Gold Income

So early game, gold is scarce because its being used for techs. We see units like archers and horsemen.

However, towards the lategame, we never see the cheap units. This is in contrast to age of empires 2, where scouts, pikemen and skirmishers become a staple of the game because gold is scarce.

Not building trash units (horsemen, pikemen, basic archers) makes the game less interesting to play, because it reduces the complexity of unit composition. Knights/lancers are suddenly now just fodder instead of the elite chivalry they should be. Forgetcrossbowmen, and go straight to muskets. There is no depth to the unit composition on gold rich maps.

I have an idea to fix that.

First, large gold veins are the source of the majority of the gold. What if harvesting gold from large goldveins was more risky, and took more effort to do and more time to set up? So, what if you couldn’t harvest gold from large veins unless you built an additional structure on top of the gold vein? A mine. But, this isn’t just any structure. When the mine is destroyed, all the workers inside it die. And when a mine is attacked, no workers can exit for 3 seconds. In essence, once trapped by a bunch of enemy raiders, your miners are doomed, and you will pay a heavy penalty for attempting to harvest gold.

As a result, people would be very scared to go harvest gold, and would instead focus on food and wood armies. The few gold harvesting operations would be heavily guarded, and the gold mines would create open targets for targeted raiding.

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