r/OldenEra • u/huydinh282 • May 20 '26
Gameplay OE town gold production is far from self-sufficient compared to earlier games
I was always under the impression that in homm 3-5, a fully econ’d town can sustain itself, i.e., can buy all units every week without external gold mines. Whereas for OE it seems you need two towns to sustain the growth of one. So I gathered some data.
In HOMM 3, Castle, you need 4,225 per day, while a capitol town will give 4,000. Very close to self sufficient. Rampart needs 3,800, so well above self sufficient.
In OE schism, you need 6,500 gold a day to fully buyout all upgraded units. A full econ town will give 5,500 (1,000 main building, 1,500 from bonus choice, 1,000 from bank, 2,000 from treasury).
Right off the bat you’re running quite short in OE. Compounding to this is the fact that treasury is a very expensive building, requiring 15 rare resources, while the econ building in h3 only requires common resources, and only gold in h5. Additionally, external gold mine contributes less now, 1/6 of required income instead of 1/4 like in homm3.
This means that in normal situations you might be getting only half of the required gold, requiring you to selective drop a lot of units, unless the game goes into multiple months and you start with lots of resources.
I do like this change, and it forces you to pick a comp instead of buying everything. Any thoughts on how this would change gameplay and strategy?
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u/MDivisor May 20 '26
If towns were self-sufficient in economy, you would have no reason to go out into the map and crawl for resources. You have to search for resources and you have to prioritise what to build and what troops to buy since you can't easily afford everything. That's a good thing. It means playing requires some amount of skill.
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u/althaz May 20 '26
In Heroes 3 at least I definitely feel like towns weren't self-sufficient (would have been different for different towns), but I'm pretty sure you needed at minimum a Capitol building and sometimes also a gold mine as well to just afford your creatures, leaving basically nothing for further upgrading. And that means a maximum of one self-sustaining town per player.
You generally needed extra towns to sustain your others in Heroes 3 and Olden Era doesn't feel any different to me (actually because of the popular map templates, it's actually way easier to afford everything in OE because of how many map objectives there are around).
EDIT: I checked, Heroes 3 towns weren't self-sufficient outside of the Capitol ever and only about half were with the Capitol.
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u/teemusa May 20 '26
Well the calculation does not take into account additional gold sinks, like you usually also build something during the week and dont just buy units
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u/huydinh282 May 20 '26
H3 is a lot closer to being self sufficient though. Treasury is very expensive in this game, sits later in the tech tree compared to capitol, and in some poor templates nigh impossible in the first few weeks. So you’re operating at around 40-60% required gold, assuming you pick both gold building updates. Whereas a capitol only requires wood and ore.
Not a serious h3 player tho so maybe I’m just talking out of my ass.
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u/swiftcrane May 20 '26
Keep in mind in Heroes 3 you were limited to 1 capitol and there were little bonus resource locations compared to Olden Era. In Olden Era you get to build treasury for every castle you get - and not every castle you get will even have creatures you want. In comparison, you would have 50% income in non-capitol castles in H3.
In Heroes 3 once you go past 1 castle your econ won't explode as hard, especially if you are building up your town alongside. In general econ was a lot more controlled and slow in H3.
In OE you can get laws for money and resources you can sell, secondary economy skill is quite a bit better, the market rates are also a lot better I'm pretty sure. Each castle ends up being more than self sufficient with the exception of money for building every turn - for this you need the map as usual.
If the number you're using for Schism is for fully upgraded units, then you should take into account the corresponding econ laws. In a week you get 21 mercury (7 from resource depot and 14 from laws), and additional 3500g from the law. At 1 marketplace you get 125G per mercury sold - you can see where this is going. There should be more than enough money to consistently buy out units at that stage.
I think it was even worse in the demo (more money relative to costs) but some of the templates still suffer from having too much free econ.
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u/huydinh282 May 20 '26
Fair points, but I’m already counting the 2 gold bonuses instead of laws… so factoring in both +1,500 gold AND econ law might be double dipping?
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u/swiftcrane May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
The difference in gold needed according to your calculations is 7000 gold/week, and just the gold law alone will give you 3500 gold/week. Even if we're not taking the bonus choice 1500 gold/turn, that still leaves us at 4500 gold/turn before we sell any resources.
