@Amph, there is a whole science ( well maybe not a science but a simple math) behind those gold prices.
Some members watch the Gold tab Activity site like hawks, allways ready to mine at the most profitable time.
Look, the whole game market is based on real demand. There are no fixed prices for anything, all the prices, including the price of mining gold, are based on number of sales in the last 24 hours. If there are more sales, the price increases, if less, the price gets cheaper to stimulate more sales...
When you click on the Gold tab, you will see the current price for gold, meaning how many resources it will take to mine one piece of gold. Sometimes the price there is 1600, sometimes is only 100. It all depends on how much gold was recently mined.
Every hour the game fund provides maximum 3 gold for miners. In this page you can see the activity of gold mines all over the world. In order to extract the gold you need to build a gold mine. Extraction of gold requires resources. The raw material's quantity required to extract one gold is revised every hour and posted in this page.
The gold in the game, just like our bitcoin, it's a limited resource. There could never be more than 100,000 gold in circulation. The game fund is constantly adjusting and controlling the amount of gold available to members. So every hour the fund provides max 3 gold. If the members mine more, the price to mine raises, if they mine less, the price declines.
"In the last 24 hours, miners extracted 75.22 gold. The last deposit was found 42 minutes ago"
In the last 24 hours members mined 75.22 gold, meaning they mined more then the set standard, the standard is no more than 3 gold per hour,
meaning (3x24) they mined over the limit and now, in the next hour, when the price will be adjusted, we can be sure the price will go up.
There is also one more indication, how long ego was found the last gold deposit... and same, if it was longer then 3 hours, the price will go down, less - the price will go up.
These gold calculations are not very important at the beginning of the game, but as we progress to raw material and gold sellers, they are becoming more and more crucial... We are not playing any more, we are carefully calculating % of our profits :-)
Getting back to your issue with firing the worker. Yep, at times, when we are low with our work force, we are pressed to do that, we fire here and hire there... this is not a big deal, it costs us only 1 energy for each. We can always hire our workers back.
One thing is sure, the more you play, the more variables you will find in this game and the more you will enjoy it.