expect a maximum number of tiles managed per farmer. We look at wheat for this exemple:

When working on the 1st tile (red), farmers will gather food, plant, and finally water. After planting, there's a 8 minute growth (light grey) you have to wait, followed by a 4 minutes rot window (dark grey) during which you have to trigger the start of the gathering action. During this time, they can work on 4 other tile and come back on the first just before the first tile starts to rot. it gives us around 5,1 tile per farmer.

But the maximum amount of tiles is lower in reality because farmers don't water the crops right after planting them, it happens a bit later, when they are already working on another tile, gathering items. So there's a bit of conflict between tiles.

You can sometimes get rid of a few tiles which are not necessary because of the rotting time. In the case of wheat, you should, as the 5th tile being worked on by a farmer leads them to almost let the 1st tile rot. So, the least tile amount is the number required to have farmers busy 100% of their time.

The optimal tile amount lies between the least and the maximum amount (yea what a surprise)
Corn farms can't manage efficiently more than 12 tiles. Wheat, linen and pumpkin farms does manage 15 tiles, as the tutorial tells you. Cabbage farm can manage a lot more, up to 19. But optimal tile amounts are lower. Maximal food production is reached at 8 or 9 tiles for corn, 12 tiles for wheat, linen and pumpkin, and 16 for cabbage.

Even with the optimal amount of tiles, you need two things to farm efficiently:

• Have an efficient tile placement and supporting buildings, as described previously.
  
• Micro-manage tiles. You should build new farming tiles by group of 3, every 3 minutes or so, until you reach the maximum number.

When building a new farm, if you are to open all tiles to be planted, it means that they will all reach 100% growth at the same moment, leading to a lot of them rotting. You should build them gradually, especially for cabbage farm where rotting is a big loss because of the very long growth time.

You can still open all tiles to be planted together. Given enough times (I guess after one hour for corn, more for cabbage), all tiles timing should adapt to fit with one another and prevent rotting (if tile amount is lower than maximum amount) ... but this is highly inefficient.

Building too few tiles will result in an under-efficient farm but no waste. Whereas building too many tiles is not only useless but detrimental to food production as farmer wastes time on crops it will not gather.


Maximum yield for a farmer is expected to be around 4 food per 2min50sec (the time it needs to work on 1 tile to produce 4 food). Having the optimal tile amount only enables constant working of farmers without waste. This is 1,4 food/min for a farmer, or 4,2 food/min for a whole farm.
In-game, an efficient wheat farm with 12 micro-managed tiles (optimal number) produced an average of 45 item per 10 minutes during 30 minutes. This suggest that in an ideal setup, farmers yield 4 food per 2min40sec, approximately. A bit faster than expected.

Now, to test under-building or over-building tiles, corn and wheat farms with 6/12/18 tiles were used for this analysis, alongside linen farm with 18 tiles. Tiles were not micro-managed, therefore, food production is decreased a bit.
*In these cases, the amount of tiles built are close to, or over, the maximum amount.

Results for 6 tiles:

Results for 12 tiles:

Results for 18 tiles:


Experimental results match with prediction. We see a slight decrease when overbuilding farming tiles. It is not strong enough to say with high confidence that overbuilding is detrimental to production, but we can guess. We hit a maximum food/min production around 4,6 with 12 tiles.

We consider a forester ideally placed, its area of work is entirely available for tree planting and the soil is tree-compatible (i.e. not sand). The forester option to gather drywood is unchecked, therefore they only plant trees.

Hardwood and softwood trees share a similar growth-time pattern. Therefore it does not matter which kind of tree is planted. Trees need 6 minutes to reach the next growth stage for a maximum output of 3 logs after 18 minutes. Similar to crops, when a tree needs water, its growth speed does not decrease.

We want to know how many lumbercamp are needed per ideal forester in order to have the most wood production using as few tools/space as possible.


If the lumbercamp option to gather drywood is unchecked, they only cut trees.
Now, there's another option in lumbercamp that you can check/uncheck, in order for them to only chop down mature trees (last stage of growth). Villager travel-time aside, it should not matter as you get 1 log in 6 minutes or 3 logs in 18 minutes.

Now, when considering villager travel time :
-Forester planting a tree.
-Forester watering a tree: You can count as roughly doubling the time it takes to plant a tree.
-Lumberjack chopping down a tree (10seconds no matter the growth stage).
-Lumberjack goign to a fallen tree cutting a piece of wood and taking it back to the camp.

When focusing on actions taken in the inner half of the area of work, there's an average dead-time per tree of :

• 1min15sec from the forester and 10sec from the lumberjack, unrelated to growth stage.
  
• 45sec from the lumberjack to cut and gather a log, related to growth stage.
  
• 35sec from the lumberjack to pick up drywood, related to growth stage.

For 1 tree, there's a 1min15sec working time for the forester and a 10sec + 45/135sec (logs) + 45/135sec (drywood) working time for the lumberjack.


With timings described previously, we can assume FtoL ratios around:

Assuming the forester to lambercamp ratio is verified, we have an average log/min production per lumbercamp of:

• Building 1 forester for 2 lumbercamp tuned to cut mature trees only (both drywood gathering disabled) will give the best tool efficiency. But you won't have any drywood
  
• Building 1 forester for 4 lumbercamp with drywood gathering enabled and tuned to cut mature trees only will give the best raw production.

For lumbercamp with drywood gathering enabled and tuned to cut mature trees only.

2 lumbercamps activated (0.5 ratio): Not enough lumbercamps.


3 lumbercamps activated (0.33 ratio): Seems almost perfect.
(1st picture after 20minutes, 2nd picture after 40 minutes)


4 lumbercamps activated (0.25 ratio): No mature trees, as expected.


The right ratio seems to lie between 0.25 and 0.33.