Schools

Does anyone know if this is just an event item or will they be able to be bought after the event like other things in the gem box?

Just an event item & really not worth the cost to get.
As to if it will be available after the event as a gem item, who knows... BB does not release this sort of information unless it is about to happen, but my guess is no.

To quote a famous French Lady: "Let them eat cake."

But what does the school do?

I bought one and the production time is 2hrs - that isn't faster than normal population replacement! I used a license to increase my population limit and the replacement time didn't change either i.e. it was about 10 mins to the next settler.

So this just confuses me - I really can't work out what it does, it certainly doesn't cause settlers to be replaced more quickly (not that I can see!).

Personally silos don't impress me too much - these just save some minimal resources in building a new field periodically - I am starting to think I should just sell my pumpkins for whatever I do find useful (gold or adventures perhaps).

Is the village school just a waste of pumpkins?

Population growth is pretty much managed through your Provision House, and the conversion of bread into settlers. You'll get 96 settlers per day, as a base rate, (without the useless bufs), and the school produces 12 more per day. Not worth wasting a buf to accelerate that either. Just focus on bread creation and/or acquisition and you'll make all the settlers you need.

A single silo by itself isn't of much value; their worth lies in quantities. Once you have 50 ~ 60+ farms running, (remember, you need to make a lot of bread, right?), you'll either spend a lot of time rebuilding fields, or investing in 50 ~ 60+ silos to try & balance field consumption. Or even 20+ silos to reduce the number of fields you need to rebuild daily.

Thanks - not up to 50+ farms yet, so I didn't realise what a problem it might be :-)

they need to update the schools so a player can buff and upgrade them.
Then I'd say the 1500 pumpkins i wasted on them is worth it lol

They aren't worth getting.

The latest test server (after ending all Halloween stuff) has the schools for 750-ish gems, with the same limit of 3.
(sorry, not logged in to the test server right now to see the exact cost)

I have different opinion about the school.

Here is my calculation:

For the chain of bakery-mill-farm system.
You need license and land area for 1 bakery + 2 mill + 4 farm (total 7 license building) ,and land area for fields and waters.

(1). For level 5 of this chain, you can create about 2117 breads a day, divide by 25 and you get about 84 settlers if you use these bread to create settlers.

(2). A school can create 12 settlers a day,
Assume we can have unlimited school, we need 7 schools to achieve 84 settlers

If we treat above 2 cases as 2 black box of settler creator that can achieve same goal.
We can compare cost to build these black box:

Box 1 need 7 licenses, material to build them and upgrade all them to level 5, material and time to build and maintain wheat field and well. Material to upgrade 1 building to level 5 : 420 hard wood planks, 550 marble, 450 granite, 800 exotic wood planks,500 gold, which is probably worth about 1300~1400 gold total.

Box 2 need 7 x 500 pumpkins , no maintenance material required.

So it is comparison of
(1) one license + 1300~1400 gold + material and time for wheat field and well
(2) 500 pumpkins, which is probably about 2500~3000 gold


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Now, compare silo and school, (we can safely assume the silo is used in the bread production chain unless you already have too many of them)

The point of silo is to automate the bakery-mill-farm chain, but you can not achieve complete automation with only silo, you still need watermill. To completely automate the level 5 bakery-mill-farm chain , you need 4 level 5 silos + 2 level 5 watermill

But the a school itself function like a 1/7 level 5 auto bakery-mill-farm chain
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Anyway, I think school is pretty good worth of pumpkins and better than silo.