In regards to the economy, I am with you guys.
I agree that difficult to master games are the ones that provide the long term fun. And I think that complexity can be added to the game that doesn't scare people away.
What becomes not fun (for most) is if things are both complex and confusing, so that it is not clear what to de to achieve a desired result.
In my opinion, a great deal of complexity and ability to drill down and micromanage need not make the game "hard" to play. Nor at lower difficulty settings does it make it harder to win.
The complexity should come from having multiple levels of simple systems.
The simple systems should be very commonsensical, don't make a bunch of rules of how things work that only work that way because "we say so". With things like the economy, I think it is very important that what you do in order to achieve a desired result should be fairly straightforward. (What may not be so obvious are other side affects that your action could have). Again these unintended consequences should make sense, they should not just be arbitrary "gotcha's" but it is having some unintended consequences to a simple action which contributes to that wonderful formula "easy to learn, difficult to master". It is learning how to plan ahead for, manage, mitigate or capitalize from these cascading "unintended consequences" that separates the novice player from the guru. And the game should still be fun and playable for the novice, but also still provide opportunites to gain further insights to the guru.
With a few notable exceptions, onc e I feel I know every inner working to a game, it gets shelved. Of course, a good many games get shelved long before that, simply because they were overly complex (in a bad way) or just did not grab my interest to make me WANT to dig deeper.
