Breaking the already broken economy with a bailiff

[Feral Grumpicorn]

When you nominate a bailiff you get a little (at first) bonus and most of them are not really interesting (like job training speed, but that needs another topic), except the trade price bonus. Since I needed some labor splendor I decorated the bailiff office, which increases that bonus quite a bit. A cheap little garden in the back, some lanterns throughout the village and more to get to the next labor level and I ended up with a trade bonus of +135% after reassigning the bailiff.

So a little test was in order: I setup a warehouse to store gold bars and gave the order to buy up to 10. Trader came and sold me 13 (lvl 1 challenge trade route maximum) bars for 83g. After a switch to sell another trade came and payed 214g for them. Free money and free trade volume!

At a trade price bonus of 41% you would already buy and sell at the same price. Considering that the labor privilege gives 10% I would suggest to set the max bonus for the bailiff to 25%. With 35% you could buy and sell with just a slight (<20%) loss. No more free money while still being a worthwhile bonus.

[Feral Grumpicorn]

After playing the clergy aspiration which is a trading game I noticed how overpowered it is. Or maybe its the production that makes no sense. Either way, its way out of balance and needs a major rework.

Food production I would say is the part of the game that received the most balancing before release. Fish, berries, bread, cheese, veggies all produce in bulk, but it also gets eaten in bulk and I prefer not to gamble too much with my villagers happiness. There is one exception though:
Boar/meat produces the most per worker if you find/plant a nice big forest and remove a strip of forest at the border so the boar cant migrate out of reach. Meat is my early game cash cow. It goes directly to the trader and not the market. If you want to go full capitalist you skip the hunters and buy the boar for 4g, let your workforce slaughter it and sell the five meat for 15g.

It gets wonkier if you look at goods, but first a short detour to construction materials and their chains:
Wood/planks: You cant buy planks, so you have to produce them. Overproduction gets sold.
Stone/polished stone: I keep a buy order for both for 100-200 in case a big project cleans my storage, but otherwise I let my storage just slowly fill.
Iron ore/iron: This is the first step where the economy starts going downhill imo. You need 4 ore and 2 coal to get one iron. Or you could just buy it for 5g a piece. With the maintenance cost of the iron ore quarries, coal production and the smelter I am not sure its worth it. And since there are 3 traders that sell iron you can buy a lot of it!
Tools: This is where its starting to get silly. You need 1 iron and 3 coal to make or you can buy it for 6g each. Thats 5 coal for 1 tool.
Lets stay with the iron and look at common wares. With the upgrade ofc: You buy the iron (5g), dont sell the planks (3*1g) and get 6 wares you could sell for 4g each. Another money maker. Overproduction is quite profitable here.
Barrels: Buy! Same situation as with tools. Cheaper to buy than make. And you dont need many for wine anyway.
Candles (with upgrade): 2 wax + 1 iron -> 2 candles. You can buy the input for 9g and sell the output for 10g. Hardly any profit. If you have clothes and common goods you dont need candles, so I would call them optional. If you have a monastery the wax is a byproduct of the lucrative honey trade. Might as well use it if you have it.
Weapons: You will have to make them if you want to go castle. No other use than giving them to your soldiers.
Glass: You hardly need any in the whole playthrough. Its enough to have some of it. Just buy it. Even if you produce quartz! 6 quartz, 3 coal and 1 tool for a single piece of glas. You can sell both the quartz and coal for 1g each, then not pay 6g for the tool and instead buy the glas for 7g a piece. The glass smelter itself already costs 500g to build. You could buy about 70 glass (more if you have trade bonuses) instead of just building the thing.
Same with the gold smelter. 6 gold ore and 3 coal for a single bar. The ore alone is worth 24g if you sell it. You can buy the ingot for 15g.
Gems, jewelry: Here be dragons! Unusable luxuries. First of all: All luxuries are as far as I know functionally identical. You only need one of them for citizens and two for some high tier guests. Worst case: Aspiration game without monastery so you cant produce herbs or honey. You guessed the answer: Just buy them. Since making gold bars is stupid its only worth making jewelry if you looted gold bars. And then its only for selling it anyway to buy herbs. Not worth the effort, upfront cost of 500 and the 60 upkeep.

I think all this explains why the "heavy industry" of the game feels disappointing. Usually you get some kind of advantage when you produce stuff in games yourself. Not here. Producing even iron is questionable at best and the deeper you go into production chains the worse it gets. Common wares being the exception, but that one is basically broken in the other direction.

One thing is funny though. The forum is full of people complaining of how bad the coal production is. The solution is simple: Dont make any! Every building that uses coal is crap. Trade for it the products instead. Its more effective to put the workers and mapspace into more food.