I totally sympathize with your argument, I really do. There's nothing more mind-numbing than approaching the final stronghold of a dying civilization, their citizens packing up their belongings and their boys and elderly and men taking up shield and sword and bow, this last city wallowing debt, and to be assaulted by two fairly elite full stack armies when sieging the city, which also has a full stack garrison.
But you're logic is flawed here: You say "Nobody who has answered to this thread has yet played a campaign with the money script set at 0." Yes they have. Everyone who's played EB has. When you play any faction in EB, you begin the campaign with the exact same starting conditions as the AI does when it is in control of those factions. And as such, for most factions you are given a certain starting military, a certain undeveloped economy and a certain small treasury, all of which combined mean, literally, debt on the very first click of "End Turn." When the player plays those factions, the player takes the starting armies and assaults neighboring settlements or disbands the starting military to make money. When the AI plays those factions, it calculates its odds and decides not to attack the stronger neighbors, and also cannot disband units as an alternative. Therefore, the AI factions do nothing and camp out in the same way they start out until they're literally millions in debt and the player's faction comes knocking. The AI has probabilities, the player has abilities. Therefore, the AI gets money to counter it's auto-debt situation and thus to spur growth and thus a challenge to the player.
I will concede that I have not altered the script to see this myself, but my counter is that I know how the game engine works, so that's unnecessary.You may call it "hypothetical assumptions," but it's not - it's how it works, the end.
Your problem is not with EB's system or the EB team, it's with Creative Assembly. The game designer made a game to be fun for the average Philistine and to make money from, not for people to alter to their liking. Modification of their software was and is an afterthought, I guarantee. If they allowed modders to alter the game's AI, there would be no money script, and I guarantee that even more. The EB team has tested and modified and tested and modified this game over and over again for years, so whatever you find in it is there for an exact and precise purpose, and with an exact and precise effect. EB II may provide the opportunity to add more complexity to the script for you, i.e. that factions on the verge of collapse by conquest get no more money or something of that sort. But I think it may not be changed, because then many of the small factions wouldn't have a chance from the start.
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