A simple twist on the railroad tycoon track would make it much better. Rather than slotting resources in and accumulating points, you should slot a resource into a factory then assign its yields to a settlement of your choosing. There will be a train animation on the map showing this connection. You then accumulate points based on how much is moving over rails. Trains, like merchants, can be attacked too. Mechanically, this system would allow you to direct factory buffs to weak settlements to develop them, or better yet, stack buffs into a single city.
The second part of the economic victory is the world bank which is a terrible system. It's just a countdown timer that you run manually by teleporting a banker unit around to foreign capitals and pay them money to agree to the bank. A much better system would be where you have to put up capital to start the world bank. This means you would need:
1) A lot of gold accumulated to even do it.
2) You then lose access to that gold.
However, over time other factions will take out loans from the bank and grow indebted. You can go to war with them to cause them to take out debt. There are other ways too like development projects if they're poor or lacking in science. Or, if you have high culture they'll take out small loans due the popularity of your products/tourism (no actual tourism system). So, every other component of progress can contribute in some way to the world bank.
As more debt is taken out of the world bank, it adds debt service nerfs to factions and you get gold coming in. This will start snowballing your victory. Once a faction's debt is high enough you can enter a banking agreement where they become subject to your financial hegemony. Do this for all factions remaining and you win.
Since this would take time, you should instead found a central bank, and then progress to the world bank over time. The amount of railroads you send to other factions will require them to take out loans from your bank to be able to buy these goods. That could factor into the victory progress as well.
The second part of the economic victory is the world bank which is a terrible system. It's just a countdown timer that you run manually by teleporting a banker unit around to foreign capitals and pay them money to agree to the bank. A much better system would be where you have to put up capital to start the world bank. This means you would need:
1) A lot of gold accumulated to even do it.
2) You then lose access to that gold.
However, over time other factions will take out loans from the bank and grow indebted. You can go to war with them to cause them to take out debt. There are other ways too like development projects if they're poor or lacking in science. Or, if you have high culture they'll take out small loans due the popularity of your products/tourism (no actual tourism system). So, every other component of progress can contribute in some way to the world bank.
As more debt is taken out of the world bank, it adds debt service nerfs to factions and you get gold coming in. This will start snowballing your victory. Once a faction's debt is high enough you can enter a banking agreement where they become subject to your financial hegemony. Do this for all factions remaining and you win.
Since this would take time, you should instead found a central bank, and then progress to the world bank over time. The amount of railroads you send to other factions will require them to take out loans from your bank to be able to buy these goods. That could factor into the victory progress as well.
