Well - I was asked by numpty to take up the challenge to write in here
To be precise - I am not strictly economy player. Since I am an economist I usually have very strong economy - probably in r82 among top 3 strong economies, but I play mixed way - I have like 50k heavy army which is way more into quality than quantity ( and a lot of catapults+balistas) so I am definitely not pure economy player. But I do not negate the fact that my 10h prod. is probably one of the biggest in r82 even after yeasterday being plondered by 60k pop by kuche (pitty that my army was away on army sejw on that time
).
To show how my eco looks like - my small credits is 1 849 758 - but I really don't know how this is counted since tax is generated by population which works in wood,iron or stone production so for sure small credit counts only resources production. And small credit is probably counted with normall resources changes i.e. 10 wood=2 iron=5 stone&gold.
But to be precise - to build for example 100 catapults only from pure economy I would need like 20h empire production in resources without including gold from tax. If we include tax - I can decrease this time to probably 17 h or sth around that.
So to answer question - yes - it is possible to live with economy even being a Nomad. But Nomad has a lot of disadvantages which You will see in 2 months time. For this reason Nomads should focus on military rather then economy to prevail over Imperians till the middle of the era. Of course I can't predict anything but the way the game is build itself will probably end with like 4-5 months of supremacy of Nomads and after this time we will see less and less Nomads in top 20. Why? Because of maximum pop cap which is 200k pop and all other disadvantages the Nomads have. I am really curious why nobody see that and comes to forum to claim that this game is disbalanced.
I played in alpha and blitz Imperians (which differ a little bit from today Imperians) and I had there like 1 mln points in the end so I could see when snake who was Nomad was like 3 times ahead of us, then we Imperians catch up to him and he was like 2 times less in points then us. Just because of game mechanics.
Of course it doesn't mean it will happen here the same way but this shows very well how the future can look like.