Quick Poll: Is the production scale weak?

[Zeldor]

There was discussion about that already and 99% people agree that prod scale is really useless. Just few nations need them and it is just considered losing a lot of design points as a cost of playing that nation.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

I don't like the fact that ressources 'force' you to constantly build units, regardless if you need them or not. This way I get high upkeep costs even if I don't intend to fight (yet). With gold dependent units I can build large reaction forces very fast exactly when I need them. With some nations like Ulm I found production very usefull in the early game, but in mid and late game it looses a lot of its advantages.
I'd prefer it if the resources would stack like gold. It shouldn't be a problem to build large amounts of armour pieces and store them in an armoury.

[DrPraetorious]

Other benefits high productivity could have -
a) Reduce castle build times.
b) Reduce build *costs*, for castles, labs, temples or all of the above.
c) Reduce province defense costs, or provide free periodic province defense.
d) Provide a reduction in maintanence costs for units (not commanders.)

I'd be 100% in favor of more rewards for productivity, but I don't think Sloth needs to be made any worse. There are certain positions for which Sloth is a no-brainer, but I don't think it's needed (for inter-nation game balance) to *punish* those positions.

[DonCorazon]

I never take more than construction 1 and that is for the most resource intensive race. Usually I am a sloth -3 guy.

The one intangible is that having those resources will become obsolete pretty early in the game but can provide an early edge that builds on itself. It may also be useful when you have death - helps keep your ability to recruit (in particular elite capital units) up while population, and thus resources dwindle.

Those are all the pros I can think of. The fact is production is the first thing that gets cut in the DC budget.

I like Dr. P's suggestions to improve it.

[Micah]

Why don't we just change the gold coefficient on the scale, like I suggested before? Sure, it's not nearly as fun or cool or whatever as DrP's suggestions for it, but it's easy to implement and would help make the scale less sucktastic. 3.5% or so as opposed to 2% would make a hefty dent in its comparison to other scales IMO.

[Endoperez]

Luck/Production is a pretty good combination, though. The castle events might need order, but traders' guilds and mine events are pretty common, and both produce permanent increase of income.

Tien Chi already has Order-based Conscription ability that slowly increases PD. It might or might not be easy to implement similar, Production-based ability for all nations.

[Wick]

The problem with resources is that mages are recruited with gold at castle labs built with gold. I think building castles with resources instead of gold might be a good thing. Stone is even more local then weapons after all.

[Tyrant]

In most cases, even with resource intensive nations, the answer is to build more castles and/or build one an iron mine. So as is, it's really only usefull if you have cap-only resource heavy units and/or for the rare heavy metal quick start plan. Micah's suggestion seems like the easiest fix, though the castle suggestions would be more fun.

I've strained my brain trying to think of a another thematic additional effect, and auto-PD build is the only thing i came up with. TC has that as a dominion benny, so there's some code for that already, but i dont' have any idea if would be easy to implement.