When I saw these changes my first thoughts were how are we supposed to be able able to finish in gold time now? But I thought I'd give it a proper try in live first in case I was wrong. I wasn't.
Firstly, we will need to have produced an extra 8000 coppers to pay for the the extra 40 goods. I'd always calculated my coin production to make just enough to produce what I needed to make the goods to unlock the quests then removed the coin producers to make room for the goods producers. So the new system meant more time to produce those coins.
Next we have to spend an hour building whichever of the goods buildings we didn't still have on the go.
Then we had an 8 hour wait while those goods buildings did their work.
How many people have time between finishing work and going to bed for the nine hours needed to construct and then use those goods buildings?
It's pretty much bound to spill into an overnight production so we're effectively looking at needing a whole extra day to finish.
Before the changes I was chasing runestones in five of my live cities with something like an 85% success rate for gold out of the 50 or 60 run throughs I'd done in them.
It was difficult to achieve this because of my work patterns which are 24 hours on with no internet access and 48 hours off, but I was just managing by doing one hour copper productions while at home (yes the cultural settlements had drastically increased the amount of time I spent playing the game).
Since the change I've done 3 run throughs in each city spending the same insane amount of time trying for a 0% success rate for gold.
Now I'm not saying that these changes will make me stop going for the tree upgrades as I'm too close o the top level in all those cities to give up on it, but I will stop chasing runestone fragments and stick to the 4 hour or longer runs which will cut down my on-line playing time by well over half.
And if as I suspect I will have similar problems finishing Japanese settlements in time then I'll only be doing them in my two main cities, ignoring the fragments and simply not bother at all in the others.
I suppose I should be grateful for these changes really.
By introducing a difficult challenge my competative nature had not been able to resist doing it, even though it had taken a great deal of extra time.
By making the challenge impossible (at least for the fastest prize with my particular work patterns) I am now able to resist them and do something else with my time.