Guide to Buildings
This guide was taken from settlers2.net with permission!
A regular Worker becomes a specialist worker if there is a required tool available. The specialist for each building is contained within parantheses as is the tool required by the specialist.
The smallest buildings which can be built almost everywhere except mountains, snow, swamps and lava (as much as that might suprise you!).
A woodcutter cuts any tree that his axe can hit. There are a few trees too tough for the axe, pine apples for an example. Woodcutter is also unable to walk to impassable snow or swamp, where there occasionally may be a few trees. He won’t go too far so you better have a forester nearby to plant more trees.
A forester plants new trees. This means he eventually creates forests unless the trees are chopped down. This unique ability can be used to create protective buffer zones against enemy players who are too strong to be dealt with.
A balanced ratio of woodcutters and foresters is 6 to 2. This will keep woodcutters at 100%.
You should avoid having a forester too close of a farm, otherwise the forester may plant trees where a farmer would like to have a field!
Usually there is granite all over the map. Stonemason makes nice stones, consuming granite in the process. Eventually the map runs out of granite and there is only that much construction material availabe.
Fisher keeps fishing the coasts until no more fish can be found. Nature’s resources are limited!
Hunter keeps hunting animals as long as any wild animals can be found in the nearby territory.
Two soldiers provide a minimal protection against enemy invasion. However barracks is ideal for quick expansion as building it requires only two items of boards. The territory claimed by barracks is minimal, but often will do very well considering how quick a barracks can be built.
NOTE! Barracks is the least efficient building to upgrade your soldiers. Carefully consider whether you wish to allow Gold coins to be spent in your barracks and guardhouses! It is possible to disallow this.
A step up from barracks, a guardhouse takes much longer to build and requires three stones in addition to the two sets of boards. However the building only houses three soldiers, and since a watchtower only requires one boards and one stone more you may consider carefully which building to build.
Provides intelligence and warnings on enemy activities, making more area visible around your borders. This building may be very useful in situations where you know your enemy is more powerful than you as you can use a forester to block the enemy’s way while lookout tower reports of any enemy activity that still may come through, giving you extra time to think what to do.
You can find water almost everywhere on most maps. A geologist will bother you with found water up to the point you are utterly bored to see the message in the post office window.
Most often a good place to have a well is as close to storehouse as possible, as most often you produce more water than you need. If you intentionally keep water balanced then it is a good idea to have it close to bakeries, breweries, pig farms and donkey breeders.
Medium sized buildings that fit in most open spaces.
This building is one that you want to complete as quickly as possible. Three sawmills is a very good startup amount that will often make sure you always have enough boards available for building. Roughly ten woodcutters is enough to keep all three sawmills at full production. Remember you don’t need to build all ten woodcutters in one go and you can start building just two sawmills at first.
There is nothing spectacularly special about this building. Just make sure it is close enough to a pig farm and not too far away from mines or a storehouse. One slaughterhouse per pig farm is enough, although it doesn’t hurt to have one extra pig farm compared to the amount of slaughterhouses.
A good amount of mills is the number of bakeries.
Keep this building close to a mill or a storehouse. Distance to the mines shouldn’t be too big either to keep the transportation of bread efficient.
This building processes iron ore to iron. A recommended amount of iron smelters is the amount of metalworks and armories combined.
Metalworks produces the tools you need to have more specialist workers. Often having just one is enough. You may also wish to set transporting priorities so that metalworker has stuff to do: normally armory is prioritized over metalworks.
Armorer builds more swords and shields for your new soldiers.
Mint is a very important military building as it provides the funding of the training of your soldiers. You might think having a mint close to a fortress is a good idea, but remember any tool or resource transported by your worker will be lost permanently upon enemy soldier closing by, and you may even lose your fortress, in which case you really want to have your mint somewhere else.
Shipwright builds your boats and ships. Most often you don’t really need boats as they are quite inferior routes, only able to transport goods, the distance of a boat route is limited while still being so long you easily end up having a traffic jam if you’re too dependant of a boat route.
