Trade & Logistics Guide
Town to City looks relaxed, but messy logistics quietly kills growth. When markets, homes, and workshops are too far apart, your citizens spend their time walking instead of producing. The cleanest cities use short warehouse hops, obvious commercial corridors, and trade routes that move surplus out before storage jams become a hidden tax on every district.
The right way to think about logistics is not “how many carts do I have?” but “how many unnecessary trips did I design into the city?” If one bakery pulls grain across town, then sends bread back across the same route, you built a beautiful bottleneck. Good logistics is city planning discipline made visible.
- Keep warehouses close to production clusters instead of one huge universal storage block.
- Let markets sit where housing density is already high so delivery distance stays short.
- Open trade routes when a surplus is stable, not when a single lucky harvest tricks you.
- Separate heavy industry from food routes so slow carts do not crowd daily essentials.
Best City Flow Pattern
The safest pattern is production → nearby storage → nearby processing → nearby market. Every extra district hop increases labor waste. If a chain touches more than two transport layers before the product reaches citizens, it is probably too stretched for the current stage of the city.