It’s common knowledge that wood-costing units are more expensive than units that dont cost wood, but they aren’t really more valuable.
Interestingly, chopping wood in the early game is actually not too inefficient, because wood constructs buildings which refunds more XP than anything food and coin can make, and XP is actually more valuable than other resources before ~6 shipments have been sent (~10 if you FF). So if you are chopping wood to construct buildings, villagers are actually collecting .5w/s + .1xp/s (.6 total), whereas collecting wood for units is .5w/s + .05xp/s. Then, if those units die that xp is shared with your opponent. Essentially, chopping wood for buildings is 10-20% better than chopping wood for units in the first 8-10 minutes of the game.
I believe this has a lot to do with the state of the meta. Early booms strategies thrive, and rushing rarely pays off. Most of the good rushes are done by musket civs that don’t need wood for units. There are exceptions like aztec and russia of course, but those civs have been struggling lately.
Here’s my solution: award additional train-xp to wood-costing units equal to 10% of their wood cost, and do not increase the kill bounty. So, crossbows and pikemen would award 40 * .1 + 40 * .2 xp for training (12), and their kill bounty would be 8 as usual (80 * .1). A coyote runner would then be 25 * .2 + 85 * .1 = 13.5, which is precedentially rounded down to 13.
I believe that this change would subtly support aggressive strategies that have been struggling, and provide some balance to a obvious issue with unit costs that always gets swept under the rug due to uncertainties about overall balance.
Admittedly, I’m not certain that kill XP and train XP should differ. Can anyone think of a way this might break the game?
Other thoughts?
