More cedar demand

[Deadbuffalo]

I've stopped upgrading my cedar city at level 7. It is basically just a brick factory that occasionally makes cedar when i get the rare request or run out selling @ 5 after a couple of days.Selling @ 4 does not really increase the amount I sell, and certainly doesn't increase my profit. In the roughly 28 nomes' markets that I can see, no other raw material is consistently stocked with 100s at 5 or lower. I don't think 5 is an unreasonable price for raw mats, since its roughly 90% better than just baking bread, but i do wonder why there is such a imbalance in materials.

In contrast my leather city is under constant demand to make more and more sandals. This has to do partially with people upgrading to level 9 palaces and third cities, but it has basically always been like that since I've had the city, and considering the game design so far, it will always have that constant demand as different people hit the sandal "cycle" at different times.

Suggestions-Take these alone or combine them

1)Raise ship price to 40 or 50 cedar. Theoretically, ignoring every other factor, shifting the demand curve 2x should raise the price point to about 10, but i'd imagine that'd give cedar producers more incentive to upgrade their production thus lowering the price point.

2)Make building upgrades, maybe the exchange or market, require cedar.

3)Reduce boat capacity. I don't really like this idea as I think 100 capacity gives early 1st boat owners easy early trading well.

4)Add a cedar requirement to palace upgrades into the cycle, ie level 5 --> 6 cosmetics jewelry, level 6-->7 sculpture jewelry, level 7 --> 8 cedar and jewelry. EVERY other good is used in palace upgrades (arguably the most important), cedar is exclusive to ships which are important as well, but people aren't building 5 ships every palace upgrade.

5)Implement military-not sure if this will be an end all cure all, but it'll help.

[Hoborg]

The problem is that all other unique materials go directly into luxury goods, and the need for those luxury goods goes up dramatically with upgrades. Making ships go up in price with the more of them you have might help (though this is nonsensical), but until you need ships or cedar for upgrading inside your city, cedar is only very rarely going to be wanted by anyone.

I think the exchange and market should both require lots of cedar at higher levels. Also, at a high enough level, the exchange should be able to build faster boats which cost more cedar.

[King Faticus]

I thought it would be cool to add furniture as a luxury good...

ahh cedar furniture... for the palace I mean...


I had considered what would happen if we made cedar more in demand.. you see it will already be used in military buildings to produce archers and chariots... but... so will leather and bronze.. and they already have a constant demand in developed nomes.. unlike cedar...

another thing to consider is in undeveloped nomes cedar is very expensive still
and making it more expensive will probably upset non cedar cities
mostly because they don't see how the market will work in the future...
we all had that gripe before with jewelry remember?

and from what I'm told people are starting to exploit the buy orders to make the market ship their goods for them.
this is happening mostly in undeveloped nomes. (probably because of the expense and time to make ships.. also the expensive cedar and the 26 cedar per bug...)
the developed nomes already have ships and don't need to exploit the market.. ships can go further and once you built them.. they are free. o_0


in short .. I don't know what will "fix" cedar...
I will wait until military is implemented so I have a better idea of the whole big picture.

[Azeem]

Cedar will probably be in heavy demand once military is implemented. You need cedar for those chariots.

[CppThis]

Theoretically yes, military will resolve it, but since military is very much voluntary and non-essential I'm not sure just how many non-endgamers will participate. Guess it depends on how monuments work.

Anyway I'd love to see Furniture, made from Cedar and Reeds, to even up the luxury resource categories per my posts on rebalancing jewelry.