That's a good idea. ;)

There is a bug in how the food from the caravan works, it's many times more efficient than it's supposed to be. Once that gets fixed things should level out a little bit at least.

I'm sure I'm doing it wrong and would appreciate any advice, but I can't ever find a spot to put a trading post. I've never seen "two rivers intersect" or "a river empty into a lake", the requirements the tooltip suggests? I've only seen single rivers empty into the ocean and no tile near that works for me either.

Your trader needs to be in the river tile adjacent to the ocean/lake (no next ot it) and the tile needs to be in your borders and you need to have the required resources (wood or stone blocks). Then you should have the option to build the trading post.

Originally posted by fatbot45:

I'm sure I'm doing it wrong and would appreciate any advice, but I can't ever find a spot to put a trading post. I've never seen "two rivers intersect" or "a river empty into a lake", the requirements the tooltip suggests? I've only seen single rivers empty into the ocean and no tile near that works for me either.

Rivers in the game are called 'streams'. As was mentioned earlier, find a place where 2 streams or stream and shallow water meat.

Yeah, I need to fix references to Streams/Small Rivers, as they're all mixed up right now.

Places where Trading Posts can be constructed are intended to be fairly rare but rewarding if you invest enough. I really like that they're powerful, but maybe the cost should be a lot higher. I was considering adding Horses as a cost. May go that direction, or bump the Timber requirement up a fair bit. Want to try that before simply nerfing them.

Hopefully the Coinmaker will be more balanced after fixing the caravan food bug - if not we'll take another look at it soon!

- Jon

To me, it seems the coinmaker makes gold mines redundant -- better to retrain your miners unless you have a ton of engineers. This seems a little weird to me, maybe it should act like the smelter and multiply the output instead?

The idea is to have something at the end of the Metalworking tree you can train "retired" clans in after you've moved your economy away from something you were focusing on earlier in the game. Providing straight Treasure is tough to balance though. Making it a multiplier on Gold Mines would make sense, but they're so rare that it's not really worth having a profession dedicated to it. Gonna think about this one some more.

- Jon

Fair enough, and in the end the amount isn't that farfetched - especially for a lategame position. There are many competitive options for turning a profit. I've been enjoying trying out the game so far and experimenting with different economies. I've mostly been messing around with a bit over 20 clans, so I haven't seen the lategame yet. I'll have to see how the balance shifts as I keep growing.

I would prefer the game be made harder rather than nerfing skills. Especially coin maker as it’s essential if you play the huns since you can’t build mines and traders

Originally posted by Jon Shafer:

The idea is to have something at the end of the Metalworking tree you can train "retired" clans in after you've moved your economy away from something you were focusing on earlier in the game. Providing straight Treasure is tough to balance though. Making it a multiplier on Gold Mines would make sense, but they're so rare that it's not really worth having a profession dedicated to it. Gonna think about this one some more.

- Jon

One option would be to add gold to the list of caravan goods, appearing only rarely and in small quantities (this would make sense from the real-world history perspective), say 3-10, making coinmaker do a conversion as other professions do, and playing with the amount of pure gold produced by the mines.