These new changes don’t even make any sense.
The issue is NOT the wood! It never was! All that will happen from these changes is give Black Ice construction a glut of dry wood to use as fuel. Assuming the fishing has been fixed in testlive, you can get literally thousands of oil from nothing but twine, branches, a carpenter to make some fluid presses.
A t4 carpenter will just reduce the resin cost back to 1 anyways, so you only added 1 oil as a component for high end players, and for people without a t4 carpenter, they will just use double the bark to get 4 dry wood and 2 resin, then only use 1 of the dry wood, instead of 2 dry wood and using 1.
Dry wood and oil are the same quality of fuel.
So -1 oil… +2 dry wood from the changes. Black ice ends with more leftover fuel than before. Black Ice just costs more bark now. 4 - 8 bark instead of 2-4. This is assuming of course, that you don’t just use a pick on dry wood and an axe in the highlands and get all the ingredients anyways. And by all, I mean you get dry wood and bark, and then wood and resin. And you can use the wood and bark to make more of the dry wood and resin.
Drying wood takes the same time as baking hardened brick, but can be done in parallel with making steel reinforcements, and still needs far less processing time. THIS is the problem.
So we need 8 resin and 4 oil now for black ice.
This means a base process time of 8x40 seconds for the drying, or 320 seconds… which is STILL LESS than the 450 seconds needed with t4 smelters for the brick! AND I can do it at the same time as I make my steel.
The main thing to keep in mind with any balancing changes is to remember that you go at the pace of your slowest bench.
For Black ice, it’s the dryer. At 320 seconds per foundation, or if I have 8 dryers (no thralls required) 40 seconds per. If I have a t4 carpenter, I can still just use 4 dryers.
For Reinforced Stone, it’s the furnace. You need the 450 seconds (with a t4 thrall) for the brick, and then 75 for the iron, and 22.5 for the steel bars, for a total time of 547.5 seconds on that bench. The furnace ends up crafting 48 items during this process, so if you have enough resources stockpiled to keep 48 smelters going with t4 thralls, you can reduce this time to 42.5 seconds. With 48 furnaces with t4 thralls. Which is still more than the 8 dryers. with FOURTY EIGHT SMELTERS.
I mean, at least the time is somewhat comparable with that many smelters I guess. But it was like that before, you just need more dryers now working in parallel. It still doesn’t address the problem of 150 stone taking longer to harvest than the black ice and wood ever will.
You also nerfed insulated wooden buildings with this change. Where as if you had just changed the hardened brick requirements, the only building type to be affected would be t3 stone. The insulated wood building nerf is actually more substantial, because the likelihood of having a t4 carpenter at t2 building is much much lower than at endgame, meaning you are almost definitely going to hit the double resin requirements. There is also the significant problem that you don’t get the fluid press until level 28, so you have an 8 level gap before you can actually make any oil to make insulated wood, and then two levels later you get t3 building.
I guess I just don’t understand the rationale behind this change. Either I’m missing something or the devs don’t think the baking time for the bricks and the fact they compete with the steel is unreasonable, in which case I don’t understand the rationale behind that either.