What seems to stand out to me is that they need to be selling their goods to get rich. Buildings that are sitting there with 9/9 never stay rich. So I need to make sure the goods are flowing.

With things like food, this is straightforward (if a bit delicate in the balance) because I can build resource gathering buildings that *only* consume food, and sell extra resources if my storehouse gets full.

When it comes to the other sorts of buildings, it gets really challenging. Every time you make a production building it is going to eat up some of all 4 of the resources, *but* it is also going to make more of one of them. How in the world do you balance that?

Then there are military production buildings which I'm assuming are just going to have to stay poor, because I'm not churning out swords all the time.

If I'm just sitting there with a functioning city that needs very little management (leave the computer, do other things, come back and the worst you'll find is a full storehouse, for instance) but I need 15 more rich buildings to level up...how in the world do I make *that* happen?

Thanks for any insights.

In the two years since this was posted, has anyone developed any insights that would help answer this question? The only hint I've seen elsewhere is to reduce taxes and make sure you don't have too many buildings of a specific type, but I've tried zero taxes and minimal buildings but still didn't get enough rich buildings.