Changing the value of wood

Right now, wood sucks. Just completely, totally, is bad. With the upcoming merger, I think it's an opportune time to look at ways we could change that. Here are several of my ideas for how to do so:



1: Have an admin buyer. Basically just a minimum value a resource can go to, at which point the game will buy it from you. That way, when the value drops below that level, nobody will actually want to sell at any lower than that on the market and will sell at slightly higher. It may make it a little harder to buy, but at the moment the market is flooded with wood anyways and plenty of people will want to gain what extra gold they can. The trick to making this work, however, is to not allow resources to be sold at barely above that level - forcing it to be a nice bit higher. This allows people a gap in which they can make profit.

For example, let's say this admin buyer buys wood at .4 gold per. If that was the case, have the lowest value wood can be sold at on the market set to .5 or .6 gold each. That way, some people will actually have a reason to want to sell on the market rather than dumping their wood off in the admin shop.



2: Bump up building requirements of wood. Each building takes a little more wood, so the value of it goes up a little. I'd say 5-10% more wood cost would be appropriate.



3: Add a new building, a healer's hut or apothecary center. You can upgrade this building to reduce healing times of units, but in order to actively use their services you have to provide resources of all kinds, with a significant focus on wood. This would give players using combat a significant reason to use more wood, provide a little extra income for the city builders out there, and reduce healing times overall. Everyone's a little more happy.



4: Caravans. With these, you could send anything you wanted directly to other players (no market transactions necessary), but it would take some wood to construct the wagons.

Wood's undervalued right now because it has no practical use for most players past a certain level.

Voted to increase the wood costs of buildings and would say also of researches. Some use for wood was introduced w/the repair/craft requirement for banners, and I think this had a small effect on market.

A lot of players have complained (especially on Olympus) that early progress is very slow. Maybe increasing the cost in terms of wood for early level buildings (1-5) as opposed to stone or iron (one is always the dominant resource) would encourage new players to buy small amounts of wood at a higher rate, supplying gold to players who have gone past level 5 buildings but are still in the phase where selling 3k wood for gold impacts their stash.

I like your idea about a healing specific building with res costs, but I feel it's too much a separate idea to be used as a solution to wood overages. TBH it seems like wasting a good idea on the wrong problem! Caravans are a little harder to understand; they would allow barter trading and make the market almost useless. Why would I ever post something publicly when I can just ask for buyers and then take offers via PM? It's obvious which way will get me more profit...

Or, option 5:
Give technologies higher value.

Wood is ment for technologies, and I believe technologies arn't really liked. Thus not being upgraded and wood is bulked.
I started upgrading and doing technology stuff (laboratory, market, eg.) and wood is almost double of the rest of the resouces. With this, I had to buy 5 pages of wood.