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A short guide on how to prepare for switching from gift economy to barter economy, also known as fair exchange.
Requirements
To prepare for the switch from the gift economy policy that the game usually starts you with to the fair exchange policy unlocked by the barter technology you require two additional policies.
- Leadership
- Privligies
These policies are unlocked by their respective technology that requires you to have an Elders Council.
Once these policies are aquired your capital, who will be your main source of income once you are set up, will need to sufficently wealthy to provide you with enough income to not go bankrupt.
Setting Privligies
To make it so that the two policies (Leadership and Privligies) provide you with an income they need to be configured.
The way i do it is that i set my Privligies to 25%, which is the maximum. this gives your leader 25% of your capitals wealth as coins.
Then i set the Leader Contributions to 98%, this transfers 98% of you leader’s coins to the treasury that you then can buy resources and hire units with.
Worth keeping in mind
Judging when to switch to barter. know that this may not be applicable or a realistic goal in all scenarios.
But if we assume that we are going to use policies configured as above you can figure out how much your initial income will be by taking your capital regions wealth and dividing it by 4, that will say how many coins you will get.
If that amount is something that you estimate to be enough then it is probably time to go ahead and make the switch.
Remember to look at the budget balances of your regions to get an estimate on how many coins you will need to pay for their maintence.
Units, walls and certain other buildings will also start charging upkeep.
Increasing income
As stated earlier that wealth of you capital is directly connected to your income from privliges.
Wealth is a measurement of how much time is spent on producing stuff in a region, regardless of what that stuff is worth.
increasing this number is usually done with two methods simultaniusly. One is increasing the efficency of your production buildings and the other is well, building more production buildings if you got the extra workforce.
Increasing the efficency of buildings, which will happen as new technologies are unlocked, will not only increase the wealth of the region but also the wealth of the workers.
And wealthier workers will pay more in taxes, so this is something that can be considered a win win.