Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim is fascinating. You play as a vaguely monarchical figure defending the land of Ardania in the only way a government official can - subsidies!
Let me explain.
You can order guilds of adventurers built, hire them on, and build infrastructure to support them, but they're ultimately self-interested. Warriors look for a good fight, rangers explore the wilderness, and rogues extort local businesses and loot the bodies of the fallen. You can only influence their behavior through a bounty system: issuing bounties for specific monsters or for the exploration of specific points of the map can buy their time to varying degrees.
As adventurers take bounties, find gold in the wilderness, and loot the fallen, they bring gold back to your settlement. They pay their dues to the guild, buy respite at the local inn, and if possible upgrade their weapons and armor at the blacksmithy. As they support these and other businesses, your tax collectors will roam the town dutifully emptying their coffers. If they make it back to your castle (never a guarantee!), you'll start to make your money back.
Building a functional tax-and-spend economy and making decisions about the nature of your town is instrumental. If looking at a bunch of adventurers making decisions about their own careers sounds engaging, give it a look! Below the cut is disconnected anecdotes about the game.
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I recruited a ranger in an early mission, who found a treasure chest almost immediately. Without a second's hesitation, he then spent more than half his earnings on a shiny new weapon at the blacksmithy.
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An Asshole Wizard zapped all of my subjects with the Curse of Stupid until I could retrieve his stolen spellbook. While I had my rangers out hunting the borderlands for the hooligan responsible for the theft, one of them found a treasure chest and pocketed the gold. This is not unusual, but the little bastard then marched right up to Asshole Wizard's Prick Tower For Jackholes and paid the daffy shithead to enchant his weapon!
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No one in this game likes Gnomes, because they are about three feet tall and look like piles of teratoma leather. I love Gnomes, because they're cheap as chips to hire and build structures wherever you want with speed and efficiency! Found a vulnerable hamlet miles out from your castle and want them covered by a guard tower? Need another Warrior's Guild yesterday? Hire a squad of Gnomes and welcome them to the military-industrial complex! Hell, they'll even repair buildings that are under attack - more than once a few brave gnomes held up the burning timbers of an inn being savaged by goblins while the entirety of my Warrior's Guild was inside drinking away their paychecks.
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Everyone in this game likes Elves, because they're all talented musicians that are built like Amazons. I hate Elves, because they bring "lounges" and "bungalows" that distract my otherwise useful adventurers with the promise of weed, whiskey, and elf sex. I'm not against weed, whiskey, or elf sex per se - I'm against tax evasion, which elves do all the time. Adventurers need money for booze/baccy/blowjobs, and the money going into an elf lounge never makes it into my tax collector's Big Money Sack.
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Wizards are...contentious. They require an inordinate amount of investment and infrastructure, because they are as fragile as the average gnome. It's possible that the thousands of gold you poured into arcane academia will provide something game changing for your military, but most likely whatever bearded creatures your lure out of their tower with promises of tenure and pension will be looked at cross-eyed by a ratman that was born last week, causing them to die of social anxiety immediately.