The iron age that wasn't

[Sevenless]

So, I've asked quite a few times in the past for steel to be spread down a couple levels to create a proper iron age. And it happened this world! But this didn't pan out in a way I was hoping for a couple reasons.

A) As has been talked about a lot, coins being pushed to week 5 slowed down making shops/markets since they normally start appearing 3-4 weeks into the game. The suggested solution was to simply push coinpress to hardmetal and/or cast iron so it comes online more in sync with when players are ready to use it development wise.

B) More critical to the concept of an "iron age", iron ore in levels 3-4 is frankly just extremely rare. Because iron was so rare, getting enough iron (and high quality iron so it's competitive with bronze) to make wrought iron gear just never happened. By the time more iron starts showing up, we're already on L5 and making steel. Basically, for the wrought iron age to exist L3 needs to be predominantly chalco for copper ores, and L4 needs significant abundance of Iron Ochre. Why not have those layers get boosted ratios of specifically those ores?

Sorry I didn't predict this when making requests, I knew the conditions and should have seen this coming when asking for it.

[Reiber]

i mean. wrought iron gear is inherently worse than bronze. even considering there is enough quality iron in the veins isnt it?
steel swords struggle to keep up with bronze tbf.

[Sevenless]

i mean. wrought iron gear is inherently worse than bronze. even considering there is enough quality iron in the veins isnt it?
steel swords struggle to keep up with bronze tbf.

Mmm, fair. All of this is tweakable to work though. None of this has to outclass steel, it should be easy to make a midpoint between steel and bronze. Swap chainmail and bronze armor soaks, problem sorted wrought now better. Wrought iron sword needs the block reworked into something else, maybe leather? Stick? Just something to reduce the penalty so it's more competitive with bronze.

[Dawidio123]

There is plenty of iron even if the ores aren't that great, surely more than enough to make the wrought iron gear. We gathered enough wrought before -5 so we could start steel pretty quickly (arguably searching for bloodstone so you can actually BUILD the steel crucibles feels dumb and rng so that got us kinda fucked up).
The core issue as aforementioned is the fact that wrought gear just straight up sucks, maybe other than butcher cleaver and winged helmets but i just swapped from bronze helmet into troll one so meh.

Chainmail and wrought sword should be buffed to be a good mid point between bronze and steel. Another issue being that bronze sword is just bars, meanwhile the other swords require a wood block which lowers their overall quality.

[Reiber]

i mean. wrought iron gear is inherently worse than bronze. even considering there is enough quality iron in the veins isnt it?
steel swords struggle to keep up with bronze tbf.

Mmm, fair. All of this is tweakable to work though. None of this has to outclass steel, it should be easy to make a midpoint between steel and bronze. Swap chainmail and bronze armor soaks, problem sorted wrought now better. Wrought iron sword needs the block reworked into something else, maybe leather? Stick? Just something to reduce the penalty so it's more competitive with bronze.

the thing i suspect this is intentional,
i think jorbtard have realized that game balancing is a difficult task, wich they arent entirely able to keep up with, and to make it easyer on them, they figured out that balancing 2 weapons against each other, with rather static sets is inherently more easy

so they more or less just balancing around bronze sword vs b12, one of them being a high investment, high resource cost lategame option for statmonsters, the other one being easily accessible by everyone early.

atleast, thats what i am assuming after they keep nerfing everything aside from those 2 options whenever they become viable.

[Potjeh]

Is there even a good reason for locking wrought behind ochre discovery? I kinda get delaying steel, but not wrought.

[Reiber]

Is there even a good reason for locking wrought behind ochre discovery? I kinda get delaying steel, but not wrought.

the only thing it really gates you from is the minehole.
well and winged helmets, wich is the one good, affordable helmet in the game, outperforming basically all the steel options. aside from troll and dragonhelmets.

[jock]

THe issue is why bother, with mine levels being so quick you can just wait a week and not stress about upgrading. Only a few groups even push that hard with most understanding that the next mine level is generally always better.

They need to slow the mine levels down a ton after week 3/4 and then fix some recipes to make them viable.