Lumber Mills vs Iron Mines

Posted: August 15, 2010 in All Posts, City Set Up

A lot of people know enough not to build farms and quarries but often will make half lumber and half iron for resource fields.  On the surface this looks like a good idea since you need both of those constantly for troop making and both are similarily priced in the marketplace.

But look closer and you see why lumber mills are better.  A level 9 lumber mill requires 450 in population.  A level 9 iron mill requires 1,125 in population.  Lumber is the more efficient resource for your city while still leaving some population available for troop making.  Yes, you can zero your production, make your troops and then put production back up but production is lowered until its back up again and its a pain to do that each time.  For those that run heavy troop making cities with 17 or 18 barracks this is most important.

  1. Arcturus says:

    Better set up is matched pairs of pure resource cities – lumber and iron. You can also store excess resource in the other city without ever impeding production of resource. (i.e, 100 million wood in your iron city, and vice versa. Your city stops producing resource when it maxes out its storage of the resource type it is producing, but that is never a problem when you are only storing the other resource type). A few thousand transports in each city, and you can always move excess and have whatever you need to produce at any time. Troop production is lessened in iron cities due to less idle pop being available, although you can drop it to zero production on occasion and suffer some lost iron production since typically you need more wood than iron for troop production.

    Another reason pure resource cities are better is because you can match 10 level 10 valleys to your pure city and maximize the valley boost. The valley boost to a pure resource city with all 40 sites raised to level 10 is a little more than 500,000 per hour. It is 1/4th that amount if you split you mixed city with 5 level 10 valleys of each type. Yeah, you get that boost twice (one for each resource type), so the net loss overall is 250,000 per hour per city. That is a noticeable amount.

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