Gold

Gold is a resource in Driftland.

Overview
Used for building, recruitment, and flag rewards. Unassigned Citizens generate gold, as does building gold mines or selling resources in the marketplace. Gold is also spent on maintaining buildings.

Upkeep
Gold is also required to pay upkeep for your heroes and buildings. Explorers cost 1 gold per day, melee and ranged heroes 3, caster heroes cost 4 and buildings impose their base upkeep cost (typically 5) +2 per bridge or Thyr Gate between the island it is built on and your castle. Bridges, Gold Mines and your Castle do not impose a gold upkeep.

Strategy
The key to strong gold management in the early game is to avoid building more infrastructure such as farms and houses than your population will need. Also remember that upgrading buildings does not increase their upkeep cost. However, it does often require a hefty gold investment which can be difficult to meet.

If you're still having trouble, the first two upgrades in the first column of the Paths of Progress tree each reduce the upkeep for all of your buildings by 1 gold respectively.

Expanding your empire to a large number of islands can also be a valid strategy, as it will increase your chances of discovering treasure chest with gold in them (typically between 150-200) which can help with quickly digging yourself out of a gold bottleneck, and upgrading into a T3 Castle.

At this point, you can begin building Gold Mines in order to secure a much more profitable source of gold income. Dwarves can build these at T2, allowing them to stabslise their gold much earlier than other races.

Notably, Dark Elves may use the Ritual of Avulsion once researched to immediately extract the highest Geology resource from an island including gold, allowing them to immediately gain access to all of the gold buried on islands they control.

Thyr Gates can also be used to used to curb excessive upkeep costs later in the game, as any island they connect to is considered by adjacent for the purposes of determining upkeep. As such, islands on the outskirts of your empire or those subjugated from a conquered opponent can still support mines and other infrastructure reliability cheaply by linking them via Thyr Gate to your Castle - although earlier in a game replacing these gates can prove tedious, they can be upgraded via the Paths of Progress to sustain themselves indefinitely at the cost of just 1 mana per day - a price especially build up islands will easily make back up in saved gold via trading at the market.

Especially far flung regions can be reached either by connecting several Thyr Gates together to make the distance or, if your magic radius does not extend far enough, by linking an island to your capital before shifting it via Arcane Currents until you are able to build a bridge connecting it to the island you wish to build on. This is possible as the distance between Thyr Gates is only limited during their initial placement and can overwise span the width of the map after the initial gates are created.