No maintenance so what new ways to spend money shall there be?

[Straybow]

I always thought of it more as things like Social Security and Medicare (at least in modern times; in ancient times it would be things like festivals and feasts and free bread).

You forgot the blood sports. Bread and circuses!

"We demand a stadium! And cream of celery soup!"

[realpolitic]

The answer is obvious: Spend the money on hookers.

[Nikolai]

You really are into a spamming and posting spree tonight I see?

[realpolitic]

No, not at all, hookers increase the population and its happiness.

[Nikolai]

Oh, I see...

[Odin]

The best place to spend money on is upkeap of roads and RRs, they should COST money not give you it. This cures the "roads all over" thing I hate. It is not only ugly, it is unrealistic, we don't have Interstate highways going through every one-horse town.

[Max Sinister]

Happiness maybe, but population? I'd rather say the opposite, since they help spreadings STDs...

[MORON]

use money to cause inflation...duh......

or just rush build everything......

or bring back uber spy of DOOM.... *just bought 20 cities over 30 turns in my last civ2 game a week ago.....having to garrison new cities to prevent rail-recapture are such a pain, and bribing isn't expensive once one knocks out the palace....*

[realpolitic]

I'd think they'd make more babies, then spead STDs. I'm modding my games to include the bodello improvement, availabe with the currency tech. Relative to granaries, they'll cost less shields, but considerably more gold to maintain.

[Addled Platypus]

they could spen the money on lies to help keep the masses ignorant to the real issues of spending money on military systems that dont realy work

now that is different realpolitic, dont forget the free clinic city improvement to help them keep clean (just a percent improvement)

[Switch]

Perhaps instead of having some governments with free WW, you could have a third slider that specifically reduces the effects of WW, perhaps a sub-slider of luxury, that would allocate a percentage of the luxory tax, maybe eliminates WW when luxory is set to 60% and WW reduction is set to 100%. Or perhaps that's too complicated...

If that's too complicated, an example might make it clearer:
You set luxory slider to 60%. You set WW slider to 50%. Then your WW tax works out to: 0.5 * 60% = 30% of you income.

I mean, not all democracies have strong WW. Look at the US, they voted him in again...apparently not too weary of the war.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

To be fair, Shogun and Straybow, it would be a HECK of a lot more simple than that.
Basically, all your terrain improvements would be funded out of a single infrastructure budget-which would work along the same principles as your luxury/science slider in Civ2. As you build more terrain improvements, your slider increases automatically to cover the cost (and your treasury is depleted accordingly). You can, though, raise and lower this slider manually-if you wish. Lowering it causes your terrain improvements to become less productive, raising it makes terrain improvements MORE productive. Also, if you lower it, there is a % chance of some of your terrain improvements disappearing altogether.
One of the key benefits of maintainance for terrain improvements is that it helps to curb the ever-present 'Snowball Effect' of the game-helping to detach success from total area of land controlled (as it is now!)


EDIT: the most complex I would see it getting is to split farming terrain improvements from mines/roads and rail-making the former part of your 'agriculture' budget, and the latter ones being 'Infrastructure'.
Another point is that traits would help lessen the per turn cost of certain terrain improvements-so agricultural civs would get cheaper farms, wheras industrial civs would get cheaper mines. Expansionist civs would get cheap roads and rail.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.