Olden Era Economy Guide: Keep the Gold Rolling All Game
Macro economy in Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era. Resources, grabbing mines, town income buildings, weekly compounding growth, and where to focus your economy early, mid, and late.
You don’t lose Olden Era games in combat nearly as often as you lose them to economy. While you’re playing it safe and building a tidy town, the AI is quietly compounding gold and growth into an army of a thousand bodies you have no answer for. The map is a race, and the player whose economy snowballs harder usually wins before the big fight even happens. This is the macro view: what to grab, what to build, and where to put your attention as the game moves from Week 1 to the back half.
If you want a turn-by-turn opening sequence, that lives in the town build order guide. This one is about the long game.
The resources you’re juggling
Your economy runs on a few resource types, and they do different jobs:
- Gold is the lifeblood. Almost everything costs it, and you never have enough.
- Wood, Ore, and Precious are the build and recruitment materials. Buildings and higher-tier units eat into these on top of gold.
- Alchemical Dust is the premium one. Your top-tier units, the tier 7s, demand gold plus other resources including Dust, so a steady Dust supply is what lets you field your best creatures at all.
The lesson here: gold alone won’t get you a tier 7 army. You need the secondary resources flowing too, which means you can’t ignore the non-gold mines. A gold-rich, Dust-starved player ends up with a fat treasury and no top-tier units to spend it on.
Grab the mines
Mines are the engine of your economy, and they pay out every day they’re yours. The earlier you flip a mine to your color, the more total resources it hands you over the game, so aggressive early mine-grabbing is one of the highest-value things you can do. A gold mine taken on Day 3 has produced far more by the endgame than one taken on Day 30.
Prioritize gold mines first, then the resources your faction’s build and unit costs actually demand, then a source of Alchemical Dust before you start dreaming about tier 7s. Defending mines matters too. A mine the enemy retakes stops paying you and starts paying them, so don’t overextend into ground you can’t hold.
Town income buildings and the upgrade
Your town’s income building is the steady paycheck that doesn’t depend on holding contested mines. Build it early, then look at upgrading it, because the main income buildings can be upgraded to double their output. That doubling is one of the best gold investments in the game, and it compounds with everything else.
There’s a bonus here too: these town buildings also produce Law Points, one of the three special resource tracks alongside Astrology and Focus. So upgrading your income engine feeds both your treasury and your Law economy at once. That’s covered in the Gold, Law, and Astrology guide if you want the detail.
Growth compounds every single week
This is the part that decides snowball games. Your creature dwellings produce new units on a weekly tick. The pool refreshes at the start of each week, and there’s timing nuance worth knowing: a dwelling finished before the weekly refresh produces that same week, and constructing a new creature building gives you an immediate growth stack right away rather than making you wait.
Why this compounds: more units this week means you clear more, expand more, and earn more, which funds more buildings, which produce even more units next week. The gap between a player who builds dwellings early and one who delays isn’t linear. It widens every week. A one-week head start on a key dwelling can mean dozens of extra units by the late game. Get your growth buildings up as fast as your resources allow, because every week you delay is a week of compounding you’ll never get back.
Expansion versus turtling
The constant tension is whether to push out and grab more, or consolidate and build up what you have. The honest answer leans toward expansion, because economy in this game rewards controlling more of the map. More mines, more dwellings, more towns all feed the snowball. Turtling feels safe but it caps your growth while the AI keeps expanding and out-scaling you.
That said, expand into ground you can defend and resources you can actually use. Grabbing a far-flung mine you’ll immediately lose just hands the enemy a Day-X economy boost. The skill is pushing your borders out as fast as you can hold them, not as fast as you can reach them.
The skills that pay for themselves
Two General skills directly upgrade your economy and are available to any hero:
- Economy improves your resource income, which is exactly the compounding stat you want more of.
- Logistics boosts movement, which sounds like a combat or exploration skill but is secretly an economy skill. More movement means you reach more mines, flip them sooner, and connect more of your territory faster. Speed of expansion is economy.
When these show up in your level-up choices and you’re not desperate for a combat skill, they’re rarely a wrong pick.
Where to focus, by phase
A simple framework for where your economic attention goes:
- Early game: Grab mines aggressively and get your core dwellings and income building up fast. This is when compounding has the most weeks left to work, so every early investment pays the biggest dividends. Don’t sit still.
- Mid game: Upgrade your income building to double output, secure a steady Alchemical Dust supply, and keep expanding into defensible territory. This is where you build the lead that wins the game.
- Late game: Convert your stacked economy into a tier 7 army and crushing weekly growth, and stop the AI from out-scaling you. If you’ve compounded well, you’ll have the resources to field everything. If you turtled, this is where you find out the AI rolled a thousand-strong army while you weren’t looking.
The one mistake to avoid
Don’t play slow. The single most common economy error is treating Olden Era like a builder where you can take your time. You can’t. The AI compounds relentlessly, and a comfortable, cautious game quietly loses the resource race. Push your borders, grab mines on Day 3 not Day 30, get dwellings up before the weekly tick, and double that income building the moment you can afford it. Economy is won by the player who starts compounding first. Exact building costs and output shift across the current Early Access build, so check the in-game numbers when you plan a specific upgrade path.