What's the point of a brickyard?

[mklangelo]

I have brickyards strategically placed near my building areas but the bricklayers continue to walk all the way to the brickmakers.

What's up?

Thanks in advance!

MK

[Yahya]

Brickyards get allocated some portion of the number of bricks you have in inventory at certain intervals. I believe it is every day at 3:00 PM, or something like that.

So let's say you have 100 bricks in inventory (at your various brickmakers). Here's what will happen if you place X brickyards:

1 Brickyard: all 100 bricks will get put there at the update time
2 brickyards: 50 bricks each
4 brickyards: 25 bricks each

and so on.

This is cool, because you can place a brickyard next to a cult temple site, for example, and all the bricks in inventory will get put there, up to its maximum inventory level (which I believe is quite high, like 250 or so, but I am not sure).

How this works in practice, as as such:

You place a brickyard next to a site, and bricks get transferred there.

You place the site.

Bricklayers leave their homes to get bricks at the closest available source. If their homes are directly next to the brickmakers, they will go to them first.

They take bricks to the site and put them down. If the building has enough bricks, the last bricklayer will start building. If not, and they have no other tasks to perform (health, worship, etc.), they will then go to the closest site (the brickyard) to get more bricks.

That makes the construction MUCH faster.

Once the site is done, you can place a brickyard next to your next planned site. And then - get this - you can delete the first brickyard and all its bricks will get automatically transferred to the new brickyard.

If you delete the last brickyard, I think they go back to the brickmakers, but you might lose them.

If your bricklayers are going to the brickmakers, it is either because they are the closest site or there are no bricks in the brickyard.

[mklangelo]

Thanks, Yahya.

Nope. All the yards had bricks and they layers were walking all the way down the hill when there were bricks very near the building site.

Oh well.

[Yahya]

Then something else is wrong. Someone else must know that one. I'm not sure.

There's no reason why a bricklayer should walk past a brickyard to get bricks, unless he's first going somewhere else that is down by the brickmaker.

That doesn't make any sense.

[Tinkerbell]

This sounds like another case of a player noticing something that doesn't really happen, like a player claiming that a citizen is ignoring a full bakery.

The game is based upon what happend the moment a citizen leaves home or leaves a worksite. You cannot draw conclusions from watching the end of a process. You must see the beginning.

Brick Layers goto the closest source of bricks. Once they drop off the bricks they are carrying, they will again goto the closest source of bricks, which should now be your brickyard. Bricklayers also go home to sleep, shop, get services.

Also, bricks are redistributed at exactly 3 PM every day.

Brickyards need to be micro-managed to get the best results. Too many brickyards, and you can have problems. Layers far from brickyards, also problems.

Brickyards are great, but you have to use them properly. You might think they are something they are not.

Remember, this is not Classic CBing, like Pharaoh. COTN is realistic. The best thing to do is use the tracking icons above a citizen's display & follow him. It will help you to understand why your people do the things they do. They are constantly making all kinds of decisions & their priorities might not be your priorities.

[Yahya]

One tool I use all the time to see what is going on, particularly with bricklayers, is to select them and hold down the left SHIFT key. It then shows their location and a straight-line path to their destination.

When they are going to get bricks, it will show a spot from where they are, to where they are going to pick up the bricks, back to the site they are taking the bricks to.

That helps me figure out what's going on all the time.

[Alizeefan]

I noticed something strange today. I'm building a remote camp with overseeërs and a priest etc....I placed a brickyard close to the camp so the bricklayers don't have to walk to far for bricks. I watched it for 10 minutes and nothing got build. After a while i saw some bricklayers taking bricks from that brickyard and transporting them to the brickworkers home's in the city. Some of them have over 100 bricks in store. So instead of bringing bricks from the brickworks to the building place they bring them to the brickworks.

[Keith]

It usually doesn't pay to have more than one brickyard just for that reason. Your best bet is to build one near the construction site. If you want another one build it next to that one.

When the construction is done and you start a new project in another part of the city, place a new yard next to that site. Then delete the old brickyard. The bricks in the old brickyard will automatically be transferred to the new one.

I think the brickyard is replenished with new bricks from the brickmaker sometime around 3pm each day.

[evilbill-agqx]

This is cool, because you can place a brickyard next to a cult temple site, for example, and all the bricks in inventory will get put there, up to its maximum inventory level (which I believe is quite high, like 250 or so, but I am not sure).

More like 700, I think, give or take. There was a thread about maximum brickyard capacity a while back and I know I've had brickyards in my cities that contain over 600 bricks.