Resource Travel Times: Fine Tuning

While I have seen several posts which give travel times from work yards to storehouses, I haven't seen anything that discusses the travel times from work yards to resource deposits -- so I thought I would start one.

By placing a wheat field in different locations around a farm house, I found the following travel times between the farm and the wheat field (in one direction only):

Field directly in front of farm: 4 seconds
Directly beside farm: 8 seconds
Directly behind farm: 12 seconds

Field diagonally in front of farm: 8 seconds
Diagonally behind: 12 seconds

Field off-set by half a lot in front (i.e. Hex Pattern): 6 seconds
Off-set by half a lot behind: 10 seconds

Field two whole lots in front of farm: 8 seconds

All of the times listed above are consistent with a travel time of 2 seconds between 2 points of the grid: For example, in the case of the wheat field directly in front of the farm, the worker must travel for 2 seconds from the center of the work yard to the front door of the work yard, and then 2 seconds from the edge of the wheat field to the center.

There appears to be an exception to these travel times: I placed a fir wood cutter so that a resource point with fir wood was located directly at the work yard's front door. I would have expected the travel time to be only 2 seconds, since the distance between the center of the work yard, and the resource point was only one grid point apart. However, the travel time actually came out to be 6 seconds. I destroyed the work yard, and then placed it so that the front door was separated from the resource point by one space on the grid. Somehow, by placing the building FARTHER away, the travel time to the point was decreased to the expected 4 seconds. Go figure.

The value of considering travel times to resources may allow some fine-tuning of production times. Many players, for instance, will place a block of 8 farm building in a square around a storehouse, with wheat fields in a larger square around the entire unit. With this arrangement, 5 of the farms have another building directly in front of them in which would really be the ideal place to set a wheat field. The farm directly behind the storehouse must travel the farthest to get to the wheat field directly behind it. Simply switching the location of that farm house with the wheat field directly behind it cuts 8 seconds off of the total production time, even though the farm building is now farther away from the storehouse.

While there is nothing earth-shattering here to make people run out and drastically redesign their entire cities in a panic, a few people, by playing around with some different building arrangements, might find that they can squeeze one or two extra buildings into a production unit and still maintain their overall production rate, or perhaps squeeze a production unit into a smaller, oddly shaped area, that they might not have considered before.

Farms and hunters operate efficiently with the meat or field below them with the storage above. Because of this the two sides which are the best locations for non gatherer buildings are open. You can build a 5 farm under a storage array with 5 open slots above and to the side of the storage (2 24secs and 3 40secs). I've spent alot of time scrutinizing building times and efficiency. It really makes a huge difference especially the higher level your stuff gets and if its buffed or not.

Cutters are a bit different. There are some amazing cutter builds out there that allow more cutters then foresters while maintaining a forest or 1:1 in the case of hardwood. As to how people created those builds hats off to them