Settlers: The Pain of Paying Absurd Kingsmarch Upkeep Costs

First off I've got to say I'm really enjoying the league mechanic - I'd just like to have a bit of a grumble about the one thing that's making me lose interest.

The amount of gold per hour required to keep my little town ticking over is absolutely killing me. I'm running t16 maps juiced for a reasonable amount of magic pack size and I'm making 7-14k gold per map - but its still not quite enough for me to build up a substantial buffer.

I don't even have a fully upgraded town yet.

Watching the gameplay footage in the pre-season the devs stated that gold would be a mostly mid-game issue - but it doesn't really feel that way for me at the moment. I guess once my town is fully upgraded it might be a different story - but having looked at some folk's fully upgraded towns their upkeep exceeds 30k/hr and I just cant even imagine trying to stay on top of that.

I guess im just wishing there was some kind of upgrade that would reduce the towns cost somehow? Maybe a bank or something? Or maybe our ships could bring back some gold when we send out some specific resource when we've upgraded our docks fully?

I'm definitely open to suggestions on how to make gold more effectively.

Gold could scale better into red and T17 maps because doing those doesn't feel like THAT much more gold than late acts or early maps. Upkeep scales way steeper than that, with rank 9 mapper NPC guzzling 2300 per hour alone.

But I'm not that mad about it tbh. I was afraid of this being a system like WOD garrison (in world of warcraft) which was hyper-efficient and literally played the game for you. This is not the case here, you HAVE to play a lot in order to sustain very high upkeep such as automatic mapping or rapid disenchanting.

I run my town like this atm:

1) Farmers - keep up at all times, since this is the ONLY truely passive system in the league. It is strictly time gated, there is no way around it other than better farmers (which cost a lot).

2) Smelters and Mining - keep on, they stop getting paid once material runs out

3) Disenchanting - only use it when dust reserve dips below 50k

4) Mapping - don't use it at all, it is far too expensive.

5) Shipping - use it when i'm online, don't send overnight ships cos you will wake up with 0 gold in treasury

Maybe later when im doing T17s with optimized build I'll have more disposable income to just get rid of all these white, yellow and 11-13 red maps.

What they stated was the CURRENCY EXCHANGE was based around gold mid-game.

NOT the town.

It would make no sense for the town to be based around mid-game. It IS the league mechanic, and is meant to take months. It has to be based around the highest possible point players can reach.

Also...not to say I like the mechanic (i hate it), but there is a pretty easy and expected strategy to use when you are towning at the top:

Don't have everyone running at full all the time: this is NEVER expected in a town builder. Pick and choose what you want to run, when. Farmers run 24/7, maybe lessen the load from them when you aren't trying to stockpile huge amounts of crops. Disenchanters take up a ton of resources: maybe lower their level or amount if you aren't in a rush for dust.

Running shipments: check all the locations to see what their preferred materials are. Stop all workers on non-favored materials until you finish all those shipments.

If you max out everything all the time, expect to have to play pretty damn hard to upkeep. It is the MAX after all....Compare it to what it costs to min/max a build. You can go for the best of the best, but expect it to cost mirrors and time. Or you can downgrade or make choices and opt for something that's 1/100th the cost.