Learning to love Resources

[DrPraetorious]

The question has arisen - who wants Productivity?

Well, for productivity to be worth it, you want:
* An outstanding combat unit with a gold:resource ratio of ~1 or lower.
* When I say outstanding, it's not enough for the unit to beat the [censored] out of independents. The unit has to do that, and it has be tough, mobile etc. enough to continue to be relevant into the era where combat magic becomes relevant.
* The nation also needs (relatively) cheap mages, or you won't have enough money to use all these resources anyway.

Once combat magic becomes dominant, the only relevant stats are size and mapmove, because everything is chaff. However, you can have a lot more gems, income and money going into the late midgame if you dominate the early game.

Sinews and steel, the best stuff to spend a lot of resources on:
- Barbarian Heavy Horsemen (LA T'ien Ch'i). These guys are better than Knights and they cost *25 Gold*. Their bows help to overcome the drawbacks of being size 3, and being size 3 provides some resistance against the area of effect magic that first threatens to make them obsolete; more to the point, they're extremely swift.
- Various Jotun and Fomorians (LA Jotunheim, EA Fomoria). Have a little trouble eliminating chaff themselves, but are tough enough to remain relevant against magical enemies. The heavily armored ones cost a lot of resources. In the MA, unfortunately, your mages are too expensive to make this viable, and EA Niefelheim laughs at you.