How to manage resource locality?

I've got a bunch of trading posts on the river and a bunch of settlements well away from these trading posts. To avoid losing land to quarries I've been trading for stone. The problem is that when I try to build anything, all the stone is concentrated in a single spot. It would go much easier if I could move some of the stone in advance.

I've got a similar problem with food. Some parts of my empire town are literally overflowing the storage with the stuff, and other parts are starving. How can I convince the townspeople to move the food where it's needed?

The issue with stone seems to be a "non-problem". Your problem as you state it is that your stone is mined at one location and used all over.

Your desire is that the stone be moved "ahead of time", supposedly because then the construction would be that much faster. The thing is, this doesn't make your construction faster, it would simply hide the cost of moving the stone to when you're doing something else.

Whether you move the stone ahead of time, or move it when you need it, the manpower required for moving x amount of stone from A to B is the same. Ideally, all your townspeople are busy all the time, so the time they spend moving the stone to a supposed "staging area" is time they're not doing some other task.

Worse, if the trip from the quarry, to the staging area, to the construction site is longer than the trip from the quarry to construction site, you're wasting manpower.

What you want to do is, when you start construction, set the building as top priority (F2 - 6 ). This will tell all available laborers to drop what they are doing and move resources to the building. Once that's done, the builders will take over and finish the job. This way you get the building done as quickly as possible, with the least waste of manpower.

Resources will always be stored in the nearest applicable storage facility (barns, stockpiles, etc.) To avoid resource starvation in your outposts, you have two options:

• Gather resources locally: Essentially, you'll be building a second town with this option. Unfortunately, this may or may not be tenable, given your stockpiled resources.
• Build a market: Markets essentially share resources between each other and the town inventory and your citizens will prioritize nearby markets to pull resources such as food and firewood. Market vendors (citizens assigned to work at this building) will constantly go between storage facilities and other markets to shift resources. The more vendors you have, the faster they'll shift said resources.