Can I get an "Amen"?
Why, if you don't tie production to study time, you could get a
ridiculous situation where a bunch of peasants could study Combat for
15 days and then... hey waitaminit! :-)
Anyway... Concerning WORK:
I lean towards eliminating maintenance costs. There are some things I
like about maintenance costs: (1) combined with limited money, they
drive people to actually do something in Olympia, and (2) they make
people with highly skilled units pay a price. But neither of these
things is, to my mind, essential to the game.
Eliminating maintenance costs might shift the game slightly towards
the warlords, because then warlords wouldn't have to worry about
supporting their troops as they slowly built an army. But I think the
game has already been made very difficult for warlords as it stands,
so I don't think shifting back a little bit will make that much of a
difference.
The other effect would be that some lazy units would just sit in one
place and Entertain constantly, collecting a slow trickle of money and
not caring much. That's boring, but so what?
-- Scott T.