Thanks for the feedback! So, my thoughts on it were grid tiles are precious, so if a player wanted to train soldiers, but not use up a 2x2 space, they could still train them at the smaller 1x1, at a slower rate. So yeah, it's really just footprint, maybe you wanted to do other things with those 3 tiles. But like you do get a speed bonus for the 2x2, I think it was like 18% faster than 4 1x1s for committing to the larger footprint.
For firepit/brazier, I was playing with the idea of buff patterns. So firepit is up, down, left and right buffs. Brazier is like the 4 diagonal corners around it and not the 4 directly touching it, like the firepit. So you could have layouts that this makes sense to do, and you may not. I just wanted to give players the options to play around with the patterns if desired.