Beer. Soldiers need beer. But only when recruited. Nobody wants to die voluntarily, but once they have your name on the paper you only live, and die, to serve your home nation.
Make sure all your shields, swords and beer end up in the same place. You can disallow any storehouse you wish to receive any further item and people of your choice. You can use the "collect all" feature, to collect all three wares in one storehouse.
Having more places to store your goods and inhabitants is important for one core reason: transportation times. When doing fine in the game you will eventually have more production than you have consumption, which means everything is transported to the closest storehouse. Likewise, when starting a new construction project it is better to get the materials from a nearby storehouse than from your headquarters that may be over half a map away!
A good place to train your soldiers as well as fair amount of protection, watchtower is a good building to build whenever building a fortress may be too costly or there is no space available. In some tactical situations when you have the building speed advantage you may be able to crush enemy buildings under construction simply with the good radius of border expansion the watchtower provides. A watchtower builds almost as fast as a guardhouse, yet much slower than a barracks.
The ultimate defensive weapon, a catapult takes aim and attempts to kill enemy soldiers and military buildings consuming stone in the process. A catapult is not the most balanced structure in the game. When placing a catapult one has to carefully consider which buildings the enemy is likely to attack first in case of an invasion. Also, multiple catapults at good distances of each other will make enemy’s life very difficult.
It is possible to avoid losing soldiers to catapults simply by destroying an occupied military building. At that point it is even ideal to wait for a catapult to shoot, as this will consume enemy stone for nothing.
These minerals are very important in ensuring the growth of your specialized workers as well as expanding your military might.
Unless near enemy territory, it does not make sense to have more than a few gold mines at a time as otherwise you’d also need to have a lot of mints and coal mines. Near enemy territory it is better to consume minerals as fast as possible as this reduces the amount of minerals your enemy may gain access to in case of successfully conquering your territory.
Iron ore is a very requested resource, although it must first be processed to iron in iron smelter. You need iron to build tools and weapons, which are both crucial in specializing your workers.
If iron is a requested resource, coal is very much so. You can’t process gold or iron ore without coal, let alone make weapons, which nearly triples the demand in comparison to gold and iron ore.
In case you run low on granite deposits available on field, a granite mine may be your savior.
The biggest buildings available, castles need and consume a lot of space. It also takes a fair amount of time to construct these buildings.
You need a lot of farms. Whenever you don’t need anything else, you probably want to build farms. There is often not enough space available and so these buildings make sure you need to expand and sometimes chop down entire forests just to be able to see all those nice grain fields appearing around a farm.
Also, make sure those farmer-hated foresters don’t come close! Foresters are very keen to plant trees where-ever there is space available and that does include the surroundings of a farm. Atleast foresters don’t plant their trees in the middle of a growth season…
Meat. Just give grain and water and the pigs are happy.
Donkeys are the extra transport you often want to have. They double the rate of flag-to-flag transportation, being very important for your core routes.
The charburner works nearly like the farmer but instead of grain fields he builds some piles which he lits then. After a while the pile stops smoking and the charburner will get some coal by dismantling the pile.
NOTE! This is an addon building, you need to enable it in RttR!
NOTE! The charburner needs more space for a pile than the farmer for a field!
NOTE! The charburner is less effective than a mine (by given time and food amount)
Ships can only be loaded and unloaded in a harbor. Expeditions and exploration expeditions can also be prepared here.
This building acts like a headquarters as it also pushes borders and has the ability to store a reserve and use soldiers for defense.
The mightiest of the mighty and hardest to conquer, fortress is the ultimate structure in which to train your soldiers. For this reason it is also the most construction materials consuming and longest building structure in the game. Gold coins are hardly wasted in a fortress as at best four soldiers upgrade with just one coin! A perfectionist can make optimal usage of a fortress and after few initial coins will always gain the best upgrade value for each gold coin.
