It might be that the game is relatively new strategy-wise but so far our groups have gone through the meta of over-upgrading and now we're probably on the other side of under-upgrading. Personally I don't feel as strongly as I did about upgrading as I did when I first started playing.
I'm not saying it's not useful, but perhaps over-valued and it's possible to compensate for a lack of a certain upgrade without losing any efficiency, vp wise. The trick to the upgrades is, if you're going to pay into them, you really have to work on making them pay out. At the very least, I feel this makes the strategy a little less flexible, they are pretty costly, and they by themselves do not lead to any victory points (with 1 exception).
I would say, absolutely not, is the Corn upgrade useful for bypassing wood. At the risk of inciting a pun, you want that wood. You really do. Again a strong move beginning of the game is typically placing two workers on Palenque and letting them both ride to a 4 wood/9 corn payoff.
Now, late-to-end game it is semi-useful to be able to use spots that no longer have corn but I haven't taken the big corn strategy long enough into a game where this becomes a factor. Also, usually the cheaper spots run out of corn (people scrambling to feed their people can't wait to ride the wheel longer), so there is always opportunity to grab corn later on the wheel.
I'm not saying it's not useful, but perhaps over-valued and it's possible to compensate for a lack of a certain upgrade without losing any efficiency, vp wise. The trick to the upgrades is, if you're going to pay into them, you really have to work on making them pay out. At the very least, I feel this makes the strategy a little less flexible, they are pretty costly, and they by themselves do not lead to any victory points (with 1 exception).
I would say, absolutely not, is the Corn upgrade useful for bypassing wood. At the risk of inciting a pun, you want that wood. You really do. Again a strong move beginning of the game is typically placing two workers on Palenque and letting them both ride to a 4 wood/9 corn payoff.
Now, late-to-end game it is semi-useful to be able to use spots that no longer have corn but I haven't taken the big corn strategy long enough into a game where this becomes a factor. Also, usually the cheaper spots run out of corn (people scrambling to feed their people can't wait to ride the wheel longer), so there is always opportunity to grab corn later on the wheel.