Something I’ve brought up before as a potential function of the game is advance economics. Your settlement starts as a small gathering of shacks housing a small, intimate community. As the town grows and gains recognition and the population grows, the needs of the people should get more complex. By the time you’re a city, your workers, crafters and artisans want to get paid. That would definitely eat into your town’s stock pile of gold while adding an interesting mechanism to keep your hearthlings happy.
I expand on this and options for economics in this thread from… wow a year ago?