Smelting in Alliance of Heroes involves the purification or alloying of metallic minerals.  Please bear in mind that I've researched the topic of ancient smelting techniques as much as I could before deciding how realistic these processes should be.  For instance, pre-heating a furnace for 12 hours just wouldn't be fun or profitable for players so it just wasn't included in the smelting process.  The addition of certain agents as flux to improve chances of success was something to be considered but I wasn't anxious to add flux components which would involve significantly more work and a later release date for smelting although this is something I can potentially add later.

In the end, smelting and metallurgy in general is an extremely complex and intricate topic of study and the reproduction of it in our game is well beyond the scope of what we can hope to achieve in a reasonable amount of time.

You should expect to see some benefits and some losses in the values of mined ores.  The values that were first established failed to meet the current standards of our QC process for various materials and these have been corrected.  Ores are unrefined metals and are given ½ their base value.  Smelting these ores can yield up to 120% of their base value so even until we develop crafts that use these refined metals, there is a monetary benefit to practicing smelting.

The following table demonstrates changes to the original values of mined ores.

As you can see, the value of iron and gold has been increased significantly.  The benefits of smelting copper, tin, and zinc will be more to gain the skills needed to smelt more precious metals as well as generating the metals needed to one day make bronze and brass for the creation of finished items.

We realize that there isn't much need for refined ores but this is the first step in the development of forging.

As was mentioned, much research went into the processes involved in ancient techniques of smelting certain ores.  Following are the three processes that you will eventually be using.