I've played a few games on 'Good' difficulty. I've played one on the single landmass map (can't recall the name), and 3 on Mediterranean. I have some observations about resources. Some of my thoughts are likely a result of my choice of map and difficulty. I'm also not playing PVP which would certainly change things. I've also not played enough to know whether some of what I experience is the result of inexperience. Maybe my play style is the reason things feel the way they do, and it's not viable under other conditions. Finally I'm not playing with DLC and I have no idea if that changes anything. DLC should enhance a game though, not be required for it to feel good. So I don't care if DLC makes it better.

My play strategy so far has been push as hard and as fast as I can early to secure the most possible map control, aggressively producing settlers even out of new cities while killing every barbarian and tribal I find. By the time I bump into my natural borders with my neighbours doing this I've had 11-18 cities, and have been either top cities, or more or less in the middle of the pack depending on the game. Once that phase is over I suck up to my neighbours so they leave me alone while I totally neglect my military. I actively go for an early diplomat leader to secure an early alliance as a deterrent, though I don't know if alliances actually server as deterrents in this game. I assume they do though. Then I boom as hard as I possibly can off of all of my cities, getting 2-4 workers per city, and building up as hard as possible. I try to get every wonder I can, which is usually almost all of them, and win off points without ever going to war, or producing more than a token military. Though I do build my cities with the assumption that I will be going to war, so most of my cities have a full complement of military buildings in case I need to quickly mobilize. I also tend to keep the 1 military unit per city for the 1 happiness since it seems like a good deal.

So far I've won off points doing this every time by about turn 120?
These are my observations of the economy of the game by resource.


Resources

Gold:
Gold being the flux resource feels mostly fine. You're always happy to have more of it, and there's lots of ways to generate it. It does feel a little on-rails since the opportunity cost of the specialists who produce it is too high to bother with them. You need stonemasons for civics, officers for training, various specialists for luxuries. I always seem to get a comfortably large amount of gold per turn without really leaning into it, and I don't feel like I have the freedom to lean into gold if I wanted to try it either since I really need those other things which there's no other way to attain. Ultimately though, gold ends up just being stone by another name. It's also kind of bizarre you can't offer it to people for opinion like you can with other resources. Doubly bizarre when you consider that you can just turn it into those resources and send it that way. From a historical standpoint if I recall correctly, the standard for intergovernmental trade was actually copper ingots. Copper is so much not a resource in this game, it doesn't even show up as a luxury which is kind of wild. But 'gold' seems to stand in for it and that's fine, so why can't I send a boatload of it to my neighbour to keep relations lubricated?

Food:
Food feels out of whack. You can easily get way more than you need. Cities don't even seem to cost any regardless of population. Not building a large army I never seem to need any, even when I produce enough workers to suck up most of my orders. Foods internal balance seems out of whack too. Lighthouse + Fish + Fisherman + Harbor = about 6 decent farms for way less investment and tiles. It costs 6 workers like 18-24 turns of labor to produce 6 farms. It costs like 6-8 for the fish. Then there's order economy. Moving to the 6 tiles costs a lot more than moving to the one. The fish costs the citizen, the city production time, and the cost/order for the lighthouse. But the lighthouse is just good globally and you probably want it anyways, so only some fraction of it should be considered. There's the citizen and city time, which isn't nothing. But you're getting a ton of growth, and a bit of money out of the deal. Tiles are no joke too. You don't want a bunch of garbage farms getting in the way later on when you need that space for urban sprawl, and military setups. Harbors and fish cost literally no space, since there's nothing else you can do with the coastal. Same deal more or less with other resource tiles like game or goats. When I started playing I thought food was going to be the most important resource. You know like in real life. Turns out it matters by far the least. I'm banking hundreds of it without even trying by the midgame, and usually just converting it into cash, which gets converted into stone.

