Trade rights, assasinating generals and spying out the enemies' strengths were really important for me :o. It'd be hard for me to play without; far less trade early on (which is always your biggest cash cow), some real tough cookies to face, and even worse you don't know if you're running into twenty peasant units or twenty generals.

Even if you didn't find them useful, I thought they were, and obviously a lot of other people did.