Dave
There are two membership systems.
the old one allows you to extend membership and get gold coins.
then you use most of the gold coins to extend your empires.
when you are extended for more than a year, the payment is in fact for gold coins only.
this was very confusing for new players and they were asking us many questions about it. (many mails each week).
older players were used to it and when we suggested a change, they were against it.
we introduced a new system for newer players. It is in use for many months.
you extend the membership and extend one empire automatically. You do not get gold coins except for the larger payments where you get 30 or 90 extra gold coins. Most gold coins are in fact used for the automatic extension. $ 36 pays for a membership extension of 9 months plus 9 * 30 gold coins for an empire plus 90 gold coins extra.
you can also pay for gold coins only.
in this system, you can also extend your membership by using gold coins and never pay in cash at all.
when you look into the details, the membership cost and cost of gold coins is identical in both systems.
the only difference is the automatic extension.
We do not get any questions at all about the payment system.
You are the first one in many months.