[MaxWilson]

My favorite way of looking at both order and blesses is that they are modifiers to the cost of troops. A 25% gold bonus is approximately the same as making troops 20% cheaper, and a bless is like modifying the base stats of a unit. In other words, sacrificing Order-3 to afford an F4 bless for Agartha is like buying Ancient Ones that cost 21% more but have Attack 11 instead of 9. (In this case it also makes it clear that most of Agartha's sacred troops are still tactically terrible for the price--they're like Jotunheim's normal troops but cold-blooded.) It doesn't quite work that way in practice because Order-3 doesn't give you a 21% boost throughout your whole empire, and you won't always be blessed perfectly (and you have to spend on priests to do the blessing), but it's a useful model.

I think the key reason why I prefer gold to resources is upkeep. My playstyle rarely maxes out resource usage at all my castles except in the early game, so Prod feels like an early-game optimization for me when I'm all about having a strategy for the late-game. (Even though, oddly enough, I rarely play out the late game and endgame because I'm winning by that point.)

Edit: good point, Aezeal, gold buys more castles. So in a sense, Order buys Prod.

-Max