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The kingdom building rules in Kingmaker were widely regarded to have a "magic item exploit", whereby players could get too much BP by selling magic items for sale in their kingdoms for BP, leading to runaway kingdom wealth.
Ultimate Campaign "overfixed" this, by applying two patches: first, magic item slots could no longer have magic items above the Base Value of a settlement. Second, those magic items could no longer be sold for BP. Some believe that the two of these together are too much. Indeed, the whole notion of magic item slots becomes a lot less meaningful if they can't have items above the base value of a kingdom. A random chance at one out of a large number of items to offset a 25% non-availability chance is hardly anything to write home about. As such, myself, I ignore this rule in the games I GM; magic item slots get filled with whatever they get filled, and these are the only magic items for sale above the Base Value of a settlement.
I'm finding I have a problem with the second patch as well, however. If you look through the building list, it's apparent that there's a BP "cost" associated with building a building that gives you a magic item slot. Now, yes, there's no 1:1 correlation between mechanical award and BP cost in the kingdom rules, and the hope is that players will choose buildings for roleplaying reasons as well as pure mechanical award reason. However, I'm finding that the cost difference is a little extreme. For example, consider a Library vs. an Academy. The former is 6BP, the latter is 52BP. The former gives you Economy +1, Loyalty +1; the latter gives you Economy +2, Loyalty +2, and somewhat better settlement modifiers (which aren't as valuable as Economy and Loyalty)... and several magic items lots. Now, yes, one is hoping that players will want to build an Academy if their settlement is of that sort, but the rules are punishing them for doing that instead of building a far more valuable 8 libraries. If, on the other hand, they can realize some kingdom returns other than "hey, here's a random magic item that's available for you to buy that you could buy if you travelled to a big city nearby anyway", then the difference in cost can be justified by all those magic item slots.
What have people done to deal with this? I fear that while there was a problem with magic item slots being too valuable in Kingmaker, UC swings the pendulum too far in the opposite direction by making magic item slots near-worthless, without reducing the cost of buildings that produce them.
I've already houseruled that magic item slots are filled without regard to settlement Base Value. I'm thinking of restoring the ability to sell magic items from those slots for BP with an Economy check, perhaps for fewer BP than what Rivers Run Red indicates. I'm also thinking of just reducing the BP cost of buildings that have magic item slots, to make those buildings easier to build and to encourage players to build them.
I'd be interested to hear what other people have done (especially if it backfired...).
I've run a Kingmaker campaign with the "old" magic item system and I have to say it was totally crap.
My player never really cares for Consumption at all and had never troubles to build something they want.
I planning to do another Kingmaker'ish campaign and I think I will also remove the "max value = city value" rule but I will keep the "no magic item selling for BP ones".
Why?
I think this makes the Kingdom Building much belivable and the players have to take care of their consumption.
Also the UC gave enough other ways to get BP (Economy check/3 now, not like in KM /5, additional field improvments etc.).
Also I fear that if I allow my players to sell this items again, they will unintenional exploit it (again^^).
My bigger issue is, that without the downtime rules, ruler characters will not have any income if they decide to stay in town for a few month...
Nothing stopping them from drawing on the treasury (well, except the Loyalty check to avoid unrest).
UC is a lot like the Advanced Race Guide. Everyone agrees it's broken and only good as a guideline/compendium. Run your Kingdom Building in a similar fashion, ignore BP costs and roleplay what you judge would be plausible.
For instance, completing a castle in one month? And only working on one building? That's too Age of Empires for me personally. I've played the whole Kingmaker campaign from the PC perspective, for reference, I had numerous 3+ district cities, 5+ district capitol, and so much BP coming in that I was struggling to spend it even buying ludicrously expensive, inefficient buildings like Academies. My bottleneck was actually the hardcap on claiming hexes and building hex improvements, not actual BP costs.
Just take the whole thing off the rails, the minigame aspect is too complex and imbalance, at best it's just going to soak up a lot of time making rolls and looking up stuff in the guide when you could easily 'roleplay' out what happens in 1/10 of the time. If you absolutely need to, just use BP costs to indicate how much "effort" it takes to build certain buildings and when the players can actually "afford" to do it.