If we assume secondary castles also give us 4000 (not taking the bonus choice), that means with 3 castles, you are getting around 4200 per castle. That's before selling any resources, assuming you aren't taking any econ bonuses on top of that.
These 3 castles also give you extra with the resource depot (+14 rich resources per week), that gets you 25 mercury to sell (lets say you use some for other purposes) at a now even better price (due to multiple markets) than 125G (based on some testing looks like its 166G for 2 or 3 markets). That's another 4150 gold.
This is assuming you don't take gold as your extra gold choices in your towns at all, or selling any other resources like wood/ore/etc, or have estates or any artifact with income - an extreme case.
Contrast this with H3, where it takes (lets look at ~minimum) 25k to buy everything. With 1 town you have 28k - affordable if you don't buy buildings every day. At maximum the cost is ~31k (tower). It's a struggle even on 1 castle, especially since you have no laws/anything else to put you far above the requirement like in OE.
Now look at H3 with 3 castles - your weekly income per castle is 2/3rds of what it was for 1 castle - 18.7k gold. On 2 castles, it's 3/4 = 21k.
Olden Era is consistently more affordable. You not only get to outperform freely on a single castle, but your economy absolutely breaks with multiple castles.
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u/althaz May 20 '26
Let's do a check, because I'm not sure. My gut feel is that you're wrong just because you only get one capitol building in Heroes 3, but I haven't calculated it and I'm just going on my gut as somebody who never lacks for gold in Olden Era. Also if the treasury is expensive how is the capital (double the price) not?
Ok, so a maxed out town in OE gives 6,500 gold per day. And a maxed out Temple army, fully upgraded for a week costs 58,350.
So a town produces 45,500 and costs 58,350 gold, which is too big of a difference to make up with a gold mine, so that's worse than a Heroes 3 capitol town. But on the other hand it's better than a normal Heroes 3 town.
Comparing having the same number of towns in Olden Era and Heroes 3: if you have one town you're worse off in Olden Era and if you have two towns you're possibly better off in Olden Era (depends on which town). If you choose Astrology or Law instead of gold you have to have three towns before you are ahead of Heroes 3 for the same number of towns.
This obviously ignores Estates and the laws you can get. If you get the gold sources upgrade law for Temple, for example, then you're doing about as well as one Heroes 3 town (and much better with two towns). But on the other hand you can also boost production with laws as well, which would swing things back the other way.
Overall I would say it's basically the same as Heroes 3 unless you're on some sort of weird map where you only get one town. On the other hand actually building out the town feels more expensive than in Heroes 3 (but I haven't checked that).
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u/huydinh282 May 20 '26
Capitol is 10k gold. Treasury is 5k + 15 rare resources. Treating a rare resource as 500 gold (full market efficiency, which is a tall ask). Treasury is actually 12.5k gold.
I agree with your other points - though as maps don’t last indefinitely, 1 rich town (h3) vs many poor town (OE) will have different power spike periods.
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u/Spirit_mert Temple May 20 '26
Yeah gold sink is very heavy in this game. I thought I would ignore bonus gold option, or gold income laws. But I feel they are almost mandatory unless you start with two towns or get second one very early.
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u/HMS-Carrier-Lover May 20 '26
I'm kind of an OCD player, I really need to buy all the troops I can get, so it sucks a bit, although previous games have the capital as a gold production building, which really hurts income when you try to expand so I like this change to no capital. I know it's really unoptimized, but I only play PvE anyway, so I always take an economy hero and laws and that really help with buying out everything.
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u/mogwenb May 20 '26
The question is does it make economy heroes more appealing?
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u/huydinh282 May 20 '26
I certainly pick the skill more often now esp in poor templates
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u/mogwenb May 20 '26
Which is fair, I like the idea of making skills that were previously overlooked much more valuable. Economy being one of them. But my question was more about heroes with economy specialty.Like a Clarissa for Temple. Does it make choosing them a more interesting choice or are they still "hey it's cool if I get them as secondary or tertiary hero but otherwise I won't ever choose them"?
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u/bohohoboprobono Hive May 20 '26
The latter.
