Well, let me introduce my opinion, since, if I recall, Juliette had mentioned, at some point, that income was getting ridiculous. Now, I've just started playing NG 1 month ago. The most valid points that have been expressed thus far are the following:
1. This update favours older players, because it is now impossible for a newer player to acquire the tremendous amounts of Naq that the older players have already spent on building their accounts.
2. This update locks the game up, because Naq is now so rare that its inherent value may be higher, but prices are not reflecting this new reality. Essentially, this translates as a huge price increase on all technologies, weaponry, spy levels and training.
Had income been preserved, a similar effect could have been achieved by increasing all prices tenfold. This means that all previous players got a 90% discount on everything. I must pay 10x more than them in order to catch up.
Not to mention that, had I known this, I might have invested differently, but let's not turn this into a whinefest about what might have been.
Although the currency has preserved its purchasing power, its rarity and the fact that prices have not changed to reflect this rarity has an effect similar to the effects of hyperinflation if your salary does not change or is not indexed to inflation.
A much better way to make the game balanced would be for everything to be destroyable. When I say everything, I mean miners, attackers, UP, techs - everything. Here are some ideas:
The library of Alexandria and all the technological advances and human knowledge that may have been contained therein was burnt to the ground.
Unit production? When women and children have been killed in a town that has just been raided, whence do new soldiers come? Immigration, perhaps, but most people emigrate from war-torn countries.
Attackers? If anything, the defending army and attacking army should be under one category, military strength, to be divided and deployed in its entirety or in part, as the player sees fit. And yes, each soldier is a mortal being, capable of being killed.
Also, miners are helpless coal-sniffers who die everyday from having to breathe in the most unsanitary air. A certain percentage should probably die regularly, no matter how much population you have. There should be no arbitrary plague cap, but disease does occur more in places with a higher population density, so the disease rate should be proportional to the population. Maybe it can be mitigated by a medical tech.
The only disadvantage that I see is that strong players would have the advantage of being able to enforce their dominance through bullying. So, I propose that ingame actions have bigger consequences and require more planning. For example, attacking should have an element of strategy (requiring thorough reconnaissance of a realm). Attacking blindly sets you up for failure. Thorough reconnaissance would give you the information necessary to make the right decision in an attack. Also, attack reports would not be delivered instantly, but at the end of each turn. Instead of AT being the limiting factor, one should only be able to deploy the entirety of their army once per turn. Deploying a PART of the army would be a way to deploy more than once per turn. Deploying the entire army would leave the realm undefended for up to an entire turn.
And every recon mission has a chance of failure. It should not depend on the number of spies sent. If anything, the fewer, the less detectable. I have ideas, but they are beyond the scope of this post.
IN SHORT: this update does break the game, so why not re-invent it completely, if we're not going to retract it?
