I want to understand how production works and the associated costs of interrupting work in progress by reassigning a worker.
I assume that the moment a worker begins production (e.g. a blacksmith producing heavy weapons), the resources (15 iron bars and 8 coal) are consumed. If you disrupt a worker during one of these production cycles, then the resource cost allocated during the incomplete production cycle are not refunded. Is my understanding accurate?
Another way this might work is that when a worker finishes a production cycle, the resources are consumed at the moment of completion. In this case, you would not lose any resources if work in progress is disrupted.
There are currently 3 methods that manually disrupt a worker’s production cycle:
- Toggle Building Production from the Building UI (hammer and pick axe icon)
- Reduce Occupancy from the Buildling UI (- symbol in the occupancy section)
- Manually Reduce the number of workers assigned to a specific Profession from the Profession UI (- symbol on the individual profession)
In my testing, it appears that none of the 3 methods of disruption return any resources. I also noticed that when a worker completes a cycle of production at the blacksmith, the resource storage for the building does not decrease.
If the game is coded for you to pay upfront, and you disrupt the work, all of those resources are lost. The optimal way to manage this would be to manually set a production limit to match the current stock total so that a new cycle does not begin, and once all of the workers at the building have completed their work cycles and go to idle / cannot work, you reassign the worker.
So how does this work? Are resources for production consumed upfront, upon completion, or some other way?