Making up problems to justify streamlining more stuff. Settlers 3 and 4 had exactly the described complexities. Guess what, people still don't accidentally make 10 scythes and don't know what to do with them. Pickaxes are always useful for more mines. Hammers for smiths and builders. Shovels for pioneers and diggers. More fish is always nice to have a buffer of trash food, and long term you want more wheat to produce bread and meat. And axes and saws - that's mostly an earlygame decision when players have to decide how big they want to try and make their basic resource economy. You simply don't make more of these tools than you need. There is no problem here. If you want to simplify anything, just make it so the toolsmith automatically adds a new tool to his queue when a building can't find a proper tool for itself. Players who proactively produce tools are still rewarded since the delay until the building works is shorter. Oh, and it also helps that buildings used to have a single worker in them, not three or four.

And in the old games, players don't end up with 200 of each building material lying around either, because the maps aren't tiny and there are actually lots of buildings, almost all of which are worth building multiple times. Having several dozen mines requires a bunch of food infrastructure to support them and a lot of industry to process their products. Plus, there are always Eyecatchers (in S4 at least) to sink building materials and gold into to increase fighting strength.

It's like the devs played each Settlers game for five minutes, decided that it was too hard for them, and now try to make a version where it's impossible to do anything wrong. We get it, you aren't changing anything substantial because all the decisions are already made. Just release or cancel the game already, but stop trying to make news out of thin air.

@OldTokken24
I firmly believe that returning to and expanding the Settlers III and Settlers IV formulas is the key. Settlers has way too much competition as a pure RTS or a pure city-builder, but it has the unique opportunity to master the hybrid form established by those two games. There is plenty of room the expand here, and create a game that even fits perfectly into Ubisofts live service model.

Making up problems to justify streamlining more stuff. Settlers 3 and 4 had exactly the described complexities. Guess what, people still don't accidentally make 10 scythes and don't know what to do with them. Pickaxes are always useful for more mines. Hammers for smiths and builders. Shovels for pioneers and diggers. More fish is always nice to have a buffer of trash food, and long term you want more wheat to produce bread and meat. And axes and saws - that's mostly an earlygame decision when players have to decide how big they want to try and make their basic resource economy. You simply don't make more of these tools than you need. There is no problem here. If you want to simplify anything, just make it so the toolsmith automatically adds a new tool to his queue when a building can't find a proper tool for itself. Players who proactively produce tools are still rewarded since the delay until the building works is shorter. Oh, and it also helps that buildings used to have a single worker in them, not three or four.

And in the old games, players don't end up with 200 of each building material lying around either, because the maps aren't tiny and there are actually lots of buildings, almost all of which are worth building multiple times. Having several dozen mines requires a bunch of food infrastructure to support them and a lot of industry to process their products. Plus, there are always Eyecatchers (in S4 at least) to sink building materials and gold into to increase fighting strength.

It's like the devs played each Settlers game for five minutes, decided that it was too hard for them, and now try to make a version where it's impossible to do anything wrong. We get it, you aren't changing anything substantial because all the decisions are already made. Just release or cancel the game already, but stop trying to make news out of thin air.