Primarily a cozy game, extremely intriguing mechanics where, like most city/empire builders you create various production chains, but the actual goal of the game is trading. The kingdom's (you) income source is taxes on trading, and therefore it is in your best interest to ensure the cities trade amongst themselves, and to balance their trading power.
A lot of enjoyment comes from laying out the cities such that they need to train to complete their production chains, and balance that with the cases where directly owning multiple steps of a chain is more useful to speed up production and sale of the end product.
The cities themselves look at what they have, what they need, and their relative wealth with others to price what they sell and prioritise what to buy. Whilst this may cause monopolies and price gouging if a city is poor, if they're already wealthy and have tons of the product they won't resort to that (how unrealistic).
The game is pretty short, as far as campaign goes, but the campaign doesn't actually take you to the very end of the tech tree or the most expensive balance, so you've still got room to build a self-sustainable empire with the epitome of consumerism, like in a game like Anno.
Unfortunately, despite this potential, there are a few downsides. The game allows you to directly intervene in the economy by collecting or donating 1K from the city's budget. Though limited by a 5 minute timer and it has consequences of reducing the city's ability to tax their inhabitants (for their own budget), in reality it just means you can balance the economy yourself and get all the money directly instead of through trading. This is a blessing that speeds up the game when you're otherwise in a position of just wating for taxes, but breaks the premise pretty solidly and allows you to just do whatever you want. Except for absolute extremes, where cities make 1K or lose more than 1K in 5 minutes, you have absolute control, and those extremes are simple to avoid or don't require avoiding by the point you reach them.
I can only imagine some kind of different way of introducing money into the economy rather than it magically spawning from inhabitants, but as the simulation approaches reality, and with a self-contained kingdom, it's difficult to envision the approach.
Secondly, the scale can often mean that the way cities conduct trade isn't optimal. As the kingdom becomes bigger the cities at the edge of the kingdom may end up stuck in simple trades if the things they require are at the very other end, and I'm not sure if they even take distance into the calculation when looking at the prices other cities sell their resources for. And you very often see traders that can carry 10 resources make long trips for 1, resulting in multiple traders from the same city all buying 1 resource. Note, if this is happening it also means the city is doing pretty well; they're just topping up their warehouse and are only sending traders because they're free. Whilst it may seem odd, it's not by itself a real indicator of bad AI, it could even be the optimal move to buy a resource cheap one by one than all at once where the high demand may cause a price increase.
As mentioned, this second point is less of a concern and more of a logistical inevitability as long as natural resources force distances between cities.
