I like the RTS-style (not to mention realistic) concept of needing to expand and import in order to continue growing. I feel like this concept is what distinguishes this game from a lot of other colony/city sims, and I think adding a traditional quarry/renewable wood-producing building would detract from this concept.
As the game goes on, it’s really cool to build a network of roads out to new resource deposits. Unfortunately, you chew through resources so quickly by this stage of the game that building new outposts doesn’t feel very impactful.
Two proposed ideas:
• It’d be interesting to find much larger resource nodes the farther away from your spawn point that you go. These larger nodes can be geographical features, like mountains or massive clay deposits along a river, that require you to place a special tier 4 ‘quarry’. These nodes/quarries would last a long time, and incentivize building an actual outpost there (administration buildings, food production, logistical networks/trade outposts, houses, factories to manufacture the intermediate goods from those raw resources, and defense to protect it all).
• The lumberyard could just be a tier 4 building that has an enormous ‘target area.’ This would require the same sort of outpost setup as the above. The lumberyard doesn’t have to be renewable, but it would help tremendously to automate wood gathering.
You will be limited on the outposts you can make naturally, as some maps won’t have clay, stone, certain ores, et cetera. You can also limit these through progression - i.e. you can only have so many quarries, or each tier 4 needs a nearby admin building, but your Town Hall tier limits you to x number of admin buildings/quarries. These limitations mean you’ll still need to rely on trade to acquire things you cannot produce yourself (which seems like a key part of the game devs want to maintain).