u/MrNoobomnenie

One of the things Realms of Exether has instantly captured me with is how different playing in different places feels, not through railroading via journal entries, but completely organically thanks to how diverse the production chains are.

In one playthrough you grow your dyes together with your fabric on Sunweave plantations while the main source of iron for your whole industry are Rustail fisheries; and in a different one you get your dyes from squids, who are also now providing the monster essence for your potions. This thing alone makes the game feel so much more immersive!

The base game is so limited in this regard. I think it would've been so much better if it took some lessons from this mod and added more variety. Even something as little as splitting logging into boreal, temperate, and tropical with different softwood/hardwood outputs could've been nice.

I was just forced to abandon my Equador run after less than 20 years because of a rather silly mistake. I wanted to have a coffee-focused economy, and at first everything looked great: I quickly became one of the world's largest producers and even turned my coffee into a luxury good.

However, then I've noticed that my country was running out of peasants way faster than it should, negatively impacting my economy. And that's how I found out that more than half of my population was starving. Apparently, food got too expensive, putting most of the poor people in constant malnutrition.

Turns out, if you opimize your whole economy around coffee, not only you will not produce any food domestically due to both government and private construction primarely building coffee plantations, but you also won't import it, because all of your trade center trade capacity will be filled with coffee exports.

So, yeah, please, don't repeat my mistake and don't forget that your people also need food, until it's too late.