The addition of Hardwood means Brazil and Maya are better avoiding Mining for as long as possible. Any bonus resource revealed on a forest/jungle tile prevents them from building their UI on that tile. Whether that's a good or bad thing is up to whether you like them having more viable tiles to build their UI.
Both of those improvements are NoTwoAdjacent, which makes them fairly flexible to put around forest resources without disrupting your max placements. A notable concern, but something both civs and their placement requirements adequately deal with. Maya might want to avoid mining so they can place Kuna over hidden hardwood, but they can also do that this deer already. Brazil will probably want to avoid this, because their UI places a resource which would overwrite the hidden Hardwood. They could have had a stronger lumbermill improvement AND a brazilwood camp if they revealed them in time.
Hardwood lacking an improvement on Mining or Bronze Working also means it won't be that useful compared to other bonus resources, who provide at least +2 yield when improved. In this stage of the game, you don't have time to get a worker to improve mines on resource-less hills, they will be busy improving a lot of resources somewhere in the empire, or roads. Resource-less mines is more of a thing in late Classical, not Ancient.
Mining is the only ancient improvement unlock that doesn't require a resource, so an early mining resource would greatly swing the balance of the early techs in favor of the bottom tree.
The advantage of a lumber mill resource is that it DOESN'T rock the boat too much in this respect.
I have come to the conclusion that, if Hardwood were to be added, it would take over
some of the resource placement frequency of both Deer and Bananas, but not swap 1:1. If Hardwood were to replace deer/banana placements then jungle and forest starts would be weaker overall, because camp and plantation resources are faster to deploy, and they both have resource and improvement bonuses from buildings in Ancient. Both have the options of further boosting with pantheons too.
If Hardwood is going to be balanced for forest and jungle starts, deer and banana frequency will have to be lowered a bit, but the number of resources in forest/jungle should be slightly increased overall.
I think it misses the point. Iron is a strategic resource that has a big impact on militaristic civs, your warring capability is noticeably weaker from Classical to early Renaissance without it due to the subpar infantry. As such, these civs will try to secure it as soon as possible; merely having a future use in sight is in practice as big as having an immediate use for these civs. And trading iron away is not something that militaristic civs want to do (outside of having an UU that negates iron requirement), as that means having less of these strategic units later on, with how long these trade deals last. So, moving the iron reveal to Iron Working is very damaging for this playstyle, and I see no proper compensation for that.
On the other hand, putting the resource reveal in iron working hides it from other civs for longer. A sword rusher has asymetric knowledge of iron deposits for a long time while he waits for non-militarist civs to take the bottom techs. He will know about iron later, but it's likely his settling window for iron will actually be bigger. Having the resource so close to the start of the tech tree at Bronze or -- heaven forbid -- Mining would have made it trivial for another civ that isn't invested in iron units to reveal iron and use it as a trade commodity while they focus on other techs.
As for "what if you don't have iron in Rennaissance?" That has a hell of a lot more to do with where the iron is than when it was revealed. A civ focusing on iron reveal for their military is helped at least as much as they are hindered in their quest to settle iron by this proposal. You will reveal it later, but so will everyone else, but the difference between a bottom tech civ and a top tech civ will be magnified w.r.t. the latter with this proposal.
Forge isn't an extra source of science if iron reveal is moved to Iron Working, as iron mines provide science. It's at best replacing one source for another, and placing a production and maintenance cost on top of it. Forges are not maintenance free, and they won't have iron revealed nearby on which to add gold either with this move.
It's not an extra source, but it's a more reliable source. replacing 1 source for another was exactly the intent: A guaranteed +1
for all cities to replace the lottery of an iron reveal. I specifically made this proposal so that it does NOT add more science to the early game overall, so the overall pace of the game will not be disrupted. What this does is make the bottom tech line
Safer.
And there is no need to emphasize the production cost (which is now lower) and maintenance on a building you were going to build in every city anyways. It takes turns to move a worker and build a mine on top of an iron source too.
base
From Workshop
to Mines on Resources
