Dear Game Developers, Moderators, Settlers and Mining-Enthusiasts,
I really like this game, and wish it a long life and constant growth, therefore I am here in a hope to hear BlueBytes thoughts and fellow settlers support.
The Problem
This game is all about maintaining the economy, production and expansion and that is great and what we love.
As our island expands, we constantly build and upgrade buildings that produce products or other resources, so we can fairly generalise that there are 2 types of resources in the production lines (we can argue regarding the names):
1. Active/Core Resources - are used to produce more resources (i.e wood, ore)
2. Passive/Final Resources - are used on upgrades, buffs & troops, but are not actively taking part in other production lines (i.e. weapons, planks, tools )
It feels unfair if the game limits us on obtaining the Active/Core Resources.
The example: If you need increase bows or coal production, you also increase the wood production and freely can do so by building more woodcutters and foresters (only limit are the licenses, but only after all possible upgrades are done.) This is a good model (in my opinion).
However, the ores are a completely different story, as we have limited number of spots on our island for the deposits.
And the production line where ores are taking main part we are quickly becoming their slaves that we need to rediscover the deposits every 12-14 hours.
The example: If you need increase weapons (swords) production, you need more ingots, and to have more ingots you need more ore, so you need to start upgrading the mines (only makes it faster to deplete) and/or refilling them. This is a bad model. (in my opinion)
Yes, we DO have the following options:
1. Refills
2. Colonies
3. Geologist Skills
but, to get refills you need to do addies, which are tied to your troops production (which also drain ores). To get Colonies you need to do another weapons & expedition troops production (which also drain ores) and finally to upgrade Geologist Skills you (surprise, surprise) need ores to build manuscript, tome, codex.
This begs for a solution to escape this endless loop of spending ore to get more ore.
The Solution
I would suggest to include another upgrade to the deposit/mines that would use food (i.e wheat, water) to "drill mines deeper" which would refill the deposit by +X amount.
Which would have the following limitations:
1. You cam drill deeper only 6 times, each drill also more expensive.
2. By drilling deeper you lose maximum possible mine upgrade. (of course until deposit rediscovered).
3. You can't drill deeper for Industrial or Special mines, so they only accept refills.
So how that helps?
Lets see in the following example:
we have 6 newly discovered iron mines, we upgrade them to lvl2 and buff (we have enough output to keep other production alive) but they would deplete in 14h. So you spend "food" to "drill deeper" and increase deposits by +300 ore, you gained more hours before it depletes and wont need to lose sleep over it, the maximum upgrade of mine drops to 6 and so on until eventually you can't neither upgrade or drill deeper and deposit depletes.
This should not break the balance of the game and will not collapse refills marketing as everyone would ever use them on industrial mines anyway.
Thank you for reading this far.