Log supply in later ages

[cthulhu.mac]

Is it just me, or does it seem like much of the game is balanced around the idea of logging camps giving 2 logs instead of 1 log and 4 production? First of all, it's just odd that it works that way - none of the other standard gathering improvement upgrades give you bonus food /production/etc instead of more resources.

Second, in the late game you get things like the powered sawmill, which allows you to convert EIGHT logs to lumber if you put two workers on it. Likewise the paper factory let's you turn 6 logs into paper. Who exactly has this many logs available? If you wanted to fuel one of each that would be 14 logs in one city, which would be reasonable if that was only 7 lumber camps, but as is it's just ridiculous.

Was nerfing log production some late-in-dev fix because books were too OP for generating knowledge in later ages, or something? If so, I feel like maybe they should just rebalance knowledge costs for later eras, and buff computer production (which is currently so limited as to be basically irrelevant) so there's something beyond books to focus on in the late game. As things stand the powered sawmill and paper factory are almost downgrades from older improvements, since they're impractical to fuel and require power.

[Akadai]

It doesn't help that it seems there's no control over which improvement uses what resources. If you have both a saw mil and a paper mil, there's no easy way to control how many logs are being used in each

I'd argue that maybe the intention is to export logs to one city for conversion, and then ship whatever it's making to others, but it seems you can only export goods to a single city, leaving others out of luck for those additional resources. So even that fails in this regard

As you get further in the ages, you unlock "improved" versions of improvements, but those improvements can actually be a downgrade depending on how you're running things. And there's nothing you can do about it, because you can't build the previous improvement. It's just gone

I like the idea of the production chains, but it needs a lot of additional features. As it currently stands, certain "upgrades" actually makes things harder

[The Konrad]

I build saw pits for the Engineering XP they give.
Upgrading them doesn't upgrade their Engineering XP, so that's just a hard no for me.
Why would anyone do that?

[cthulhu.mac]

Originally posted by The Konrad:

I build saw pits for the Engineering XP they give.
Upgrading them doesn't upgrade their Engineering XP, so that's just a hard no for me.
Why would anyone do that?

Yeah, that's kinda another issue. Part of the reason engineering XP is so precious is that the upgrades you get tend to REDUCE the number of improvements that generate it since the upgraded versions process more raw materials, but they still only generate 1 XP.

[archonsod]

Originally posted by cthulhu.mac:

Second, in the late game you get things like the powered sawmill, which allows you to convert EIGHT logs to lumber if you put two workers on it. Likewise the paper factory let's you turn 6 logs into paper. Who exactly has this many logs available?

I've seen entire continents covered in nothing but forests :P. Also worth noting if you go with the Naturalists early game there's big incentives for having cities surrounded by forest tiles. That's before you consider how easy it is to end up with five or six foreign import slots.
The key thing to note is that the number is a maximum. The powered sawmill *can* do up to eight logs, but if you only have three available it converts those three. That's actually the main benefit of the later upgrades in many areas, not so much that they boost production, but that you can consolidate your existing production and free up space. I mightn't have 8 logs all that often, but it's quite likely I can have four or five, and prior to that tech converting them requires dedicating at least two tiles and two workers to do so; the powered mill let's me do the same thing on one tile with one worker.

Originally posted by Akadai:

It doesn't help that it seems there's no control over which improvement uses what resources. If you have both a saw mil and a paper mil, there's no easy way to control how many logs are being used in each

Assign or remove workers from one to the other?

[Akadai]

Yes, reassigning workers is kind of a work around, but that's a lot of extra steps just to try and get things working the way you want. It would be better if there was some sort of up/down arrow to tell how many logs you want a building to use, or a button to tell it which resource to use

In the case of a Kitchen, which uses 3 different types of foods, you can not tell it which food to use. Not only that, I don't think they'll use multiple resources to fulfill the need of the building and instead either pick one at random, or the one you have the most of

The only way to really control what is being used by what is moving workers in and out of places and hope it grabs the right resource

There just needs to be better management options

[taomastercu]

Originally posted by Akadai:

Yes, reassigning workers is kind of a work around, but that's a lot of extra steps just to try and get things working the way you want. It would be better if there was some sort of up/down arrow to tell how many logs you want a building to use, or a button to tell it which resource to use

In the case of a Kitchen, which uses 3 different types of foods, you can not tell it which food to use. Not only that, I don't think they'll use multiple resources to fulfill the need of the building and instead either pick one at random, or the one you have the most of

The only way to really control what is being used by what is moving workers in and out of places and hope it grabs the right resource

There just needs to be better management options

Against The Storm allows you to decide on what inputs to use and how much and swap recipes and so on.

I can already imagine the HH/PI publishing memes related to this disparity.