Is the age of aether supposed to lack an advanced mill?

[cthulhu.mac]

Every other age 7 variant unlocks the ability to build a better version of the basic mill improvement, but the age of aether does not. And since there are no later mill improvement upgrades, this means games that go through the age of aether are stuck using ancient mills (i.e. 1 worker slot, 2 wheat to 2 flour) for the rest of the game, making wheat in general highly inefficient in the late game.

[low_apm]

thats actually a good thing, considering how bad all the other upgrades are

[archonsod]

I suspect it's intentional. If you look at Aether, and specifically the Automata tech, it's the resource production it improves rather than refining (IIRC I think the automata plantation is the best available), so it kind of depends what you do - theoretically you're improving efficiency on the gathering side rather than the refining side. How well that works for you is going to depend on what you do with it.

[cthulhu.mac]

Yeah, but the other age 7 variants also get upgraded farms. Arguably better ones - I don't think trading an aether for an extra wheat is a good deal, and neither does the game, considering aether costs 40 to import and wheat costs 4.5.

Also, balance aside (I'm not really sure how ages are supposed to be "balanced" against each other anyway) it's just weird from a simulationist/roleplaying perspective that age of aether timelines apparently NEVER move beyond bronze age milling technology.

[MHarmless]

He specifically said plantation, which produces extra without costing any Aether.

[archonsod]

Originally posted by cthulhu.mac:

Yeah, but the other age 7 variants also get upgraded farms. Arguably better ones

The only other Age 7 farm is the fertilised farm, the only difference between it and the Automa farm is that it costs 52 IP versus 50 specialists and doesn't have the aether - grain ability. Or to put it another way, in order to replicate the Automa farm you'd need to build two fertilised farms, costing 104 IP, two tiles and two workers versus the one tile, one worker and one aether.

it's just weird from a simulationist/roleplaying perspective that age of aether timelines apparently NEVER move beyond bronze age milling technology.

It depends on how you look at it. The other two age 7 mills are factories - i.e. scale up production via a bigger mill and more manpower. It's the opposite approach from Aether who are looking to reduce the amount of manpower spent on menial, repetitive labour by turning it over to automatons. Or in other words, rather than scale up production their approach is likely to be to maintain the same level of production while reducing the amount of actual work required. So we don't get a mill upgrade because there's no real difference, on the scale we're looking at, in what it's doing since the main beneficiaries are those working in the mill who presumably now get a bit more free time to play with - just as we don't get a mill upgrade to represent the shift from human to livestock to wind and water powered mills which happened throughout earlier eras for the same reason; freeing up a couple of boys from having to turn a crank or bag flour all day may well be life changing for the boys involved, but it's not particularly noticeable for the society they belong to.