When my village reaches 500-600 citizens, i start running into the next problem:
i build housing and facilities clumped together (like a village), with farms, orchards and grazing around the outside, so workers have a minimal commute.
Heavy industry is clumped together in a second village beside the first one so desirability debuffs dont effect the houses, but workers can easily reach their jobs.
After about 500-600 villagers, you basically have to start up a second location / housing center or relocate your existing farms / barns to grow your housing footprint.
With two centers, food production and storage becomes kind of unmanagable. Either you have to build farms right beside your new hub, that will suffice the needs of that location, or marketplace workers will be running their legs off trying to move goods from the main village to their marketplace.
I noticed this most clearly when i had 600+ firewood in store, and the villagers outside of town started freezing to death because their fully manned marketplace (with shoes and baskets and paved road) could not transport enough food and firewood to keep those villagers alive.
Adding a seperate stockyard for wood and a local woodsplitter would turn the second village into a target for raiders so i prefer to keep my production centralised. (also wood from the trading post would not help the second hub)
Adding a seperate, local food storage makes food unmanagable: grain needs to be stored near mills, preservists need ingredients nearby not halfway across the map. Plus farmers will make very illogical delivery choices - travelling halfway around the world to drop off a handful of beans when there is available storage much closer by.
Possible solution: maybe carts could supply the marketplaces like they do temporary shelters ? That way a fully manned marketplace could supply the needs of their customers even if the storage is far away.
Maybe carts can be used to stock all kinds of buildings? If a building is suffering from low productivity because a lot of time is used transfering goods, maybe an option to assign a cart to its supply chain?
Sorry for long post, will try to farm some potatoes.
this is the correct answer. Much easier to move Idk half a dozen farms (assuming youve planned well and have a years worth of food stored up) than have two towns? I dont even understand the rationale there because of all the issues youve brought up. And everything can be disassembled with at least half the costs recouped. Although typically I’m just salvaging walls and nothing else.
I tend to plan my towns along a central block strip that leads either E-W or N-S from the town centre (depending on the terrain), in that central strip will be the buildings that are neutral to desirability but produce something, as well as the storage buildings. And to one or other side will be the low desirability industry buildings and the other will be residential blocks with their desirability boosting structures/services. I build one wall around everything, typically starting with wood later in the 2nd tier phase and then upgrading to stone in the third tier phase.
As I expand the town I just go in the direction that follows the central strip so that I can expand both industry and residential areas seamlessly. And generally of course I will have placed my food production buildings outside the walls in the directions I wont be expanding until much later. Maybe late in the game I might expand just the residential and/or industrial half outwards for another block. This keeps everything moving fairly efficiently.
Occasionally I will require additional storage buildings placed in the industrial side kept stocked with a minimum of some specific resource for a particular industry, but thats typically only a late or end stage game consideration.
I used to just use the 4 barracks one at each main direction centre gate but then someone here reminded me that a barracks with just a few garrisoned soldiers was basically acting like a machine gun so I’ve switched to gradually placing barracks around the walls, outside of them and surrounded by walls themselves with a gate to get into the city and perhaps one gate to access outside the town walls to the side. Generally though its better without any outward facing gates since they are weaker and if they broach the walls then I can release the soldiers inside to destroy say a ram or whatever.
Hmmm nope, as per what I understand from your post, these issues arise because the lack of proper town design / planning on your part.
In fact, they have implemented so many QoL mechanics now, that is players fault if they have bad logistics.
To all Storage buildings you can set minimums and maximums of each resource or item they can store. That includes even the markets.
You can set min and max quotas of production for each one of your buildings too, so you can make sure you always have a good pool of laborers and also enough people for each building at the same time.
You can relocate any and all buildings or salvage half their resources. Your markets should have all 4 villagers allocated when your town grows, but 500+ population is not a big town by any measure, a middle town at most.
If you like, you can try this city planner for the game, it helps a lot when designing the next build in your game: Farthest Frontier Planner - Gamer Digest
This will help you solve your logistic issue.
I always play with 4 market districts, with 32 houses around each market, for a total of 1024 population (still not a big town) and logistics is the least of my problems/worries, hope the planner helps you as much as it helped me.
I do try to build a repeating pattern, but often find that terrain (especially water) interrupts expansion at some point.
Whatever happens, I doubt a 1000+ population is realistic for me, as my PC starts humming like a beehive by the time I hit 600 and only gets angrier (and choppier) as more growth takes place.
Whatever happens, I doubt a 1000+ population is realistic for me, as my PC starts humming like a beehive by the time I hit 600 and only gets angrier (and choppier) as more growth takes place.