Villagers will only satisfy their needs for food and goods from the market stalls,

when building a market, you can choose to continue expanding the same "building", but it's not mandatory even when you get to the "great market hall" - this is legacy system from before the full release - in early access, you would post a pole and build the market around it - that was how the market was built,

- the advantage is you can manage multiple stalls/products and the vendors (called Market Tenders) in one click on any of the stalls that make the part of the build,
- but it's also a disadvantage - what if you want to swap the product in a specific stall when you have multiples of them arranged in a certain way (I had 8 stalls of four products and after the initial build with no specific order I wanted to make them have the same product in stalls facing each other, but it was impossible to figure out which line corresponded to which stall due to how it was built and moved after...)

Now it is just like any other multipart building - you can construct it as you like and as many of it as you like in as many locations as you like,


Picture from game 2



another picture from game 2

- You would want a market setup in a central location to housing because the villagers will visit it when on free time and not resting at home (see section about villager needs optimisation)


Examples of a market in a central location of town (game 1 after rebuild)



you want to make sure to include a granery for the food products to be close by to the market so the tenders don't have long to go to get products for the stalls

For a better patrol coverage - build several small watchtower type manors and populate each with one patroller because, if they are part of the same building section they form one party (I think that's because of how it is in the kingdom path where you have companies which are considered one unit and always go everywhere together so probably the same mechanic was used for patrollers)



one watchtower building is attached to the main building








and a second one tucked inside of it attached to an encore point that is not on the edge of the structure so it looks like a half-extantion








a watchtower built on the wall and gate

Villagers will want to have a home close to their workplace because there was no mode of transportation in those times, so consider that, but more importantly, they will also want to have services, entertainment and food (church, pub/tavern, market) in proximity so you might want to cluster housing and workplaces near each other and also plan for services close.

As far as I can tell, most towns in that time period were built inside a walled and gated area that not only included housing, but also a church, market and tavern in the same cluster and it seems the game is planned for that to be the case as well. so you want to build one long, wide or large settlement with smaller clusters of housing+service+entertainment+food or multiple small ones separated with job sites and other buildings (or just empty fields of green space) - there is no requirement for proximity between clusters of houses as long as all the needs are covered for each (remember that you also want to tax them and provide patrols - those are also buildings that need proximity to housing and other buildings)

Before starting a big construction - a towering castle, a big citadel, a grand church, you want to prepare by building the support buildings for that construction - a builders hut, a warehouse and maybe even living quarters (housing) for them,

This will allow for a faster building time, if you allow for the resources and ample builders to be placed there,

A plan to construct a mighty castle to overlook the town and glorify the king



the construction support site includes a builders hut, a warehouse and a house for builders. there is even an iron miners shack for iron on the far left to increase iron production capacity because I was expecting high demand for iron for the castle structures