Taking one step further this scenario, we need to make the gold resource important for players, so players will have interest to obtain it. One particular interest will be hiding gold but surely with buried treasure feature, forthcoming bank feature, this will not be enough.
Gold requirement for special buildings as already mentioned, is 100% certain.
However we are looking to add this requirement to more aspects, such as:
-Ship of the Line construction will also require gold bars.
-Hiring Officers after a point will require gold bars.
-Some voodoo cards will consume gold bars as an additional cost (some of the existing ones or new ones)
We might need to add artificial consuming techniques too, like enabling ports to be interested in gold. This can be affected by port population; The higher the population, the higher the demand for gold bars per day. Ports will pay their fee like normal players.
Any ideas on the matter, feel free to help us out here.