Chained Crafting Buildings

Brandmeister wrote: Good point. 6 for each one, then. Isn't a month over 10000 spears or 5000 armor? Quite a lot of one specific item. I was thinking more in the 500-1000 range for batch sizes, only a day or three at the speeds on my chart. I had planned on using an architect's office, not prestige, since I intended to build up and tear down so often. But 3 to finish levels 11/12 could still be worthwhile.

Brandmeister wrote: Remember to include the standard building as well, since the crafting buildings depend on it. You are using two standard buildings, so that's 6 slots to my 5. Your method will result in crafting at a higher speed; mine frees up the second item production building for normal usage. Both methods have pros and cons. I am not sure if I can agree that a level 12 specialized crafting building is sufficiently quick to set up and tear down. It depends on the size of the typical batch, and how often you want to vary the mix. How long are your usual item runs? Do you use prestige to finish the specialized building more quickly?

I'm using a slightly different approach.  Instead of using 4 building plots in one city, I use 2.  I have one unspecialized building at level 20 and build a specialized  building to level 12 which is still easily swappable.  For spears that gives 11.67 compared to your 17.02.  Doing it in two cities though uses the same plots you're using in one and produces 23.34.

When I started crafting, I had hoped to make it economically viable. Since then, I've come to regard crafting as a labor of love in Illyriad. You're right, I don't know that I could run the crafting queues 24x7 without running short of materials. I might just pick a particular type of equipment or two, build to 2x20 (30 effective) plus a 5+4 kicker, and see if that resembles a viable approach to crafting. I do think that reasonable market offers exist for certain types of items, but I don't know if there would be much ongoing business at any meaningful volume*. That's why I wanted to generate speed with considerable flexibility.

(* Except for certain very useful, high demand items like pikes, reinforced leather, boar spears, and so forth. Perhaps I could fill empty queue time with those.)

Verified with three generic leather armorers at 4,3,2. Kickers at 1,1. The effective base rate was 6.188. 4+(3/2)+(2/4)+(1/8)+(1/16)=6.1875. Specialist building level was 1.5: 22.5%. The final rate displayed was 2.29 units/hour of overpadded leather armor.

Base rate of 1.64 * 1/(1-(6.188*0.02)) * 1.225 = 2.29

So the math works. Technically this can scale to 3x20=35 (effective) exactly as proposed. Whether or not the approach is valid for crafting flexibility is a matter of opinion, but I'd like to hear those opinions.