This is very helpful in the early game for getting an economy up quickly to keep pace with Beryl. It isn't perfect, nor even the best way to do things -- your island is going to look trashy; there will be lots of wasted space; you will experience imperfect need satisfaction among your populace. Still, I say again that it is invaluable to have a workable modular layout like this that you can just copy and paste in the beginning when you're racing against the clock, early in the game.

Remodel later when you have more time for a leisurely pace of development -- like, after you contain or destroy Beryl.

Honestly kind of unhelpful if every island were giant squares without rivers, maaaaybe but I felt this was really lacking.

I tend to always build farms along rivers as you can easily match the jagged shape with the single tile fields for maximum land efficency.

79Maliboo its the difference between coupling and cohesion in system designs. Just because you can does not mean you should. As complexity grows coupling will have larger and larger side effects.

In software this is called technical debt and it accrues interest extremely fast. But the same principle applies to many other systems. You will end up getting lost and confused once coupling has reached a certain point

This is generally what people experience when things are "not modular". You move one sheep pen isolated by itself and that does not seem like a big deal, then all of a sudden your entire production chain crumbles and you cant figure out why, then go bankrupt while you are scratching your head trying to add some convoluted band-aid that will come back to bite you later.

Not sure how much of this information is applicable? Town centers, yea, production centers no. Optimization of space depends 1 on the shape of the land. 2. Only the item being put into the space. There's no advantage (other than unions, which most of these dont show) to forcing everything into a small area. If its in a warehouse it magically transports across the island. Optimization of districts, rather than production areas, is paramount imo. factories in one district, homes in another.

I'm also really bad at the game so take my question with a grain of salt.

Production chain image is from beta version, what do you think? This is fine for pathfinding, how much space you need/how many warehouses - but they all lack firehouses and there's atleast twice as many production chains in the game now - and the games real charm is asking players to come up with their own designs and solutions, just have at it and see what you end up with.

Still relevant in 2021?

Bright Harvest adds new additions to your farms, silos (which use grain (old world) or corn (new world) to boost productivity of ranches) or tractors (which requires oil so you can produce fuel which is fed to tractors, used to boost productivity of ALL your plantations/farms). These produce a significant boot to your farm output (with 200% output being the more common number)...

How does bright harvest make this obsolete?

With the Bright Harvest DLC, this is obsolete. Then there is the fact that ALL buildings are vulnerable to fire and riots, not just the housing.