This is one of the points where players tend to disagree with PD on the balance a fair bit. Although with the latest Wind of Fortune, it looks like Urizen might be getting *gasp * at least a few reliably profitable economancy rituals.
Fallow Fields and Dried Meat is the top example. With a LOT of farms it gradually approaches 30+ rings per mana. With a few farms it still loses money unless the mana market has crashed. But this is at the cost of a coven slot or expert, and mana that can’t be spent on something that produces more Fun Per Mana. I know farm rituals are up for review at some point, but it’s still a good example of a ritual that people cast for the sake of “using that thing they bought with XP” or “doing that thing that seems like it’s part of the Landskeeper brief”. The sunk cost fallacy is a major source of fun loss in that way.
The key economic question at Empire is nothing to do with Rings. It is “Does this ritual produce a more entertaining outcome per mana spent than casting Freedom of the Soul on some people for shits and giggles/giving someone an extra Cleave in a battle?”. You are here to have fun. Mana can generate game effects which generate fun. All turning it into Rings does is to change the type of Fun you can generate (and rings are arguably less good at generating Fun as you can’t use them as ammo). So if a ritual pays out rings, IMO it needs to pay out a solid profit.
Both of those other rituals are outrageously cost-effective in terms of the real economy of a larp, as they give One Person’s Worth of Fun for Not Much Mana, and then scale up to Many People’s Worth of Fun.
Oh, also Ruthless Vigilance, Healthy Crop is super-cost effective because in addition to kicking out a small profit of Herbs on a single target, it gives the recipient a cool roleplay effect that tends to conflict with the goals of a Physick. And that RP effect, and the “collateral damage to all plants that are not Medical Herbs” fluff has got me so much RP over years as a Winter magician.