Important decision on the use of coinage

The decision I made involving the Expanded Edition on the use of coinage has haunted me for months. I can't shake the feeling that since so many of us use Currency* today instead of actual Money*, we do not understand what the applications are truly of coin.

So I was going to go ahead and add two more resources to this edition to have a more even spread of resources per empire usage, but I am going to be adding nine instead, the middle one being coin.

Coin will not be able to be used all of the time but each deck (Maurya, Carthage, Persia and Greece) will have one specific coin trader within each deck.

Ancient Greece will use the inventor of western coin, Lydia as their specific coin card: "Lydian Coin Merchant". It is called a merchant but not an exchanger because the idea is that Money is not exchanged, but Currency is. The idea for currency exchange did not come until much later around the time of Christ.

To take a quick side-trail here: I find it interesting that the only time Jesus Christ used anger and force in His ministry is twice at the temple in Jerusalam, once in the beginning of His ministry and once at the end (most people only think it happened the one time), where He drove out the money exchangers for using a leveraged system of currency exchange. The only temple tithe one could pay to be a devout Israelite then was the "Temple Coin" (which they held a monopoly on) due to the law that you could not have graven images given to YHWH. So Christ was all pissed off and called them thieves. Lovely.

So we won't be monopolizing the coinage use in Empires and Generals and I believe it will be a quite fair system of exchange on a 3:1 value.

Three of any one resource gets you one coin. One coin can buy any resource.

If it were a 2:1 ratio, I do not believe that it would be a fair game if you decided NOT to use coin and then things would be unbalanced.

And one of the game mechanics calls for a slight bend/twist in history, where everyone had a fair shot and things were fair across the board in every culture and every continent. For the MOST part. Obviously the game is not meant to show racially supremacy but racial exclusiveness and racial diversity and achievement.

Wow, I just sat down to write a few words.

Aren't you happy you read this?

-Pauly


*Where historically Money is a value of the rare and precious metals you have on deposit in the form of equal value receipts and Currency is the receipts for supposed money or whatever the market will bear as supposed monies.