The Lumber Mill is a type of lumber resource building in Napoleon: Total War.
Description[]
Prepared timber makes construction and shipbuilding significantly cheaper.
A water-powered lumber mill produces logs and sawn timber from nearby forests. Its semi-finished products increase the industrial wealth of a region because it is more profitable to ship half-finished planks than tree trunks.
It has always been possible for logging to denude a forest of all of its profitable trees, in the process causing terrible damage to the land. Without the trees the soil is soon gone, washed away in the first strong rains. It then becomes almost impossible for any kind of trees to re-establish themselves. This worried hardly anyone at the end of the 18th Century, although there were honourable exceptions: some men did go out of their way to plant trees so that navies would never be without supplies. The world had been given to men by God for them to subdue, and there were always more trees in the next valley, and the next.
General Information[]
Requires Logging Camp, 1,620 gold* and 5 turns. Can be upgraded into Steam-Powered Sawmill.
*The Lumber Mill technically costs 1,800 gold, but it always benefits from the 10% cost reduction from its predecessor, the Logging Camp.
While the lumber mill produces double the region wealth and grants double the cost reduction for ships that the logging camp has, its cost reduction to constructing buildings is much smaller: just 2% less. Nevertheless, an additional 2% reduction can mean significant savings for regions with many buildings to upgrade, such as France, Moscow Guberniya, and Poland. Even if the region containing the lumber resource spot is small, upgrading lumber resource nodes to Lumber Mills make way for Steam-Powered Sawmills later, which in turn provide much larger discounts and a global cost reduction benefit.
In terms of profitability, Lumber Mills rank poorly compared to other ways of increasing region wealth. However, if funds are limited, they may be spent on a lumber mill and then on buildings in other regions first, to fully take advantage of the cost reduction and therefore recoup the cost more quickly. Over 80,000 gold needs to be spent on a region's buildings following the construction of a lumber mill to justify the costs if calculating cost reduction to buildings alone, which for most regions is simply impossible, but the increase in region wealth makes it worthwhile in the long run.
The discount provided by the Lumber Mill and its variants do not apply for the unique buildings of each faction, such as Nelson's Column, the Minin Monument, and the Siegessäule. It also does not affect the price of Stables or their upgrades.
The Peninsular Campaign[]
In The Peninsular Campaign, lumber mills require 720 gold and 4 turns to build.