City Buildings & their benefits

A quick guide to the city buildings and their benefits.

-Every investment in a city building gives you a direct personal benefit
-It also adds 30 minutes of "active" time to the building (which stacks up to 24hours max), which provides a powerfull boost for everyone in the city.


Inn & Castle:
Speeds up your quests. 1 investment reduces the time to 50% of the base time, twice to 25%, and 3 investments gives the maximum possible reduction which is 15% of the quests base time.
The inn is only for standard quests for materials & the castle is only for city raids.
When Active:  Base time of quests/raids reduced by 25%

Town Hall:
Reduces the timer of your shop’s furniture upgrade by 50%. No maximum, so you could do a 7 day upgrade in a few minutes.
When Active:  Costs of shop upgrades reduced by 25%, also applies to shop expansions (make sure  the town hall is active before buying expensive upgrades, it will save you a lot of gold).

Worker Buildings:
You can buy experience for your workers to level them up.  Extra skill & mastery points for your workers are nice to invest in as they level up very slowly from just crafting alone.
More skills means faster crafting times & your worker’s combined mastery points determine your chance of getting a higher quality craft.
Flawless odds for example (2 different %’s as having a bp mastered increases the odds by *1.25):
A player with      0 mastery  has a      0.25%-0.31% chance to get a flawless craft
A player with 1000 mastery  has a     5.25%-6.56%  chance to get a flawless craft
A player with 2000 mastery  has a    10.25%-12.8% chance to get a flawless craft
and you can go a bit beyond that towards 15%ish  (%'s thanks to the fomula at http://shop-heroes.wikia.com/wiki/Mastery )
When Active: Crafting skills increased by 400 - 500+25% of your workers skill points each (depending on crown jewel upgrades), resulting in extremely fast crafting times (Skills are only checked when you start crafting an item to determine the crafting time)

Hero buildings:
You can buy experience for your heroes to level them up. More power can come in handy for missions & arena's, and you may want to buy level 42+ for some heroes to you can sell raid bp items to them (+-7 levels). If you’d want impatient costumers that pay double to request lvl 49 items, they’ll have to be lvl 47-51, or maybe 47-52. (I've seen both +-2 and -2 +3 levels indications, if anyone still has lvl 52 heroes that could confirm it for sure I'd appreciate it. My heroes are at max lvl so I can no longer test it myself).
(Tip: with surcharge good quality dragonfire potions sell for 27.3M to heroes! don't miss out on lots of profit (and exp) selling them for less on the trade house. if you make them often, I'd recommend investing in the Cathedral to level up Fiora+Edward to 42, as they can both buy them. You can often even buy them from the TH and sell them to heroes for a profit and lots of shopkeeper experience)
Another advantage is high level heroes will also be high level costumers, that will offer to sell you items close to their own level (+-7). My highest level heroes occasionally sell me common lvl 50-55 primal blueprint items, which I can sell for an easy 100-350M profit each on the trade house.  
When Active:  +25% hero power. (Hero power is only checked at the moment you send your teams)

Resource buildings:
Invest in them to gain a certain amount of resources instantly.
When Active:  the resource regeneration rate is significantly increased
(5M for 30 mana may seem like a lot, but it also increases mana regeneration with +112.5 more mana per 30 minutes for everyone in the city with 3 bins (+75/hour*3bins=+225 mana per hour, divided by 2 because a  boost lasts 30mins))


Tips:
-Always check which buildings are already active before you start playing.
The game only checks if a city wide benefit applies when you start with an action. If a building is not active when you take an action, activating the building afterwards will not have any effect on it.
-The city is kind of like a x10 game speed option the game offers. It seems like it costs gold to use, but it’s actually going to help you and give you back a lot more gold in the future instead.
The gold I’ve invested to take benefit from city wide boosts in the past, still helps me today. It went into the levels of my workers, heroes, quests, etc.  which allow me to get gold, gems and high quality crafts a lot faster than before.
This is why I would always expect players to want to invest for themselves. Even if the buildings are activated by someone else, you only get the city wide benefit and you're missing out on the part of the game that helps you advance much more quickly.



In our City:
We try to keep many buildings active 24/7, personal benefits on their own are already a great reason to invest, but the city wide benefits are also very powerfull.

This is a teamwork area, so please try to be a social neighbor:
-If you can afford it, help us keep things running smoothly and add some extra time to the buildings you find beneficial.
-If you're going to invest very large amounts, try to spread them out over several days.
The city wide benefits time only stacks to 24hours, so daily investments are always very helpful to keep the city stable, while 2G+ once a week only helps for a day. Communication here is always appreciated, quite a few of us usually extend the time of buildings to 20+ hours just to ensure boosts remain active for the city. if we'd know another player wanted to invest big for a while in a certain buildings for personal gain, we could invest less in those & more in the buildings that aren't active 24/7 yet.    
-Newer players: focus on your own income development first, only invest for your personal benefit.
We'll do our best to keep the city benefits active for you & hope you'll help us do the same for others in the future =)


*Added on request*
Important city wide benefits & why we try to ensure they're always active:
1. Worker Buildings: Highest 24/7 priority
(Market, Sorcerer's Tower, Forge, Park, Miner's Guild, Engineering School and Trader's Square)
Because 400-500+ to all crafting skills is an amazing speedboost. So amazing that if you happen to start crafting something when the buildings are not active, you'll immediately notice the extremely long crafting time. (18+ hours to make stakeshooters…. ouch!)
There will be no way to fix that time, you could activate the buildings, but you'd still have to cancel and restart your crafts, losing 50% of the resources in the process. (precrafts & quest materials are always returned)

2. Castle: Should be active during raids
Same as with the worker buildings, this can still result in "oh cr^%!" moments as you're stuck with longer timers if you accidently send teams when the castle is inactive. And you can't cancel missions to resend teams. If no one bothers to invest in the castle, the whole city raid goes slower. Everyone's raid teams will take 2 hours to return instead of 1.5 hours. (Even players using the castle to speedboost will face longer timers as 15%-50% of 2 hours is of course longer than 15%-50% of 1.5 hours).

3. Hero buildings & Resource buildings: Lower Priority
Nice if they're kept active as many players benefit from them, but not as high priority because there are no severe penalties for performing related actions when these buildings are inactive.
(You will notice if the hero buildings are inactive as their power shortage is displayed before you send your teams, so you'll still be able to activate the +25% power boost before sending them on a mission).