Reduce Cost of Clearing Forests - Gameplay Balance and Feel

[BlueDreaux]

The total gold to food cost ratio of doing full upgrades through each age seems way out of balance. I'm presuming it's intended to be out of balance to compensate for the costs of training armies and tactics, however it ends up being too unbalanced and makes gameplay feel wonky as players end up with stockpiles of food while they finish gold upgrades and then those stockpiles of food contribute to other players having an overabundance of food from other players to loot. It's like it's not even a reward for saving up enough for upgrades that cost food. The costs of other upgrades that cost gold seem really well considered in their balancing while there's really no significant gain or advantage to clearing forests, aside from having room for the next age, and accidentally tapping forests when an animal is what we want to select (and then to have the forest interface possibly cover what we really want to click) is an annoying part of the interface so smart players who clear forests last just end up with that annoying part of the interface for longer durations as the cost of clearing them outweighs even considering clearing their annoyance before doing any other upgrades. To this I propose reducing the costs of clearing forests. Seems the best way of reining in how unbalanced the upgrades cost ratio currently is without messing up the gameplay feel of more significant aspects of the game.

 

[auriga]

Much like Clash eventually did allowing wall upgrades with food after say level 9 would solve the food problem

Additionally, cutting the gold cost and adding a food cost to forest clearing would help a bit as well.

 

[Eddie F1]

Not sure clearing forests with food would help much - there is always a worker shortage, not a gold shortage. Unless they reduce the forest clearance to 1 worker also.

Walls are the obvious place to dump food - instant build with 1 worker.