I'm thinking more on the gameplay- there's nerfing, then there's obliterating.

I'd have been fine with merchants just giving 1 or 2 gildar instead.

Yeah, food is scare, people need food. So, it just logical if you sell food for money to the population

i kinda like it this way - it makes food even more valuable than before - and it also maks you not just click -arcane-tech-money-mats- building on every city you make

Basically, we need to move away from buildings that conjure resources.  It needs to be about converting 1 resource to another. Food was chosen because you are seeded with a fertile land nearby as well as a gold deposit.

If you have a resource that doesn't have some cost associated with it, what happens is that the route to victory becomes about creating as many cities as possible without regard to any strategic placement or consideration.

I don't like the food cost for markets. The first thing I do is mod the file to remove it.

Some resource production from buildings is acceptable and realistic. If your going to put a food cost on it then make the benefit more worthwhile or give us an income based on ALL the city production (food, materials, iron, crystal = more gold bonus).

food is at a premium- hence the evil soveriengs produce marketplaces that exploit that said need and charge money for they glorious food bwhahah.

wait that actually makes sense to me .

I think a lot of people who are new to Stardock's games are a little put off with the resource-based economics. I ran in to this when I first played GalCiv. Most empire-builder strategy games are all about 'build as many cities as you can anywhere'. GalCiv threw me for a loop because it was about grabbing resources. This game is the same way. Cities are really only productive when they are there to harvest a resource. It's a little bit counter-intuitive to the standard way of thinking. However, it makes perfect sense in space, where most of the place is just emptiness, and it makes sense here where the world is overcoming a cataclysm. Resources are all that matters. With this system, there are fewer cities to manage, but each of them is strategically important based on what it produces. That is a very real world concept. Consider Hitler's invasion of Russia. He didn't go to grab random land - he went to grab the oil-production areas.

With that being said, monetary wealth is always a measure of the overall economy of a place - it never comes straight from gold mines. I think it would be better to do away with gold mines altogether and make wealth come from taxation (giving us a reason to have people in the first place) and from selling resources in the markets. However, we need to be able to sell more than just food. I really want a market that sells materials. They just pile up, and the people could certainly use them in their everyday life.

Inline with the second paragraph of your post, basic resources (gold, food, and materials) should not come solely from a "good" area, but to aquire it takes more tech and yields less. With the proper technology, food can be produced in less ideal locations (irragation allows farming in arid enviorments). The workshop already produces some materials, and it would not be that far fetched to believe there are lesser sources for material (non-old growth forests still are a source of wood, you just cannot take as much without depleting it quickly). The as you said, trade and taxes are the staple for monetary income for a goverment; however gold mines do have a place still as they produce large quatities quickly (coinage, though that would normally cause inflation but that is getting to complicated).

Rather than making cities without strategic resources worthless, the focus should be on making it less profitable and harder to mass produce towns as an easy means to gain resources. On suggestion is to have cities only buildable on revitalized land (which could be created with a spell or occur normally). Then a penalty could be applied for having to large of a nation as the real reason civilizations did not settle everywhere is not because there was no point, but rather it would be too much bother to protect and govern.

I think the merchant change is an improvement, but mostly misses the real problem of size one cities being free promoting city spamming. And caravans being too effective.

I am hoping that having all cities use an extra food takes time to implement, and the merchant thing is a quick fix until they can get it right.

Um, actually the merchant change is quite the opposite of an improvement for city spamming in my experience. Although the reason isn't the merchants themselves, but rather the reduced profitability of hunting monster for Gildar. Let me see if I can explain this in a way that makes sense...

Before, merchants cost nothing, but only produces 1 Gildar. It was virtually worthless, I didn't even bother building them because I could make money so easily from hunting. So a spam outpost would produce me a bunch of food (from caravan), a tech point, a mat (I didn't bother building arcane labs).

Now hunting isn't profitable anymore (waste of time really), so I have to resort to building merchants. Since a caravan from a city to my capital will generate anywhere between 2-5 food (capital always produces 12 food, so even a 20% bonus is 2.4 good). This means building a spam outpost nets me at least 1 food (usually more), mat, tech, and 2 gildar every turn (arcane too, but that becomes pointless after a certain point). Which, if you look at from a certain point of view is actually more than what a spam outpost would have produces from v1.07.

The thing is, because hunting is no longer a viable way to feeding your economy, you end up almost HAVING to spam cities for those extra 2 gildar per turn. As a result, merchants are now great, and there are now more spam cities than ever.

I can buy that argument.  If you're going to keep the 1 food cost, maybe up the benefits?  Tasunke's 5 gildar idea sounds good.  That's about the value of 1 food to me.

If city spam is your concern- you could solve two birds by upping army maintenance costs to lower units fieldable dramatically.  More cities+ fewer units= harder to defend.  Don't allow lvl 1 cities to allow for more units. 

Actually, a better way to solve city spam (rather than up army maintenance costs ... are u kiddin me holmes?) would be to have Total Worldwide population (of your faction) to cost food.

Like, 1 food per 200 global population, or something. Then, like another poster mentioned, have each Specialist Building cost a certain amount of "free population" ...

so you have used population and free population ... and only free population can be used to recruit soldiers (and many new buildings cost free population, turning them into used population) ... and all population, anywhere on the map, uses 1/200 food.

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if, somehow, a cities population dips through its "free pop" and somehow lowers the used pop ... then buildings that use "used pop" will lower in effectiveness.

Preferably at a % rate based on the entire Used population. (so if half of the used population die, then all buildings work at 50% effectiveness)

As far as City-Growth n Prestige go ... I feel that there should be not only Pop increase from Prestige, but also from Birth.

(Birth growth would start out VERY low or at 0, and then would slowly increase as the population increased, kind of like a shallow logarithmic curve)