Well, we already know from the beta that we are finding bags of coins in the world around us... So possibly the world before the cataclysm had a single currency and the post-cataclysm factions are just using those coins as a basis. I mean with as vague as money always is in these 4x games, this is as good an explanation as any imo.

I guess I've been thinking of nearly all the beta 1 UI text as an extremely rough draft, right along with the underlying functional questions like 'how many of these things should be magic items vs. gold?' Re how vague money has traditionally been in TBS games, well, is it that wrong to hope for Elemental to make a big step forward?

@Wintersong: I was thinking of your personal avatar factory when I mentioned sovereign faces on coins, but now that you mention pure-text decoration, I can't easily imagine when I'd want to see a detailed image of a coin in the Elemental GUI. Maybe if the Treasury gets its own full-screen (or at least decently-large) interface, a faction's Coin of the Realm might be a good design element...

It would be interesting to have economic sabotage beyond just blowing up buildings. Flooding cities with goods and counterfeiting to cause inflation in your enemy's cities could be an interesting passive-aggressive way to attack somebody.

Although it doesn't make a terrible amount of sense, they could just have all the different currencies be 1:1 equivalent........... in the real world that is highly unlikely, but so is using the same currency all over the continent.......

I'm not at all seriously expecting to see a true multipolar currency market in a TBS any time soon. But the kindgoms-empires context in Elemental does seem like an opportunity to try some very basic stuff with two currencies, e.g. recruiting a major Death-oriented power (say a Lich Lord) might be impossible without empire coin or vice versa.

That's basically the cosmetic approach, which I think would be more fun than 'nothing' without adding that big a task item for the art devs. It could even work into flavor text for quests and such, where the type of coins in a dead assassin's pouch are a clue that might mean Faction A is behind the attempt or an unknown faction wanted to implicate Faction A.

This is actually what i would prefer. So in one game, iron might be very rare and thus worth so much more throughout that game, and in another it might be a different resource thats rare. So that money actually means something, because you would be spending it to actually get other resources that will actually build you things. In games like these, money and the economy always takes a back seat which wouldn't be the case when running a nation. It would be one of the most important things. I'd like to be able to evaluate every game which is the best nation to buy salt from if i need salt? I don't have any iron, is there any nation i can buy iron ore cheaply? Where should i try to get a trade treaty signed? These questions would make every decision count and increase the games re-playability i think 

As far as I can tell, based on the betas, resources will be amassed (or produced) and not unlimited (like it was in the civ) from resource ownership. So there could be a world market where i could buy a certain amount of wood by giving a certain amount of iron. They would each have a value in gold (based on abundance like demiansky said). So if wood is common in the world, it will have a relatively low price, and iron would probably have a higher price. Or maybe you could have it be based on a nations abundance of a certain resource, so you could have a certain resource be cheaper in one nation than it is in another?

This way its kind of like having different currencies, but really its just based on how important a certain resource is to that nation at that point in time