The Value of Education - How Good Is A Village School?
Village schools produce settlers, so they effectively replace some of your bread production chains that you would otherwise need (of course, you will need bread for buffs etc. and you don't want to only use schools anyway). But how much is each school worth?
If you keep a school running 24/7 and never hit your pop cap because you do enough adventures with enough losses, and the school is upgraded to level 5, then that is (2 hours per 5 settlers) * (24 hours per day) = 60 settlers/day.
Each settler costs 25 bread to produce if you make him in your provision house, and would take just over 20 seconds (assuming you make bandits, which are the fastest per settler, and that you have a level 5 provision house). 60 settlers will save you a little over 20 minutes, so 3 village schools is worth about an hour of provision house time per day.
60 settlers will also save you 60 * 25 = 1500 bread per day. One bakery with a low travel time produces about 900 bread/12 hours, so 1800 bread per day. 3 schools is worth 4500 bread, which is about 2.5 bakeries worth (or slightly more than an improved bakery).
You also save on farms, mills and wells/watermills. One normal bakery takes about 1.5 mills to supply it with flour, and each mill takes about 2 farms to supply it with wheat. That's 3 farms per bakery. In total that makes 5.5 building licenses needed per bakery, including the bakery license itself. You need 7-8 wells to keep your bakery supplied with water, or about 1.75 watermills. Unless you invest in watermills and silos, you have to rebuild wells and fields as part of your bread supply chain.
Using improved farms/mills/bakeries changes the number of buildings you will need, but doesn't change the ratios of production. Replacing three farms with one improved farm means that that improved farm can act as a supplier for a bakery by itself. If we use just improved buildings, we would need 6 improved farms (= 18 normal farms), 3 improved mill (= 9 normal mills), and 2 improved bakeries (= 6 normal bakeries). This produces ~10,800 bread/day. This supply chain with 11 improved buildings (but not including silos and watermills) is equivalent to roughly 7 village schools worth of bread production.
It is easier to buff bread supply chains at multiple points. If you buff your farms, mills and bakeries then the numbers change - let's assume you keep them all 2x buffed, 24/7. 3 farms -> 3 mills -> 4 bakeries means for 10 buildings you get 8 bakeries worth of production. That's 14,400 bread per day, although if you use Aunt Irma's Feasts then those 10 buffs will use up 100 * 10 = 1000 bread, as well as 1500 fish and 500 sausage. They'll also take 50 mins of Rarity Provision House time. You're left with 13,400 bread per day. 13,125 bread takes 3 hours 9 minutes to turn into 525 settlers in the provision house.
The only buff available for village schools, as far as I'm aware, is Hot Lemon Tea. I personally get a decent supply as a side effect of sending out explorers on buff searches. They are also not that expensive on TO. Using a Hot Lemon Tea on a level 5 village school will give you 12 buffed cycles at 3x output, = 2 * 12 * 5 extra settlers = 60 settlers on top of the 30 base settlers you produce. Those 60 settlers are worth 1500 bread, for a total bread equivalent production of 2250 bread. To make a buffed village school chain produce as much as the buffed improved bakery chain (using 10 buildings) we described earlier, it would take about 18 unbuffed schools or 6 buffed schools. This has the downside of schools being a bit harder to buff, but the upside that we don't need to build any fields or wells.
As a side note: The maximum value you can get from a Hot Lemon Tea is on a level 6 university (a university is a village school with 1/3 the production time - basically an improved village school). This means you would get 36 buffed cycles at 12 extra settlers per cycle for a total of 432 settlers worth 10,800 bread. Hot Lemon Tea is a very good buff in the right circumstances.
Overall, village schools are a good investment if you expect you will not have your population sat at the population cap much/at all. They are a useful supplement to bread production, and can partially replace long & complex supply chains that need upkeep. They are significantly undervalued, in my opinion.
Interesting side note: A village school costs fewer gems than a watermill does, and a single watermill used on an unbuffed bread chain will produce fewer settlers than the school, while also requiring a lot of other buildings.
(Note: as travel time is such a small proportion of production time for village schools, I have ignored it. It's an increase of <1% for all realistic placements of schools. You may find that some of the assumptions I've made around things like buffs don't apply to your island - e.g. you use steaks instead of baskets. This will affect the numbers a bit, but they should still be in the right ballpark.)
I hope this was interesting and informative. If anyone disagrees with any of my maths or conclusions, or has some other useful information, please contribute below! I think everything in this post is correct, but I could be wrong.