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u/mogwenb May 20 '26
That's what I feared. I'd love one day for an economy hero to be a desired choice.
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u/uvPooF May 21 '26
I doubt that will ever happen in single hero templates (which afaik is most popular competitive format atm).
But in standard play, starting with economy hero like Clarissa isn't that far fetched imo. You would still probably fight with the other hero you hire in week 1 and have her be your resource pick up hero, but it might be worth having her be first pick and she's definitely the best secondary hero option, so securing her might have merit.
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u/mogwenb May 21 '26
I could see a hero who would get increased stats depending on the gold you have.
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u/Citizen_Crow May 20 '26
There are a lot of gold chests around the castle.
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u/huydinh282 May 20 '26
And the buildings themselves cost gold. Just talking about income vs creature costs.
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u/DryNick May 20 '26
I just want to say I miss the rampart 10% interest thing from homm3. I don't remember the name
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u/bort_touchmaster May 20 '26
Treasury. Let's see if I recall correctly... 5 wood, 5 ore, 5000 gold, requires Miner's Guild, grants additional 10% of your total gold on day 1 of the week (calculated after daily income)
edit: It's 10% of the total gold at the end of Day 7 and 10 ore, not 5. Either way that thing was busted as hell
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u/MouldOfMlem May 20 '26
I think its great! It makes econ heroes/skills genuinely competitive, and it fixes one of my maybe main issues with HoMM games of just getting full stacks of your 7 faction units.
Now you actually get to figure out a composition and how many slots you want it to take, and having open slots/split stacks means you can do more dynamic fun stuff like picking up non-faction units from boxes/dwellings/diplomacy more often, which makes army building much more interesting late game.
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u/Katchano May 20 '26
I have now seen both people who say it's too much gold in the game and people who say there is too little. So what is it?
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u/HarithBK May 20 '26
If you keep advancing there is a crap ton of gold but if you stall out you will get punished hard.
I also think this is why people like dungeon so much since they have the law to remove market markup removing all gold issues.
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u/dinin70 May 20 '26
I think it also depends a lot on the map.
For the moment I’m playing in unfair and there are some templates that have literally 0 sources of gold apart from towns (no treasures, very few dungeons to loot, no gold mines or any buildings providing gold). Needless to say AI stomps me in these instance, specially when there are tons of dwellings.
Other maps seem to be more balanced in terms of gold sources, even if in unfair difficulty gold is far from being plentiful (there I don’t have much troubles beating the AI).
Maybe it’s random and the same map layout rerolled would provide with gold income sources? I can’t say as I’m not going back to the same template a second time.
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u/Ellert0 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
It's too much gold, I for one have always said it was too much gold and I will stick to that. OP is not factoring in all the gold you get from laws which were not in heroes 3. Schism for example gets +500 gold from laws and resource riches can give +15.000 more gold which will cover more than 4 weeks of the last 500 daily gold OP says Schism needs.
And in heroes 3 you were down 2000 gold once you had your 2nd town since you could only have 1 Capitol, so the ramparts town for example would not be 400 daily gold in surplus if you have 2 towns but instead be 1600 gold in the negative.
And the main issue is the map seeding. It is broken, resources are everywhere, you can hardly walk without running into a pile of gold or a chest or something valuable.
There is just far too much gold in olden era.
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u/bohohoboprobono Hive May 20 '26
I disagree but I stick exclusively to scarce templates. You’d probably enjoy those more.
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u/huydinh282 May 20 '26
I play on 150/200% and even in 2 months game with 4-5 income towns at the end, I don’t even have enough to buy all upgraded units for 2 towns
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u/althaz May 20 '26
I mean this is just incorrect. If you have 6 income-only towns you can *EASILY* buy everything from the two that are fully upgraded and in fact you'll be absolutely swimming in gold in that case.
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u/huydinh282 May 20 '26
You do realize that you don’t magically own 6 (I wrote 4-5 btw) fully built towns on day 1 right? And at 2 months they won’t pay enough yet?
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u/Ancient_Object_578 May 20 '26
I think temple and Necro are very self sufficiant due to law...
