@ FishSmell ehhh I am lvl 43 and I sell them .. horses that is. It's one of the 4 things I can sell. (to gather enough gold for upgrades and ls'es).
@fishslice, yes ls'es. awesome. Same price as they were but pretty much the value has been dropped to 66% of what they were to removal of the weapons. You also forget that since people now have to use ALL their resources or save up for disasters (trust me you do not want to experience losing 100 cannoneers with a stock of zero cannons). So since they need to use the iron and the titanium and well pretty much everything that leaves only a few things people can sell they will have a surplus off. And let me tell you that isn't stuff worth 1000's of gold. more 40 gold per 10K. Now imagine sending a few explorers our (lets assume you manage say 2 commodities that give you a 10K surplus which both sell at 40 each per 10K and yes that is reality I mostly can sell Pinewood and Coal ... both sell at 40 gold per 10K so a massive 80 gold/day at lvl 43 :P) that means 10 days at the very least for a single LS if I don't send explorers. But lets say I can get enough other stuff like water and horses to cover the explorers. so 80 gold/day. So 10+ days to buy an LS which now gives 66% of the old value in loot. Not very much something you'll be doing often now trust me.
As doing even a single adventure will now drain resources heavily it means all the iron and copper you produce are ALL used. ALL of it. So by the time you have recovered even just the recruits from doing a DB (and I am not including blocking here because many people cannot block and the fact loot is basically set to people that can block ... kinda ridiculous) so that's in the vicinity of 2K recruits + 1K horses used. Recovering the resources for 2K recruits takes a LOT of time now. Now on top of that these people will have far smaller population limits. Why? All the epic buildings have been reduced remember? So they will hit walls soon enough that are called Building licenses. Since those epic buildings no longer drop as much as they used to (read 10-20 less then they used to aka you need to do 10-20 the adventures to get them) people will be stuck doing adventures within their pop limit.
It has created a string of problems that are quite fairly not imaginable for people that have huge stocks.
Now to the gems part. I also happen to buy gems, but you are saying that it is ok that if I want a nice amount of frozen that it is fair that I now have to pay 7 times as much as you did to get them. Because that is now the reality. Do you also know what the result is if they keep cranking up the difficulty for non-paying players? They will quit. I certainly wouldn't enjoy near empty servers tbh. And please do not say that that will not happen. One of my last games died because of exactly that. I wouldn't find a game that is mostly deserted except for the people with lots of money very interesting to play. I like seeing a lively active chat and guilds. I buy so they do not have to. No need to punish them more and more for not being paying players.