Chained Crafting Buildings

I have been considering how to do efficient crafting on large numbers of items, while still supporting some degree of flexibility. One approach I have considered is 35+specialize. Three level 20 general crafting buildings of the same type are used to provide an effective level of 35 for crafting any item of that type. (35 = 20 + (20/2) + (20/4), since each building is half as effective as the next biggest one. Since basic crafting only advances at 2% per level, not 4.5% like regular buildings, the base item speed curve doesn't really kick in until an effective level of 35 (see Table 1).

Once the basic crafting speed is established, then a fourth building of much lower level is specialized to be the performance 'kicker'. Two kicker buildings can be used to gain +15% and +7.5% bonuses per level, respectively. A single level 7 building will double crafting speed, and two level 7 buildings will increase speed by 2.58x.

This approach allows the specialized fourth (and maybe fifth) buildings to be quickly demolished and rebuilt to accelerate a new crafted item. The drawback is that each city must dedicate four or five building slots to a specific category of crafted items: spears, swords, bows, leather, chain, plate. However, I believe this approach would be effective at meeting market opportunities for crafted items, especially for active traders.






Edited by Brandmeister - 11 Aug 2014 at 03:31

That's exactly what the first chart says. In order to get 35 effective levels, it's 3x20 buildings. Each successive crafting building is half as effective as the last one. Your 20/10/5 of leather armorer buildings would be 20+(10/2)+(5/4) = 26.25 effective base levels.

I will edit it to read effective level, and clarify that the building levels are all 20.

I do not see the benefit, though. I assume that you want the same return for those armourers (or whatever) as for any other building, since building space is a limiting factors in a city. I have problems keeping a single level 20 building busy all the time for want of raw materials. You must do a lot of harvesting to be able to feed one of those L35-equivalent cities. And to make it cost effective you would need a rather high market demand. 

I have begun implementing this approach in one of my crafting cities. I will start with swords, then spears, and see how that works.

This does seem to be a more tolerable approach than maintaining crafting buildings in several different cities. Chained together with 3x20, the buildings function like 3.3 individual crafting queues. This allows me to use the buildings in my other cities to produce standard items. I may try to push all the way to 4x20 of things are going well, to mimic 4 crafting queues.

The downside is that I won't have many typical buildings in that crafting city. But all my others will be standard now.