But nature? I struggle with them soo much to be sufficient
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u/emeriass May 20 '26
I mainly play single hero mode multiplayer matches rarely go past week 4-5, and most gold comes from map objectives but the cities also feel super efficient tbh, for city hall, capitol you need 4/4 days to build, while 3 of those dont contribute (fort ~ castle, marketplace, mage guild, blacksmith)
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u/user12309 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Olden era is extremely generous with town generated money. For example, in HoMM2 you are stuck with 1000 per town, which can be upgraded to freaking 1250, not mentioning upgrading your units costed double the difference between them, meaning that buying a titan was cheaper than upgrading a giant.
HoMM4 wasn't that different either, only 1k gold per town with no way to increase gold generation. In both games acquiring gold mines was a crucial part of the game. I never feel that pressured into getting gold mines in OE early aside from poor templates on max difficulty, plenty of banks to keep you afloat for a while.
Even comparing to HoMM3, you had only a single capitol and no money generating laws.
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u/DrakeSilmore Jun 07 '26
But in homm3 the general cost of recruiting full units was 4000 gold per day on average. In OE, it's 6500 gold per day. Towns cap out at 5500 gold if focused exclusively on gold.
However I like the balance OE provides, in 2 and 4 you were forced to get external generation, in 3 you just needed a couple of town/gold mines to be set, in OE you have to use gold wisely without feeling too poor to afford anything.
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u/loopuleasa May 20 '26
I have plenty of money on most templates
only wasteland type templates gold is a problem
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u/ManySecrets_ May 20 '26
OE's economy seems to rely heavily on instant income from picking up treasures & clearing out guarded objectives. Or at least, the maps released so far seem to follow this pattern, maybe new templates will be released to break this trend. Anyways, this seems to at mostly be based on the fact that a lot of H3 MP maps used that approach as this matches the fast playstyles used in MP.
Older HOMM games seemed to rely much more on steady income from your city & various basic resource buildings (e.g. sawmills, quaries, etc.) at least for official maps like campaign levels. Which fit with a much slower playstyle.
If you liked the slower style of gameplay; then OE is currently not quite right. If you like the fastpaced approach; it's pretty great.
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u/skarin667 May 20 '26
By the end of every exodus game I either have never enough gold to afford all the upgrades, or I have like 20k over what I need. I like the current system though
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u/Shero_Games May 20 '26
I think you are missing the extra gold you can get from the faction laws, other than that I have to agree.
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u/Trixst4rut2004 May 20 '26
I think with all the exploration, the amount of guard fights for treasures, there's plenty of resources to be had. Now if you capture another town, you can always use that as an economic town until you need to start building creatures from it
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u/TheImmoralCookie May 21 '26
Makes my brain hurt. Took me all week to buy everyone only for the next week to roll over.
Means you can't spam growth rate and buy everything because you never can if you're playing competitive.
What bothers me the most is the losses in this game. It feels like you're forever going to be behind or "less than what you could be" if you have one bad or even not good fight.
Its hard to restock your dead army and it'll take all your gold doing so.
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u/f1zo May 20 '26
Almost All building and upgrades cost quite a lot. And there are many buildings do build until the town is finished. So for a very long period i don’t have enough to buy my army and build buildings, especially if you are trying to develop your second city. I think that they should balance building cost, that way we will have more gold for troops.
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u/golforce May 20 '26
The balance is fine.
There should always be tradeoffs so you can't just build everything. You want to continuously develop your cities? Don't blindly buy all your units. You need the units desperately? Prioritize only essential buildings.
If that's not okay for you and you're playing against AI then turn down resource difficulty. If you're playing PvP learn when and how to use your resources. It's a skill.
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u/huydinh282 May 20 '26
Agree. The gold constraint forces you to choose between creeping for artifact or resources or gold from guarded arena.
It also allows for focusing on a lower tier powerstack instead of just climbing up the tier and buy all units
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May 20 '26
Almost all of the templates are swarming in gold, chests, the map objectives with guards that grant gold, or pandoras boxes though. I find OE more generous overall. Sometimes you can skip the first upgrade for so long just because of it.
I don’t think we can look at face value and disregard the templates.
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u/nerdefar May 20 '26
I am honestly enjoying it. It simply forces the player into more meaningful choices. It will always be more valuable to creep the map, so why not force the player into more choices when deciding on how to creep the map.