Interesting update. It sort of forced me to survive to the first few week. And also change my way of playing the game.
In early game, you cannot really afford to both pay the futamazon and maintain some troops. Moreover, for the first few turn, your kingdom is so small that you can only chose among six or height tile to conquer, so it's actually likely that you end up in a situation were all your border tile are too hard to beat, and so that your troops cannot help you to developed.
So the solution I found was to pay the futamazon, and let the guy from abstinencia get in the city since the start. That I was in peace with all other kingdom and could maintain troop only when needed for conquest. Even so, given your meager income in the first few week, barely cover the 50 gold to the amazon + two clantroopers. So I had to conquer as many tile as possible alone before creating any troop.
But this strategy would not have worked if I wasn't able to keep the amazon tribute to 50 because of the bug. I feel like in this patch, without this bug, you will just end up suffocated by amazon tribute and units maintenance cost. Except if you get a super lucky start were you can claim a lot of tiles with just one or two soldiers, so you still have spare gold to invest in building and upgrade.
I think having one or two very easy fight in the first three weeks can also help you a lot. It may allow you to upgrade you troops, which is an incredibly cheap way of get more fight power comparison with training yourself or hiring troops. Getting 10 point of charisma would cost you more than a thousand gold if it’s for you while its will cost only 12 gold and 12 faith to get them on a clansman that got from level 1 to 2.
To summarize : with this patch, the situations were you are not bleeding out one or two type of resource or the other have been made far less common.
My suggestion to make thing better :
As it’s a porn game, adding more porn is obviously more efficient to make the players happy than fixing the gameplay. X)
A few idea that could make thing more smooth :
Allow the player to go into dept. This way, if you are in a difficult situation, you still have ways to fix you kingdom and are not totally paralyzed by the lake of money.
Either have the possibility to sell excess food, wood and stone or create some map building that sell those resource for you. Like you could make brewery that take your food for gold, furniture maker that consume wood, architect or statue maker that consume stone and a kind of on-map temple that use faith.
.
