As some have noticed, the price of manuscripts go up as you make them. There's a website showing how fast the prices actually increase: (hopes the forums allow a link outside)
http://www.settlersonlinewiki.eu/gui...tem-geologist/
Now if you take a look at that, primary thing to realise is that very soon tomes start taking 2 manuscripts, then 3, 4 and so on. And codex taking 2 tomes, then 3. This on top of the fact that manuscripts increase in cost too, exponentially. But math is tricky, so here are some rough numbers. For simplicity's sake, I counted a set of skills with 10 manuscripts, 10 tomes and 10 codex. That's only 30/31, so actual cost for leveling one geologist (or later explorer etc. if nothing changes) is slightly more. Or less, if you pick lower skills on purpose to save a bit. But back to the point. If those numbers are in fact correct, already your 5th special character to skill up would cost you no less than:
- 72000 gold coins
- 1.8 million simple paper
- 1.4 million nibs
Ok, that's expensive but maybe you can handle it. 6th set of skillups costs about 10 times more. 7th would cost so much more you don't even want to know. Compound interest truly is the greatest force in the universe. I know some people who were planning on skilling up all their 10-15 geologists. Some have started already, spreading books among all of them. I feel sorry for them already.
So, what I'm hoping to hear is one of the following:
1) the website is wrong, the prices don't climb up that fast and tomes and codexes do not use more than 1 book of previous level, ever
2) when next set of skills are introduced, prices are reset back to original (allowing us another few characters to skill up with reasonable prices)
3) when next set of skills are introduced (the explorer for example), different three books will be used for skilling up that character type. And those three new books will start their prices from low like current ones. This would allow continuing geologists at high price, or doing explorers cheap. It would also prevent stockpiling current books in order to immediately level up an explorer to high level.
As you might guess, my favorite would be option 3 there.
One might ask why am I worried about some issue that will not be any problem until months later. Well, it actually is a problem already. If I spend books on 3-4 geologists today, by the time the explorers come available, I might not be able to afford making books for them at all. Or the generals the latest. So what I do now may totally ruin my game later.