Hi!

Making a medieval city builder in the vains of banished, anno and stronghold. For harvesting resources like trees and surface stone I see a couple of options:
1. Buildings harvest in their vicinity (woodcutters hut in stronghold, almost everything in anno)
2. Unassigned workers harvest resources that has been "marked" for removal (banished)

To me the first option is more streamlined and resource income will be more even. The other one demands more input from the player and resource income will come in chunks. What are your thoughts and could you come up with another solution?

Thanks!
Erik

Seeing as this is a medieval city, I suppose the player takes on the role of a feudal lord or something similar(?). If that's the case for your game, I'd say the second option is more engaging since the player is given the direct ability to control their workers. And since they're "unassigned", you might also assign them different jobs or give them different locations to harvest resources from (if the player wants to focus primarily on farming any certain resource for a specific period of time). 

Another solution is to go in a less controlled direction. I think the game was named Majesty or Majesty 2 when I saw this mechanic first. You didn't actually control your adventurers directly. They'd go out and do adventuring stuff. You could influence their behavior by placing bounties on monsters, lairs, or exploration markers. They'd go out kill the monsters, and come back to your town to spend the money. It was pretty neat.

You could do something similar with resources. Instead of directly controlling the peasants, you just increase what you're willing to pay for stone. And more workers will go out and setup stone cutting workshops.  There'd still be some peasants working on food and wood harvesting unless the price of stone was SO awesome that you create a gold rush.