Econ 101
At the heart of the economy are your Regions, which house your Population. Your Population lets you work the tiles controlled by the Region, generating Resources directly, or Goods that convert back into Resources at the end of the turn. There are many paths to a bountiful economy – more Population to let you work more tiles, more advanced Goods which convert into more valuable resources, or just expanding to control more Regions in the first place. How you assign your workers gives you a lot of flexibility about what you’re actually generating each turn. When there’s a war going on, sometimes extra Production to finish out a new Unit is a lot more important than growing your Population. You can manually control each worker’s assignment, but if you prefer to just focus on the big picture, the game will make sure that no workers are left idle at the end of a turn. Some parts of your economy generate passive income as well. For example, you can construct a Town Center for +1 Government XP per turn. There are many Technologies and Ideals which also give you income directly, or for each Region you control. When creating a “wide” Nation these per-Region bonuses are important as they can scale up dramatically.
National Resources
These are all tracked & accumulated at the “nation level”, pooling income from all your Regions together. They generally carry over from turn to turn.




Regional Resources
These are generated by, and used with, a specific Region. They generally do not carry over from turn to turn but instead are used immediately.


Needs
Needs are worth describing a bit more in detail, because they are such a key concept in the game. There are 9 types of Needs in total, and how well your population grows is directly determined by your overall “Needs Satisfaction” (which is simply the average of all the individual Needs). If you meet the need at 100%, your people will have their basic requirements met – slow and steady growth. But if you can provide up to 200% Satisfaction, you can grow a Region much, much faster. Of course, the converse is true as well, as a Region with less than 100% Satisfaction will not only cause your Population to decrease but also has other negative consequences for a Region! Five of the Needs (Food, Housing, Sanitation, Luxury, and Education) are triggered simply by hitting various Population thresholds in the Region (for example, Sanitation becomes required once you are above 10 Population). The other four (Faith, Power, Ideology, and Information) are more conditional, activating based on external factors like Religion or Government. Almost all Needs grow directly with your Population, so managing a full set of Needs on a very large Region can be quite challenging! Vassals have a key advantage in that you don’t need to manage their Needs at all – the autonomy provided to a Vassal lets them grow at a steady pace without any guidance.Goods
While Resources are directly gathered via Forage (on unimproved tiles) and Buildings / passive bonuses, any advanced economy is going to run mainly on Goods. Goods represent a wide variety of things from raw materials to advanced consumer products – there are around 130 different Goods! Each type of Goods has a different “consume value”, which is what you get at the end of the turn if you don’t use it for anything else. Many Goods even give you multiple types of Resources when consumed! Goods come from a variety of sources, but the most common way to get them is to work Improvements. For example, direct Forage from a Grassland tile gives 2 Food, but if you build a Farm you can instead get one Wheat, worth 4 Food. Finding “bonus” tiles in the world can take that even further – building a Farm on Wheat bonus gives you 2 Wheat from that same Farm, for a total of 8 Food. To really get the most value out of your Goods, however, you will want to convert them into more advanced types of Goods. The aforementioned Wheat (4 Food) can be turned into Flour (8 Food) at the Mill – and each Mill provides capacity for converting up to two units of Wheat. Pursuing advanced Goods chains can be extremely efficient but they require an investment to build the right Improvements as well as have enough workers available to operate every step in the chain.