This is odd to me.
Not that I don't believe you, but I usually see decent amounts of iron and coal available in other countries. I wonder if this is due to just having more iron and coal mines at start, or if something else is going on.
To be clear, I can't run a decent sized economy off iron and coal imports, but unlike wood, there's more available. I wonder if this is a combination of dual production bugs (as you point out elsewhere) combined with other issues.
I checked the files again, so if the AI goal is on agricultural expansion or plantation economy, it's going to weight those buildings at 2.0 and manufacturing at 0.5, looks like resource buildings are untouched at 1.0 so it will likely build mostly farms/plantations.
Resource expansion goal gives it 1.5 to rubber, oil, mining, and logging.
Industrial expansion is 1.25 to manufacturing, rubber, oil, mining, and logging, so they should be even from a multiplier perspective. Been poking around in console for a bit, even under resource expansion 1.5* multiplier, odds are some random factory is going to be weighted higher, so when it's on par with factory weight, it doesn't have much chance unless the factory outputs fall under 75% price and the resources are over 125% price. Note that there is a bonus to industrial/military goods, and since iron and coal are categorized industrial, but wood isn't, this gives them another advantage in weight.
The production methods chosen to compare weights for building a new building is either the existing one in a state or what the default one will be for constructing a new building, so in somewhere like the France or Russia, since all the logging camps start with hardwood production, any new camps will have hardwood production and use its values and price thresholds for comparisons, while every other markets will use no hardwood. So this means a country like Russia is unlikely to build iron or coal mines unless it becomes a critical shortage because they start with the lowest mining PM, but they will sometimes build logging camps (unless they have a shortage of tools at some point and decide to change a logging camp down to use no tools, at which point the country's default will be no tools logging, and it will never have a chance against other buildings until it decides to change that PM back to sawmills.)
The reason France does so well with building relative to other countries, is that it starts with good PM in all mines and lumber camps, has enough production of every main good that it isn't going to have a price swing that will glitch out the profitability calculations or accidentally run into a shortage, and has some pretty good trade routes at game start that are likely to remain in effect.
And I think the other thing with mines is that once they reach condensing engine they are fairly profitable and can somewhat compete against random industry while logging camps with sawmills aren't going to be weighted favorably until they get electric saw mills, but then the cost of electricity or a shortage there could block the AI at that point, and techs are also unlocking higher PM for factories at that point pushing them even higher once they switch to those.
