Medieval Dynasty

Considering the variety of in-game items you can create and sell, there's no right way to do this; however, I think I have found possibly one of the most efficient ways. Play with a 200% maximum building limit, fast crafting, and unlimited weight and you will be able to build a very strong economy with not a ton of effort.

Goal: Build a mead industry that can make you upwards of 25,000 coins per day

You can put your villagers at 100% productivity without repercussions. Work them hard.

Early-game: The easiest way is to make stone tools and sell them. The 2nd best way is to explore explore explore. All over the map there are broken wooden carts, campsites with loot, and treasure chests to find. Some of these can be quite profitable - the best loot I've found was 127 Apple Seeds in a bag. They not only sell for a lot, but this gave my economy a boost by allowing me to sell apple wine after a year. The loot also is refreshed at the beginning of every season, so there's always more to find.


Mid-game: Build only the buildings that you absolutely need to - we want to save as many building slots as we can for houses, apiaries, and market stalls.

I would suggest something like this:
Excavation Sheds: 2
Woodshed: 1
Mine: 1
Well: 1
Food/Resource storage: 1 of each
Workshop: 1
Tavern: 1
Smithy: 1
Houses: As many as you need to fill all available jobs

The goal is to have the villagers only do the things that you can't do (or that they are more efficient at). Their job is to collect raw resources including clay, honey, iron, and wood. Your job will be crafting. With fast crafting on, you can create 100s of items in seconds, when it would take your villagers days to do the same.

Create tools for them, take the clay and make mead bottles, etc.
Just make sure you put the end products back into your storage buildings.

End-game: Build a significant number of apiaries and market stalls, continue to craft using the raw resources your villagers bring you.

With my building limit being 130 buildings, this is what I ended up with:
Houses: 50
Woodshed: 1 (creating logs, sticks, and planks)
Excavation shed: 6 (you need lots of clay for the bottles)
Mine: 1 (focusing only on iron)
Well: 1 (buckets of water)
Apiaries: 30
Workshop: 1
Tavern: 1
Smithy: 1
Food stalls: 30

(I had no villagers employed at the workshop, tavern, or smithy. They exist so I can use the crafting tables myself)

Once you get going, you'll pick up speed fast. Your productivity will also significantly increase as your villagers gain levels in their jobs.

By the end of every day, you'll have a few thousand honey. All you have to do is keep crafting the required tools, making more mead, and putting them back into your resource buildings. Your villagers will sell the mead and collect everything you need to keep repeating the process.

Z792's method is great! But I'm just going to post what I've done here. This is of course mainly focused on if you are on console and put on all the cheese settings (unlimited weight (includes your horse!) health, 1000% exp gains etc) as well as going for the other achievements. This will undoubtfully be your last achievement. You can obviously do the change building cap on PC and save to cloud, switch to xbox but I believe that also increases the development challenges similar to how dynasty gains increase the number of villagers you need. I just didn't bother.

My end game setup was this:

Building cap 65
26 houses (1 was mine and my wife) worker total 50
1 builders hut (My wife was working here, Just make sure to keep some straw and sticks/logs for repairs on your buildings) - 1 worker
1 smithy (To make iron knifes) - 0 workers
1 woodshed (To gather sticks 100%) - 1 worker
1 tavern (Mainly for the extra chance of vendor and gifts from the happy wife achievement)
1 resource storage (To hold supplies from the workers)
6 mines (To mine iron 100%) - 36 workers, each mine making roughly 150iron ore per day
Rest On market stalls selling iron knives. You will of course need to have a sewing hut to make the products for the market stalls, but this is endgame.

This left me with 12 stalls (making 1300 coin/day with all perks in diplomacy and their skills level 10) - About 16K coin.

Each town in the game has 2-3 vendors that on average hold 1300-2100 coin from my experience. 10 towns in total (extra vendor sometimes shows up to your tavern). For me that was 20-25K average per season. The above method assumes you are going to run around the map on a horse or carriage selling your daggers to every vendor you can. This method is also 99% afk-able. All you have to do is grab your supplies from the resource storage and craft the iron knives. What I also did was set the seasons to 1 day length, because the villagers restock at the start of every season. Another thing to note is women who are pregnant and have children will not work for I believe 2 whole years! With seasons set to a day that will go faster and they can get to work faster.

Early game you can sell stone knives and any other junk you find while doing the story quest/side quests. You might also want to consider getting at least a barn and some flax to make enough cloth for stalls.

So, in short: Mine iron, make iron knives, sell iron knives.
Afk - 16K/day (1 day seasons).
Run around selling iron knives to everywhere I can - 30-40K/Day (1 day seasons)
Either way you're going to end up just sitting there with nothing to do. So, if you want to afk or not is up to you.