Frankly speaking, paying just a thousand ingots and merely five minutes of your life to seed a thousand oak trees, just to harvest seven thousand wood the year next is just imbecile. Especially late game. In a challenging game like FF, where realism percentage hits almost triple digits, it’s a bit awkward having the a ability to plant a ready to harvest plant. I would even consider this as a cheat.
On the other hand having the ability to plant a small seed or infant plant and having to wait twenty years for the proper harvest yield, would be even more realistic and challenging. That is why trees remastering is essential. Wood is THE most important resource in game at the moment. That is why a proper yield and growth period increase is crucial.
The best solution to this in the end is a redesigned or a more stable trading platform, where you would access a needed resource X (e.g. wood) given the possibility to trade it (export for example) for the excess resource Y, at a given ratio.
I personally don’t plant trees to harvest them ; just for decoration.
But regarding wood, I very rarely have a problem with it. I had to buy some from a trader once (because of bad planning). I usually have largely enough laborers to get me some wood and enough wood around the map to never run out (even-though I guess on a small map it would become more problematic I guess).
My biggest problem is that they are not smart about wood cutting. My laborers will annihilate any tree in the zones I target until there is none left, instead of doing what intelligent people would do and alternate between zones to be more sustainable.
That’s were I’m eager to see what crate comes up with for the wood industry.
We are not talking about AI problems in this case. You already have the option to build labours camps and set the assigned workers to cut down only mature trees in an area to sustain a viable, environmentally friendly supply of wood. Chaotic wood cutting is of course not the solution.
I am actually trying to outline the problem on medium and even large maps where once you hit the 1000 mark you just inevitably come face to face with wood shortage. Late game is quite unique in FF. Totally different style once you hit the 400-500 mark and above! For your settlement to thrive after that you absolutely have to make sure you always maintain the proper (huge) and super demanding STOCKPILES of all the basics and not just the production ratio like in early stage! Wood takes the righteous first place! That is why trading would be considered an actual solution to this!