One day I woke up and got a mail from our friendly Hafsen:
This will best explain.

Your setup is like this: Each number represents your placement and walking times to the storehouse of your settlers.

14 10 10 10 14
10 6 St 6 10
14 10 10 10 14
16 18 16
17 buildings at 188 total time

By moving to this

12 8 8 12
14 10 6 S 6 10 14
12 8 8 12
14 8 8 14

18 buildings at 184 or your can take away one of the 14 seconds buildings at it would be 17 buildings at 170 saving you 18 seconds of time total which is a lot for this game. or drop down to 16 buildings at 156. The idea is make use of the most efficent spaces first.... if you only use the 10 8 and 6 second spaces all over your map your total time with decrease DRASTICALLY.

In short you can do either 8 buildings in a square or 10 buildings in a hexagon shape improving your times
I decided to show exactly what he meant with pictures!

But before that, let me quickly explain a something unwritten:
Each flag is 2 seconds of travel time, and there is a flag for each 1 road piece. So measurement of buildings for the sake of Flag, Travel Times and Roads would be 1 road block squared (the smallest square possible formed with a road).

Storehouse Placement
This is the standard suggested build, I recommend you get this beehive hexagon pattern in your mind, as it's simple to build with.

The following is an explanation of WHY this is the best, as well as building placements for farms/silos.

The point of this build is: minimize travel time, thus maximizing the amount of production per day.

This is the typical "square box" pattern that people usually recommend. It's very simple, looks organized... but wait

Those are the travel times to get to each place. In total it provides these travel times:
2* 6 second
8* 10 seconds
2* 12 seconds (recommended if you start buying BL and prefer to have under 125k storage)
9* 14 seconds (not recommended)

This may not look so bad, however this is the optimal building placement, and this whole page will be explaining why.

If you can already see the benefits of this build pattern, what are you waiting for? Go and do it!


However, many of you might question it. Let me explain the total travel time in comparison.
2* 6 seconds
4* 8 seconds
2* 10 seconds
6* 12 seconds (recommended if you start buying BL and prefer to have under 125k storage)
4* 14 seconds (not recommended)

This is definitely the most effective way to use storehouses lingering about, there should never be a reason for you to build a storehouse simply to get more storage space.


As for Farm/Silo combinations near your storehouse, here are some optimal build patterns surrounding the Hex-placement.



This one is one of the most optimal, as it provides 6 spots under 40 seconds travel time


A lot may wonder why I don't use the 24 second production right next to the storage. When you make a farm/silo combo, you would want to make sure that both travel times are the same. If you have a bigger production time on Farms, you have to constantly re-build wheatfields. If you have a bigger production time on Silos, you are wasting space that could be used for other buildings.


These are other optional ones with a layout of combo, the different circles show the combos.
Remember, these building placements are symmetrical from the left to the right side. However top to bottom changes as the first flag (travel time) from the storage starts at the bottom of the storage.

> Wheatfield on the Top
> The Extended Bridge

Watermill and Friary
The two buildings that have an exceptional rule to building placement would be the Watermill and Friary.

They have their building entrance on the left side, so it would always be wise to place the buildings on the right side of your storehouse. Any placement to the left would add 4 second travel time (8 total)

Building Sizes
As explained at the beginning, measurement for buildings will be a Road Length ^2 (road squared).
Some pictures to help explain that will be here:
Size 4 2x2
Size 6 2x3
Size 9 3x3

[COLOR="rgb(0, 0, 0)"][COLOR="rgb(139, 0, 0)"]Trivia Question: can you guess how many Road Squared fits inside the Dark Castle?[/COLOR][/COLOR]


There are five different kinds of buildings when it comes to placement.
The first that was explained in the previous post, is the storehouse. The entire planning of 3 of the next buildings will be explained right here.

The next three buildings contain the Self-Harvest, Harvester and a Production building.

The Self Harvest
These buildings include: Well, Copper Mine, Iron Mine, Coal Mine and Gold Mine.

The self-harvest basically means that it collects from a Deposit, however the deposit is in itself. It has one of the shortest travel times in the game since it only has a [Storehouse -> Workyard and Workyard -> Storehouse] per production cycle.

Harvester
These buildings include: Stone Mason, Marble Mason, Pinewood/Hardwood Cutters, Pinewood/Hardwood Foresters, Farm, Fishery, Hunter, Silo

The harvester buildings all collect (or replenish) a Deposit. The time traveled to a deposit is indicated by the Yellow Flag. This is why the tutorial would advise you to put the building as close to the deposit as possible, because it doesn't matter how far it is from just the storehouse, but the combination of it's distance to the storehouse and the distance to the deposit.

Production Building
These buildings include: any other building that produces anything.

These buildings basically just multiply the travel time by 4, since:
Storehouse -> Workyard = travel time
Work Preperation = travel time
Cleanup = travel time
Workyard -> Storehouse = travel time.
(Travel Time) x 4
However, even if a building requires resources from another production building, it will ALWAYS pick up from the storehouse. This game has no storage for production buildings!
As the picture shows, there is no Yellow Flag between the coinage and the gold smelter




The next building would be what I call
These buildings include: everything else, including decorations.
Standalone Buildings

This building has no specific placement, so it can be placed anywhere that is out of the way. In a sense these buildings kind of work like decorations, as they have no effect on any other building other than the space they take up.