financial cottage economy is very situational compared to a specialist economy.
how often do you find yourself without food resources? you normally get corn, fish, wheat, cow, clam. they are very abundant everywhere on any sort of map.
of course. if you are playing financial and regenerate to find a map with a lot of rivers, riverside grassland and floodplains, then you are set. but very often, your start will be on a lot of plains and hills, and the rivers are far away from your capital. (i do think regeneration is cheating)
you can pretty much play on any map with a specialist economy, even if you are river deprived. i think financial is horrible if your initial cottage can't immediately become 3. So i think financial only shines when you are on rivers, and when you have rocky city sites, financial isn't much of an advantage.
of course, a specialist economy will allow you to create a great prophet faster for your shrine, if you ever own a holy city.
SE = always awesome. =when you have food.
and CE = situational. =only when you have CE-friendly tiles (riverside grassland, floodplains)
Floodplains is awesome for SE too.
so SE is more adaptive.
according to the Darwinian laws of natural selection, CE can be weeded out.
First of all i would like to refresh Ags28's statement that said everything is balanced between speeds. Well, it is certainly not. I would say everything is balanced between speeds except for holy marathon, were the unit hammers ratio is doubled to normal instead of tripled, which allows for more military and a better usage of units according to their movement speed remaining the same for all gamespeeds. This gives a true opportunity of settling an epoch that lasts and play every intricancies it deserves. Of course, on the other hand settlers do cost triple (300 H), thus turning imperialistic in an excelse trait (one of my favourites).
I would suggest to these newcomers Poorleno and Hubutz to get a grip over marathon (truly time consuming though) once they have a an average understanding of the game.
I will have to agree with Agc in that financial is a midsome trait under my game settings. Wouldn't describe it as horrible, but it has many disadvantages; towns are very dificult to recover after a war event (and believe me that you will have to hide behind your walls and castles in a marathon/emperor game), they take too much to grow, nerfing your ancient and classical development (except outstanding terrain tiles + financial). Nevertheless,they are not even near of being useless, and if you do it right, and under certain map and civ conditions, is is very nice to have them runing your economy; or maybe use them just to come along in some dark moments of your empire (as a complementary alternative.. it is how i use them most times).
