ORIGINAL: bjmorgan
Actually, it is not always a good idea to leave sliders producing one resource of some type when those slider points could be on another slider where the produce two resources of some other type. Of course, since you dump everything into a national pool anyway, you have to look at the current province's production potential in relation to what all of the other provinces can produce. That means you sometimes have to produce a resource in a province just because you can get a little of it produced, since you may not be able to produce that resource any where else.
Does any of that make sense?
Yes, it makes sense to me. When I was playing Sweden, I had to put slider 'points' into inefficient textile production even though production of other resources was more efficient. Ideally, Sweden should trade other resources for textiles, but the privateer hordes blocked my attempts to do so.
BTW, I imported "COG2Provinces.txt" into Excel and crunched some number. Sweden has the best Wood (Nyland), Wool (Uppland), Spice (Uppland) and Luxury (Uppland) producing provinces. Uppland also ranks near the top in Iron production. However, Sweden's Labor and Textile production sucks. It is best to set the Labor sliders to zero in every province. This gives you one Labor in every province. To get two Labor you had to practically max out the slider and in my opinion it isn't worth it.