I've played a few games of RW and noticed that almost no-one builds developments and when they do, it's mainly the defensive ones? why is that so? Anyone else who've come across this phenomenon?

I used very often resource DEV especially food for elves. Additionally tactic and influence is as well quite useful and often used them. Maybe at the beginninjg people don't care about DEV to be able to get more units but after couple of games it's obvious how important they are.

+1 to Berto. We didn't use developments at all in our first few games, but more recently we've started to and they're definitely useful. Last game I used the Undead special development to protect a stronghold that otherwise would've fallen to those nosey humans! It was an important victory that kept me from losing a dragon rune in a space which was sadly under-protected despite my best efforts. I still lost the game, though. Those sneaky elveses got rune #6 before I could since me and the humans were busy staring each other down.

I don't use them a lot, mostly because we rarely use the Harvest order more than once or twice in a game. Part of this was due to the Bountiful Harvest, which comes up 1/4 of the time in Autumn, and resets all your dials - which makes trying to Harvest sometimes a crapshoot as to whether it's a waste or not.

However, we often play with a house rule (one of the very few house rules that I actually play with) where a Bountiful Harvest season allows you to collect on developments that already exist. That way, if you have a Resource development, you can get the extra food/whatever from it (rather than being "punished" by it), and it makes using Harvest to build developments more worthwhile.

Without that, I found myself rarely building them (except defensive ones), not because the developments aren't useful, but because I never used Harvest often enough to get much benefit out of them.

This is real pain that harvest must be use as a order to use those resources. At the first stage of the game we usually do this couple of times. It´s urgent at the beginning to buy one either influence or strategy. Later if u use harvesting to build development on urgent stronghold u can use early created one. So if want to buy one do this first time u have such possibility.

I've found developments to be pretty weak.

The defensive ones are worth it at times because they work without having to get the supremacy on harvest again.

I find harvest is one of the best cards to play out of order because the supremacy sucks so much.

I'll find myself doing things like fortify in the fall, then harvest in the winter to get the cost of a stronghold right back.

I have used the developments in most of the games we have played. Getting the extra resource is always a plus. When looking into the developments available remember that each faction has a special one and see how it may benefit you in the game.

I use the special developments often. The others I usually build, but then end up not using (or using only once).