Let's talk economy (ver 1.05).
I've now played two games each of which are currently over 400 turns and I have some observations on some of things in the economy that are a bit arwy.
1. I mentioned this in this post: https://forums.elementalgame.com/392907the shop value for common equipment for champions is way out of whack. For what it costs to outfit a champion, you can usually outfit 16 or so soldiers in similar equipment. The shop costs should be no higher or only marginally higher to outfit a single champion with common equipment than it does to equip a single soldier. Shops should also carry rare items that only champions can use. It would be great if these items changed every 10 or so turns. Common equipment costs (i.e. soldier equipment cost) is probably a bit too cheap.
2. In all my games, the AI as well as my faction had extreme excesses of metals and materials which means that either things need to use more of them or they need to be produced in much smaller quantities. Crystals and Horses seem to be about right. Food seems too rare and for some reason isn't tradable. Later in both games, the AI is so full of metals and materials they have no interest in trading for them.
3. Building costs are too cheap and their maintenance is also too inexpensive. If it wasn't for the gildar that I spent equipping my champions I would have had an extreme excess of gildar. In both games, I was able to build every building in every city without regards to cost, materials or maintenance. By turn 400, I would hope to have a war chest of gildar, but I would still expect to be making more intelligent decisions about which buildings I build where. As it is, you might as well automate the building process once you determine where the city location is because it's really not a factor in the game.
4. Gold mines do not produce enough gold to make them as special as they should be. Gold mines should be extremely valuable resources and currently they are only marginally more valuable than other materials and certainly not as valuable as crystal mines are. Since gold is turned directly into Gildar, they should probably produce twice as much gold as they do and the AI should lust for control of them.
5. Taxes should be a much earlier technology IMO. People have been taxing others since the stone age. Making it a later game technology is worthless IMO.
6. Wages for the military units is too small and doesn't scale well enough. Standing armies should cost a lot more than they currently do especially since you can have armies of 16 soldiers becoming very powerful in the game. I have a army of 16 knights in legendary platemail that has a combat rating close to 400 that costs a couple of gildar per turn. That's crazy.
Most of these issues can be corrected by changing their values in the ElementalDefs.xml file and would go a long way to making the economy more robust. I think for the most part the ecomomy model works, in a very simplistic way, but the costs need to be rebalanced better.
Summation:
Shop costs need to be massively decreased for common equipment. More 'rare' equipment needs to be available even at the start of the game, but shouldn't be extremely expensive. I.E. a ring that increases attack by 1 should be 4-5 gildar, while one that increases attack by 3 should be 50-60 gildar because it might be extremely rare.
Materials and Metal costs should be adjusted. Either make them produce less or make things that use them use 3-4 times that amount.
Maintenance costs on all things is too inexpensive. I would selectively increase it, especially on later improvements and with soldiers depending on the gear that they are outfitted with as well as their experience.
Have taxes come much earlier in the game.
Those are my thoughts.