It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This bugged me after I started thinking about it a while ago.
Wood: trees don't grow back. At least, I haven't ever seen them growing back myself, and no one else says they do.
Stone: aside from those deposits, you don't get more natural sources of them. There aren't even mineable crags that contain tons of stone for a pseudo-steady-state solution; I generally found myself running out of stone really quickly.
Gold: same with stone, basically.
Food: This is more indirect, but you get food from four sources: hunting animals, of which there are a limited (non-respawning as far as I know) amount, gathering fruits (also limited and non-respawning AFAIK), making farms (which requires wood), and fishing (and fishing patches are limited and non-respawning too).
There's one exception to all of these, which is that you can continue to buy wood, stone, and food from the market, endlessly, even after you completely exhaust your natural resource supplies. Prices will keep on rising up to absurd levels, though it caps out after a while. Of course, this depends on your having gold to meet your market-splurging needs...
...and you can obtain unlimited amounts of gold. Have monks gather relics and place them in your temples, and you will gradually get gold from them. Slowly.
So if you completely clean out the map's worth of natural resources, you're left with market transactions, and luckily for you, the game is designed (1) such that your empire and the little slice of the world you and your opponents fight over is considered an open system with resources magically appearing at the market when you need them, and (2) such that you'll never even come close to that before you defeat your opponents, as long as you play even remotely reasonably.
But this still bugs me.
Comments
You can also get gold from trade, if I remember correctly.
Yes, you can have trade carts travel in between markets to gain limitless gold.
Yeah, that too. It's still slow, though I don't remember how it compares to monastery relics.
Apparently someone thought of making respawning trees and fish in a mod: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/0/828935672793227402/
Should probably do so, but at a slow rate that might be dependent on how much there is left of the resource. Like, a fish resource that has 30% to 100% of its initial size grows at the maximum rate but below 30% it grows more slowly because you don't have enough fish reaching reproductive age for max replenishing rate.
So then you could manage catch times and stuff. Of course this would make that part of the game more complex -- not just the "quickly grow your empire and then quash the other guys" gameplay. I guess it'd also make sense for the fishing boats you make to have a setting of how much they should fish out of a fish resource block before they let it regenerate.
For extra fun, make it so that you can't tell how much resource there is left. Now make multiple players fish from the same resource. Tragedy of the commons