Mines are too Slow.

[Bobby]

When your city production is based on coal and iron, but the mines are super slow even with 30 plus people mining still takes ages to make a handful of iron when i need hundreds to expand my city. it makes the game drag.

[Shad]

The mining depends on quality of deposits, and adding more people has diminishing returns (with low numbers they go for the more efficient deposits in the mine, which high number,s they mine less efficient ones too).

You want 100% auxiliaries built in the mine, you want dondorians mining (they get bonus), and you want tools. And eventually you want tech later as well.

But yes, mining is manpower intensive, especially early on. When your town is small, you may find selling furniture/pottery and buying ore to be more effective.

[kmbullet67]

When starting a map I tend to prefer quality over quantity with ore and coal. The deposits with a blueish hue to them are dense high quality deposits that make mining much more profitable in the long run. You can also right click on a deposit even before placing the throne and it will give you the exact numbers on a particular deposit.

[Bobby]

I normally make cotton farms and go almost straight into clothes production to trade and buy coal and ore, then i hit a death wave and lost massive manpower and in a loop of food,food and only food production which if i want to end for good i want a bakery and iron. But thanks for the help.

[Shad]

Clothes are not good for early trade. They are 3 step (cotton, fabric, clothes), they spoil relatively fast, and you need clothes for your own population to not die so much from heat waves. Furniture is better is this regards as it's made directly from wood, and there is no population demand.

Also for clothes, get a hunter, and it will produce meat and leather. Excess of both can be sold and leather can also be made into clothes.

[Whiskiz]

carpenters are best early for trade, only requiring wood - then pottery with clay

requires a big woodcutters though so you don't burn through all your forest, but is quite stable

adding more people to a mine isn't necessarily bad, for example 5 people mining a 100% total efficiency clay mine is going to be worse than 10 people mining 60% - it just requires more manpower

start off with only the best deposits, then slowly add more that lowers overall deposit gain as you get more people to delegate to the job - up to you where you think your deposit efficiency to manpower ratio should be

fun little minigame

[Shad]

Originally posted by Whiskiz:

adding more people to a mine isn't necessarily bad,

The game explicitly says that adding more workers will always give you more resources in total from mines, it's just going to be lower returns per worker.

[madpraxis]

And mining IS slow. It's not a fast activity. At all. Brutally hard, back breaking labour.