visual zinc
Just an idle thought; when you build a Tier 3 town hall you unlock an Other subcategory Build Structure that lets you generate a small amount of essence (maybe 10% of production as a starting number and see what feels good?) from production.
In the General tree of the Empire Development affinity page, at the end of the ladder is a new repeatable ritual that requires Binding Essence and rewards a goodie bag of gold, mana & a very small amount of imperium.
This allows rulers who have a large pool of Essence to turn it into... fairly lossy but some kind of income. Like, I would prefer this to be unquestionably the least useful usage of essence but if you have so much of it...
