How to Have a Good Economy (I bet you don't know how)
Resources are the basis of your cities. You indeed need to have a high production in order to sustain your armies and development. Everyone has a different approach to getting their resources, but most people are wasting a lot of money without even knowing it. Here is my opinion on how to maximize your resources, without considering farming (farming merely adds to this; it is not important to consider, because it's always the same income anyways.)
First of all, it is important to pay attention to how you distribute your resource fields. As far as I remember, there is a maximum of 40 with your Town Hall level 10, or 37 with your Town Hall level 9 (for most people.) You thus need to realize that your resource production has a limit, which is why you must pay attention to what you produce. If you go to the market, you can have a good idea of which resources are worth something and which resources are worth nothing. Compare all buying and selling prices. Usually, food is the cheapest resource, stone is worth a bit more, and wood and iron are expensive. What are you going to produce? Wood and Iron, of course.
Selling and buying resources is the most important part of your economy. Suppose you sell 1 million wood units at 6.00 gold/unit. This is 6 million of gold. Now, the price of food, which is the cheapest, is at 1.00 gold/unit. This means that every time you produce 1 million wood units, you can buy 6 million food units. Now, consider the distribution of your resource fields. If a sawmill level 9 produces as much wood as a farm level 9 produces food, how are you going to distribute your resources? Indeed, you will not have any farm because you can get way more food by producing wood. Warning: since you do not have any farms, always make sure that you have enough food to sustain your daily consumption.
Now that you understand (hopefully) why some resources are more important to produce than others and why some should never be produced, let's move on to how many of each type of resource field you should have. In my humble opinion, you should either have all wood or all iron. Yes, I mean it. Here's what to consider when making a choice: at the beginning of a world, wood sells more than iron, as people produce a lot of archers; after a couple of months, iron shifts wood's price, as people start training their cavalry. This is a fact; what I have observed in other worlds I have played is a pricing similar to what follows: food ~1.5, wood ~6.5, stone ~4.5, iron ~8. However, if iron is worth more later on, it is important to bear in mind that it is longer to build, more expensive to build, and requires more population, thus leaving less room for your soldiers. Considering this, you might wanna go for wood, which is faster to produce in big quantities, thus allowing your city to have a good economy very quickly.
Now, you're gonna ask, "why would I only produce wood and not iron if both are expensive and important?" Here's why: the game allows you to capture valleys that provide a production bonus. If you only have one type of resource, you're obviously gonna capture only one type of bonus. If you have several types of resource, you're gonna capture several types of bonus. Now, consider the simple math here: if you have 2 sawmills level 1, you produce 200 wood an hour. If you capture 2 forests with 10% bonus to wood production, you have a 20% bonus, which means 240 wood an hour. Now, if you have 1 sawmill and 1 iron mine, you produce 100 wood and 100 iron an hour. If you have 1 hill and one forest, you have 10% to each resource; you thus produce 110 wood and 110 iron, amounting to 220 wood and iron an hour. As you can see, it is better to only produce one type of resource, as the bonuses add better. This is because all your bonuses apply to all your production, whereas having several resources means that your bonuses only apply to some of your resource fields. It is thus better to focus on one type of resource in order to maximize your production.
Now, you know how to maximize your production. Produce only wood, sell it to get gold, and use your gold to buy other resources. Get as many forests as possible. In the end, here's what your production will look like: one level 9 sawmill produces 4500 wood/hour; you have 37 sawmills, thus 166,500 wood/hour. You have 9 level 10 forests, a 207% production bonus, thus amounting to 511,155 wood/hour. Add your hero's politics bonus to that, which, for instance, could be 100 (to make it easier to calculate), and you have 677,655 wood/hour. That's a lot! This means you can buy 4,065,930 food/hour if wood is 6 times worth food!
As a final note, it is important to use well the market. A lot of people do not use it well, and it results in them (and me) losing money in the end. Someone who does not use well the market influences others as well and it frustrates me. Here's an example:
http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/1604/marketa.jpg
As you can see, there was an offer of wood at 0.838 gold/unit. Now, someone posted an other offer of wood at 0.76. There is a huge gap between the two of them (0.078). If I want to sell 1 million of wood (which I wanted to do), this gap is a difference of 78,000 gold units which I could have had in my treasury. Moreover, it eventually brought the market offers down to 0.7, whilst it could have been at 0.83 (here a difference of 130,000 gold units). When posting an offer, make sure that it is just bellow the lowest offer. Thus, if the lowest offer is 0.838, you should make yours at 0.837. This maximizes your incomes on the market. The same thing applies when you wanna buy resources. Post your bid just above the highest bid. Thus, if the highest bid is 0.6, you should make yours at 0.601. When you use the market often, this makes a huge difference. As exemplified earlier, you can get 130,000 additional gold, which is a lot when beginning.
Finally, keep an eye on how your resources sell. If you have posted offers and haven't seen your resources sold, go see if someone has posted a better offer than yours. If yes, place a bid just bellow his to make sure that you be the one to sell your resources.
And that is it! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post a reply.
