About the Iron production.

[IceBlood]

I'm bit of dissatisfied on the iron production chain. It seems the iron smelters are using too much Iron Ore and thats why the players are using millions of recruits instead of Militia and Soldiers. For example I have 5 level 3 Iron Smelters and they are needing total of 39 levels of Iron Mines. That means I have to keep up all 16 level 2 Iron Mines running 24/7 and still many of those have to be buffed all the time. That is insane if asked me and it will kill the interest to the Iron Production. It's so much easier to train 1500 recruits per day so why even bother to train Militia? They are not "that" good anyway. It's someway funny that I need 6 level 4 Copper Smelters just to produce enough Bronze to create enough Tools for the building of Iron Mines. I suggest the BB could change the needed Iron Ore amount per Iron Smelter level from 4 to 3 (for example). That would courage players to use more Iron instead of Copper.

-IB

[LukaGrizlly]

Agree, 16 iron ore for one steel steel sword with you need 10 time to just one soldier, ugh..
Not to mentioned that crafting time 24 minutes and coal consumed in process to make that sword isnt really helping to encouraging ppl to use something else then recruit unless they are sure they loose few to none of those precisious unit.

[X-BT]

Agree, in general I think the resource usage needs to be better balanced. The militia vs recruit is the worst case I have seen until now, as training one militia is several times as costly as training one recruit, math follows:

Say your iron mine has 600 resources, and costs 250 hard planks, 250 marble and 200 tools. Iron melter makes 150 iron from this. When the weapon smith is finished you have 75 iron swords, and have also spent 75*8 + 150*6 = 1500 coal in the process, or 3000 pinewood if you made this coal using coking plants.

For copper, the mine is 30 pine planks and 45 stones, and has say 700 resources. Spending in addition 700 coal you get 700 bronze from the copper smelter. An additional 1400 units of coal results in 700 bronze swords from your weapon smith. Total spent 30 pine planks, 45 stones and 2100 coal or 4200 pinewood, and you get nearly ten times the number of bronze swords compared to the number of iron swords above.

Using the above results you get that for 100 milita you spend 3333 hard planks, 3333 marble, 2667 tools, 20000 coal and 1000 brew, while 100 recruits only cost 43 pine planks, 64 stone, 3000 coal and 500 brew. As you mention there is also a significant difference in production time, and also the investment in production buildings is quite different.

To me, this huge price difference compared with the small difference in stats between the recruit and the militia makes no sense. In the beginning, this game appeared to have a great potential for giving the feeling of progression necessary to maintain a players interest in the game, but with the militia unit it feels like it is going backwards, and that new units becoming available to you are actually worse than the ones you had. So why keep playing if I get the feeling that this is as good as it gets?

[Kotugo]

I don't think Militia or Soldiers are meant to replace recruits. Ideally they are used against leaders when recruits don't absorb enough damage to kill something, they are also useful against first strike/attack weakest when any cavalry/archers would get wasted. In this case you mix them with recruits so the recruits are killed off while the militia/soldiers do the damage. So ideally you would make about 200 of them and then only make more when you need to replace any out of that 200 that are used up.

The same goes with longbowmen/Crossbowmen, use them when they won't get killed, if you have a target which requires a ranged sacrifice then use standard bowmen instead.

[IceBlood]

Kotugo, that is exactly what I'm trying to say. There is only one (right) way to play this game.