Iron:
Iron seems too abundant in general, and you just take what you need. If you want a huge army, it costs a lot of iron, but getting a lot of iron isn't difficult if you really want it, so you do. You seem to get a lot of unremarkable hill tiles you don't really want to put anything else on, so there's not much opportunity cost outside of worker time and orders. The picture seems to be that you might need either a lot, or almost nothing. But either way you can easily get exactly the amount you want without much trouble. So it's not interesting. There's also no internal balance to iron. You want iron, you make the one building that makes it on the one type of tile that produces it in exactly the same quantity every time. Nothing to consider like mountain adjacency for stone, or alternative sources from the basic improvement like nets or groves for food. It feels kind of half baked, and I don't know why from a design standpoint. But it's largely inoffensive and it doesn't really bother me.

Stone:
You need too much. You need like 10-20x as much stone as anything else. You'll squeeze quarries into every single mountain nook, every triangle of 3 arid tiles you can find. You'll stick them on lush terrain next to a pasture and a granary if it touches even 1 mountain. You can basically consume every piece of stone you can feed yourself. With the exception of my first game, I haven't had a game where I didn't take stone as aggressively as possible. Yet I still resort to turning ALL my gold into stone, and turning most of my other resources into gold to turn into stone. It's totally wild. Like in this universe the philosopher's stone doesn't turn lead into gold, it turns it into stone. King Midas doesn't turn things to gold with his touch, he turns it to stone. Stone ends up with value over 20 while food and wood drop to 3, and iron to like 6 or 7. I take the law that equalizes buying and selling prices so I can get more value out of my other resources to buy more stone. I take slavery every game because I need the stone, and I can turn the iron into stone. Every urban building not only costs stone, but costs stone upkeep. Every wonder costs stone. Roads cost stone. These are the things which make you win. Iron and food to support a large army does you absolutely no good if you can't produce that large army because you don't have good cities. You literally win the game primarily off of having good cities. Whether that's to make and support a stronger military, or to just build culture and science to the victory points. Stone is totally out of control. I'm fine if there's a resource more important than other resources, but this is a bit much. I shouldn't want a ratio of 0-1 farm to 20+ quarries.

Wood:
I find wood to be the only resource in a really good spot. A bunch of things want it, and it's pretty inefficient outside of forest rivers until late in the game. So you want the mills on those specific tiles. I've had access to enough forest rivers to be comfortable every game I've played. But it's also come at the cost of urban convenience basically every time. They get in the way, and you need to think about how you'll place your hamlets to bypass the chokes they create, or whether you want to sacrifice a mill or two for baths. I really like where wood is, and I wish the other resources felt like it.


Science:
I don't have much to say. It seems fine. You can focus on it or not to whatever degree you want. Techs seem a little less important in this game than other 4x games. Like I don't feel totally hosed if I'm behind 4-5 techs. So you can sacrifice it a little bit to do some other stuff, then make it up later which is nice. Often times cities are limited more by your overall grown than the tech itself. The one game I did push tech really hard I ended up way ahead of everyone else. But it just gave me the option of making more buildings, not the capacity to. I was still severely limited by orders and city production, so I wasn't able to leverage it into too much. This might be the first 4x game I've played where there really is such a thing as too much science. I found it mostly gave me the freedom to pick up the one shot bonuses when offered without it feeling bad. On my low tech games I'd still take the luxury offered, but it felt bad to do when it was setting me back 4-6 turns. When it's 1 turn it feels like it's not even a real choice in a good way. You're being rewarded for developing the way you did. And there's a good variety of specialists who produce science in different ratios, so it is something you always have the option to do. I think it's fine.

Civics:
Between civics and training, civics is the stone. I'm constantly running out of it. You have to lean really hard into it. It's funny then that it's so interrelated to stone. Stonemasons are the only early game specialist who produces it, and they also produce stone. So guess where most of my non luxury specialists go. You need to make a forum of the highest level in every city to get anything done, and it costs stone. Cities don't feel like they're really online until they can produce specialists in 3ish turns, and that takes a lot of civics. Then every wonder you build, and wonders are absurdly strong in his game, costs a ton of both civics and stone. Little of anything else. This ends up flattening the game's economy into one where basically there are two resources, and everything else is kind of incidental. The economy is civics and stone because those make everything else.

