How do refineries work?

[Innovan]

Can anyone explain how refineries work?

I place a grainary silhouette. It lights up several fields nearby with gears. Is that how it works --as an area effect increasing the yield of harvesters in the field? Or do the harvesters have to carry the grain to the grainary?

Are there pathing issues to make sure they work, like placing a grainary on each road between a field and a storehouse? What effect does assigning disciple refiners to a grainary have/what does the productivity number mean?

Also not sure how Lumbermill and Smelters work. Is it good to lift ore rocks to be placed near the smelter? I've not noticed gears lighting up when I place either of these two refiners on the map so far, not sure at all how they work.

 

[Gremxula]

It is all quite complicated to explain but as youve gathered the grain output is much higher with certain combinations of buildings.
I like to place a store on the edge of a productive patch  run a road through the middle, place a granery as far from the store as posible(with 100%) then cluster fields around it.
Ore and wood work in simular ways but you normally don't need to bother with smelters and I never have built a lumber yard from need.

 

[Innovan]

I got a sandbox game working and studied what the villagers do with the 'S' key toggle.

Farmer's path without a grainary in their city is
Go to field (carry sickle graphic)
Go to storehouse (carry pot graphic)

With a grainary their path is
Got to field (carry sickle graphic)
Go to refinery (carry pot)
Got to storehouse (carry pot)

Minimizing their travel path is good if you want your farmers to spend less time walking and more time gathering. As an experiment I tried placing my farm, grainary and storehouse in a large inefficent triangle. Sure enough I had a major freeway of farmers walking a long way out of their way to visit the grainary on their way to the  storehouse, despite the length of time added and the inconvenience.

However, what grainaries appear to do is multiply your grain amount. So a farmer walking into a refinery with 100 grain at 100% effectiveness seems to walk out with 200 grain. I haven't found a way to see how much a villager is actually carrying until they dump it at a storehouse.

Getting the multiplier of your grainary higher can be done a couple of ways, but the easiest is by placing one in the middle of multiple large fields. Each adjacent field adds more to the multiplier of the grainary, and they all seems to multiply across eachother to get higher productivity in general. (the number next to the little gear) The grainary  seems to have a cap of 100% from having large fields adjacent, but this also minimizies the travel path for farmers, particulary if you put down a granary and road first, then lay down the fields.

Once you max out the refinery multiplier at 100% from adjacent fields, staff people actually working at the refinery add further above that. I was getting an additional +11% per person working at the refinery on top of the 100% from adjacent fields/buildings, not sure where this caps out as well.

Haven't researched the differences between using disciples vs people doing jobs of their free will. Still trying to get a better way to look at the amount of grain each farmer carries.

 

[Redhead Goddess]

Well done, Innovan - that is quite comprehensive.

 

[Innovan]

Fields raise productivity of other adjacent fields and of grainarys. (only. Not the lumbermill or the smelter)


Universities boost the productivity of both adjacent fields and refineries the highest.

Granarys, Smelters and Lumbermills all boost eachother's productivity if built near eachother. They also boost eachother's worker capacity by +3 for each building within range when built near eachother. The location of lumbermills and smelters in relation to their resources (trees and ore) does NOT matter. While granaries still do better surrounded by fields, the smelter and lumbermill should be built next to eachother and both surrounded by multiple storage pits, each of which also will boost their productivity. Placing the two together and ringing then with a pentagram or more of storage pits works wonders for boosting productivity.

Prisons also boost productivity, although not as high or as far.
Storage pits boost the productivity of both nearby fields and refineries.
Housing will boost the productivity of refineries and fields (yes, even skyscrapers do) a small amount each, but the refineries themselves make the housing negative happyness. An evil player may want to ring dense slums of hovels around refineries to boost the productivity of these buildings.

Curiously, graveyards boost productivity of both fields and refineries by being adjacent to them. Go figure.

Pubs, baths, amplitheaters all remove productivity of your refineries and fields they are near. Amplitheaters have a huge range of destruction of productivity.

 

[Innovan]

Fields really, really cross over productivity to eachother!

Place a granary in the middle of a fertile plane. Run a road into this.

Then build the minimal size field possible. You should be able to box in the granary with a tight circle of 8 minimal fields. Then do another circle, and another. At the end, hunt around for any empty spots and plop down another minimal field where ever it lets you.

Doing this, I was able to get productivity up to 680+ for the fields, and the Granary to +1020% unstaffed. The fields crossed the productivity bonueses as far as four fields over.  I think in the end I had a 7x7 grid with all 48 fields also boosting the granary.

The only hard part is making sure you have 5-7 storage pits nearby with space to hold all the grain that you'll be making.

Note though that you can only God-hand one field harvest at a time. So while this boosts your people's ability to grow food on their own substationally, it also completely cripples your ability to help them much after the layout is done. For this reason, my first fields are as large as I can drag them to allow god-hand harvesting early in a level in case food runs short and I need to help. Later after there's enough labor I can delete and layer in the minimal size fields to get let them work more productively.

To staff all these small, dense, very productive fields, be sure to ring the land with a road with houses on both sides, which will also add a production bonus to the outer edge of fields. I add the houses with their backs to the field first, then the road, then the houses across the road from the field.  A nursery at the end is useful to make sure these people work the field without babies dragging down their work speed. If you decide to add a tavern as well (It's only wood, so I do), make sure it doesn't light up the gear of the granary when placed, or else you'll be reducing the granary productivity multiplier.

Fortunately pubs only reduce the productivity of refineries, not fields. But it only increases the happiness of each house in its radius, so placing at the ends the way I do is actually suboptimal. That's just the only place I usually have space left.