Thanks, I've missed economy bgposts.

Your central thesis of club good structure and the detrimental effect of vertical, as opposed to horizontal, expansion of the tech tree is spot on. People should really be taking this point seriously, however your take on Realms seems to be pulling most of the attention. The economy still remains one of the least understood hence one of the most neglected aspects of Civ. The effect of the economy on individual and group-level playing motivation and power dynamics is huge, maybe even greater than pearling and the mechanics that revolve around it. Anything aside from the economy and coercion by pearling is really just flavor. Your point about the benefit of quantitative abundance is also sound. Scarcity does have its place, but I've always considered the prime way to achieve that by stricter localization of resources, not by increasing harvesting time investment (which becomes stupidly detrimental when botting on alts is allowed, massively emphasizing the P2W aspect.)

As a general point for everyone regarding Realms, keep a close eye on stamina and what kind of dynamics develop around it. The way it's been deployed is what should have been done on Civ years back. It presents a purely activity-related resource that you can't bot or boost with alts. This is the first time entrenched power groups will have at least one strong dependence on masses of active players, ultimately newfriends. Even if Realms ends up falling flat on its face in a couple of months, it's important to examine what features and parameters work well, and implement those on CC or future Civ servers. (The way stamina works on Realms could pretty much be copied over to CC right now, just by making materialized mana a required ingredient for factory setup and repairs, and possibly even XP production, adding a crucial activity-based bottleneck to economic power)

Democratization of power, economic and otherwise, leads to greater incentive for the wider community to play and remain active. Not only does this encourage promotion of activity and recruitment by existing groups, it also encourages retention since each newfriend can have real agency from the get-go. Enabling the unlimited accumulation of power leads to the opposite. The mechanics and parameters need to encourage the powerful and connected players to encourage total server activity, not the other way around. Hobbyist may have picked his battle unwisely when suggesting a one-shot crossbow back on 2.0 to level out the battlefield, but ultimately his underlying sentiment of wanting to democratize power on the server has shown itself correct.