Training:
Most cities end up feeling kind of samey in this regard because you don't have that much control. You make the 2 barracks and ranges, then maybe you get some officers. Maybe you have some ore that makes a city a bit more military focused, and maybe you've got your 1 copy of a pagan shrine which produces some training. But they always end up being pretty close to each other in training output which is fine I guess. You don't have a lot of control outside of producing and upgrading officers which is a legitimate choice. It's a pretty huge investment to get 4 officers to max, and it's pretty impactful on how fast the city produces units compared to other cities since there are so few other ways to improve training. But you really can't do it until you get your civics under control first or it'll take the entire game. Something like 25 turns per officer, probably starting the journey around turn 50? The game would be over before it was done, and the city would still need time to produce units. It doesn't add up. Like everything else you get the culture and the civics first, then tack on officers. Probably after you secure all the luxury specialists since those are so important. So while it's an interesting choice in theory, I found in practice it just ended up being the default path for most cities, and the game ends before my war machine really comes up to speed anyways.

Orders:
I don't know if I like this system compared to civ. You don't have a lot of control over how many you have, and when you need them. Like it's really easy to end up with way more than you can spend. But then when you do need them, say when you're doing military stuff, or all your workers just finished building on the same turn, you end up running short. I don't really have the option of saying 'this game I really want to do a lot of military stuff, but also don't want to sacrifice workers, so I'll sacrifice somewhere else to make sure i have the orders to do both'. Or scouting + conquest. Or scouting + workers. I always feel like I have too many orders, or too little, and far too little control over either situation. Normally in a strategy game if I end up with too much of something it's a sign of a mistake. I over invested in that resource, and that opportunity cost probably should have gone elsewhere. It's a sign of inefficiency. But with how little orders interact with other parts of the system that doesn't seem to be the case. You can sometimes get them with trade, but that's RNG based. You get them from legitimacy which is fine. You're always trying to maximise that anyways though, so I've never been in a situation where I thought 'I need more orders, I should have gone for more legitimacy' or 'I have too many orders, I shouldn't have pushed legitimacy so hard'. There's not much you can do with city development to control it. Just get growth. But you'll be doing that anyways, with the exception of maybe granaries. I don't always have the space for all 3 granaries in every city. Orders kind of feel like you play the hand you're dealt. I don't love it, especially when it feels too constricting at points in the game. Not even points in the game, like specific turns of the game in a way that feels random, or at least unreasonably tedious to manage (like trying to desync your workers and councillors).

Luxuries:
They're important, but uninteresting. You give the ones to the families they want, then you give every single other copies to cities unless you need to send 1 or 2 to a neighbour to keep them happy with you. You get every single one you can, how many you get is somewhat outside of your control. When offered a luxury in a trade deal you'll usually take it because 40 turns of a luxury equals 80 happiness and culture in a city and that's worth whatever nonsense they're asking for more often than not. Luxuries just aren't interesting. There's some nuance as to whether you want to spread them across more cities to get get culture and happiness up more widely, or focus on a couple cities earlier to unlock more powerful buildings and earlier wonder access. But that's about it, they exist and you want them. You use them and they do the thing they do. I guess I can imagine a world where you ally tribals to get their land. Maybe that can be more order efficient than conquering them at the cost of a few luxuries for however many turns you need to colonize them? Maybe I'll try that I don't know. Luxuries are boring. I feel like they should do different things for cities instead of always being 2 happiness and culture. Then the decision of where to put them would be more impactful.



Alright that's all I've got. I'm pretty new at this game and it's kind of complex. I'd like some other perspectives to think about these things from if you've got one. I'll probably just be turning the difficulty up in the future which may force me to play differently. Maybe there's a map that's more balanced?