RS2 will offer a fairly unique economy which I hope will create a very 'immersive' atmosphere for the player.
One of my dislikes of RTW\BI has always been the hokey economy that is really totally beyond the player's control, and pretty much chugs along unchecked unless you do hand-stands on roofs trying to hold back RTW's relentless penchent for churning out cash. I struggled with this to no end in RS1.5, and never really got a handle on it....so I determined that it would be better in RS2.
The biggest 'flaw' in RTW is that whenever you as a player capture another faction's settlement, you automatically gain the benefits of anything IN that settlement without having had to pay for it or do anything. A market with a trade bonus becomes your's automatically...a port with a trade bonus is yours for the taking. But in real life, it would take quite some time for any government to get a handle on the economy of an area it conquered...unless it were to just gut the place and take all the cash. So I've made changes that allow trade bonuses and trade benefits to ONLY affect the areas I choose for a faction (thru an AOR system that allows every region to be uniquely identified)....home regions, or areas of cultural influence play a big part in this. This creates a true 'illusion' for the player that he\she has a ton of cash to spend on their campaign as they please...which is essentially true. I WANT factions to have a ton of cash in the event that another faction starts pushing them back into their homelands. The more money they have, the better opponent they become. This aspect and theme of RS2 will be just like RS1.5...only much more (and hopefully better) developed.
I further 'increase' this illusionary cash cow by increasing the tax bonus in the faction's most powerful city (or cities), so that another gob of income is dropped on the above. Then, I change what used to be 'trade bonuses' in many buildings into tax bonuses. So, with the exception of market buildings, ports, and a very few others, the trade 'wealth' of a faction is 'locked' into a growth controlled system based on a far more 'fixed' rate of trade, and largely determined by what you own, and where you own it. Outside homeland or cultural areas, you get small tax bonuses coupled with trade bonuses that may well be 20-50% lower in a 'Forum', for example, than what you'd get in a homeland city.
I threw on top of this a set of buildings that are indestructible, and required in many cases. The 1st is called a 'goverment path choice'. After building this, you asked to choose to build this city into an 'economic city' or a 'fortified\military' city. The last level of these two is a 'merged' city that allows all of the benefits of both, but is quite expensive. The results of your choice here allow, for example, stone walls and above to built in a fortified city, and upper level barracks (only for the player in modfoldered campaigns, as the AI is too stupid to use these wisely ). Or in an economic city, you can build great forums and above, along with a whole slew of other economic and economic upper level buildings we've added.
Couple all of this with a bonus system that allows only very small bonuses each time you upgrade a building, and what you have is an economic system that the player MUST maintain. Blitzing will almost be impossible in RS2. You start the campaign; you see you have a good deal of money, so you start churning out units and building things everywhere.....but the whole thing is based on taxing a fixed growth trade system....so what happens is that your profits take a nose dive and you build a sort of 'invisible deficit'. You still make money, but the longer you continue the relentless spending, the greater the debt becomes until at last the money becomes less and less per turn. If you don't back off, you have very little to work with. But curtailing spending will allow, over a period of years, for the economy to recover and the profit to reappear, at which point you get a good chunk of money again.
I've also added a 'tax building' tree, where you can raise taxes in a settlement at the cost of a bit of unhappiness that grows with each level. So the player can raise taxes...get more money...and drive his faction even further into debt!! LOL (The AI has a field day with these...it's one way I can tell if factions are running out of money...as soon as they start building these, I know they're going broke.) This is independent of the built in RTW 'Low, Medium, High, Very-High' tax system, and basically configured for a 'High' tax setting.....on purpose. The happiness penalty incurred for raising taxes with a building is far less than setting taxes to very-high in settlement...but again, the time may well arise when you are hard pressed for money, and must raise the RTW tax level to 'Very High'. It only shreds your economy all the more! Debt piles onto debt, and pretty soon you have an Empire with no profits, no money, and a hugely unhappy populace.
Still another feature of the RS2 system will now include an 'infrastructure' cost penalty...in the form of a tax bonus penalty as a 'maintenance fee' for certain buildings. Sewers, bathes, roads, aqueducts, walls; anything that could be considered a part of your faction's infrastructure that has to be kept in good working order over the years, comes not only with an initial cost, but a yearly maintain cost as well. And the cool and realistic part of it is that sometimes, what you get back from a settlement won't even be worth the cost of maintaining it. But you still gotta build it, because your people will hate you if you don't. That's because settlement law and happiness will ALSO be tied into this system.
The last piece of this puzzle is the farming 'base level'. I never managed to get population under control in RS1.5 because the 'base level' for all regions was way too high, and you can't reduce population growth beyond whatever level that is. So I set all base levels in regions very low. The advantage here is that now I have control of population growth. The disadvantage is that now I have to control it. LOL It has been a bit of an adventure to get a grasp on this part of things in a 0-turn mod where the AI loves it's military 'fodder'.....but we're getting there.
The overall economic picture of RS2 will be then, one of managing cities and towns not just to keep people happy, but to actually keep your economy working. You'll find that when your faction is under attack and you have to build a lot of units...or your people are unhappy, and you need to build things in settlements....you'll have money, and you can spend it, but it'll be a lot like 'borrowing from the future'. You'll drive profits into the red, the amount of money generated on a collapsing economy through taxes begins to evaporate, and then you get into trouble.
That's the plan, anyway.