The fault is in the assumption that 1 per 2 previous is the actual ratio - which when you get to large quantities you start to seriously pose the question : but how much do you really value 1 age up goods? (and the answer is not going to be twice as much). Small volume you may be able to get whatever ratio you want from someone who wants that good now if you're the only one offering enough of what they want.
At times in this game's past various market pressures have gone so far as to invert that ratio for the last age - when AF was the last age you had many people willing to trade 2 AF for 1 FE. We had lots of AF and not much to do with them - and wanted FE or lower for GvG. It happened again to some extent in OF for AF goods when we'd sold off our stocks supplying people with orangeries and there was more demand.
Now those were pretty extreme circumstances - but there's no saying it can't arise again if there's say a lot of SAJM players negotiating GE5 and a lack of SAV supply.
One interesting point is how the game itself values them. When you spend a good it gains you points based on the era of good.
| Bronze Age | 2.5 |
| Iron Age | 3.0 |
| Early Middle Ages | 3.5 |
| High Middle Ages | 4.0 |
| Late Middle Ages | 4.5 |
| Colonial Age | 5.0 |
| Industrial Age | 5.5 |
| Progressive Era | 6.0 |
| Modern Era | 11.5 |
| Postmodern Era | 12.5 |
| Contemporary Era | 13.5 |
| Tomorrow Era | 19 |
| Future Era | 21.0 |
| Arctic Future | 22.5 |
| Oceanic Future | 29.0 |
| Virtual Future | 33 |
| Space Age Mars | 37.5 |
| SAAB | 44.5 |
| SAV | 49.5 |
| SAJM | 55.0 |
There are some oddities about this - modern era goods *are* valued at almost twice progressive era goods because of the refinement process - that pretty much noone uses anymore - a modern era good's value comes from 6.5 it would be itself based on normal progression to that point plus it adds the 5.0 in for the colonial good it "consumes". Each additional refinement stage sees another jump similar to that (CE->TE; AF->OF).
But based on this 100 SAJM goods are worth ~2200 Bronze Age goods
If we try to smooth this out for an even progression between ages, 22^(1/19) ~= 1.177 as the geometric average for two adjacent ages. And I think a lot more people might be willing to trade up if this was the norm - that the previous age good is *almost* as valuable as the current age.
