We Love The Ruler Day

[Deity Dude]

What exactly is the benefit of this in CIV IV. I can't find it in the manual or the civlopedia.

[DirtyMartini]

I believe, for that turn, the city having the celebration incurs no maintainence costs.

Maybe you can answer me this:

Is the entire effect of a courthouse to cut in half the -x number next to maintainence on the city screen, or is there some hidden cost it also halves?

[Quillan]

The game assigns a maintenance cost to all your cities. Part 1 is based upon the number of cities. This is split between them, I suspect based upon size but it might be evenly split; I haven't studied it to see for certain. Part 2 is based upon the distance between the city in question and the nearest center of government (palace, forbidden palace, or Versailles) you have. Those two added together are your maintenance cost for that city. This is what the courthouse halves. Whatever the total maintenance cost of the city works out to be each turn is cut in half (not sure if it's rounded up or down). Part 1 can fluctuate depending on cities. It is quite possible to build a new city and increase the maintenance cost in other cities along with it.

[DirtyMartini]

OK, I follow that. Sorry, I'm going to totally hijack this thread.

So, if I'm correct, the "-x" number following the leader "maintenance" on the city screen is the portion of the distance penalty and the number of cities penalty for which that particular city is responsible. Courthouse halves this, so if you spam courthouses in all your cities you halve the composite costs for the empire.

Here's why I requested clarification. At some point it is necessary to expand. As expected, when I do so, my research budget falters as my maintenance increases with each city I conquer/found. Many threads on this forum suggest that pop/chopping courthouses will remedy this, but, while I haven't crunched the numbers, the magnitude of the impact on science/budget seems disproportionate to the maintenance numbers listed on the city screen. This is usually on the order of -3 or -4 with a reasonable expansion. It doesn't seem worth it in the short term to rush in a courthouse for a 1 -2 gold reduction in cost -- wouldn't it be better to increase production capacity (or something) and defer building a courthouse until a time when both costs and production in that city are higher. Also, if maintenance costs are really this low where is all my commerce going?

Example: in my current game I idled away at three cities until about 200 BC then subsequently pruned the Chinese and the Malinese, at which point I gained about three cities, founded one and razed three. When my new cities came out of resistance, I checked on the maintenance costs: -3, -4, -6 tops. I opted to add some other infrastructure first, then added courthouses once my border and production issues were ironed out, quite a few turns later. This strategy seemed to bog down my research for quite a while -- more than I would expect for the kind of numbers I was seeing, maintenance-wise. It still makes sense to me to defer courthouses temporarily, but I have wondered if: a) I'm missing some component of maintenance or b) I'm not missing anything, but the consensus is to make courthouses my first priority -- should I pop/chop them in first thing.

Thanks, and sorry for the disjointed post and the threadjacking

[Quillan]

It's probably due to rounding off quirks. I don't know the exact numbers, but the maintenance for number of cities can only be in full gold piece amounts, not fractions. You'll pay 0 or 1 for a city, but cannot get a 0.2 or any such. When you add another city, it might well suddenly tack on 10 per turn in maintenance because a bunch of your cities all had an increase in the maintenance cost. By the same token, if the city is paying 3 a turn in maintenance before the courthouse is built, does it now pay 2 or 1 a turn? All those odd numbers and fractions have to round off to a full number, and sometimes the results are...odd.

[Gherald]

What you are missing is the civic upkeep, which is seperate from maintenance and goes up with either number of cities or population (probably the later, but I don't know the specifics)

[Just_Matt]

Good question, I'll see if I can figure that out tonight.

FWIW, I don't have a problem with my Research number once I get about a dozen cities, usually near the BC/AD switch.

I build Granary, Forge and Courthouse in that order. I usually rush Gran and maybe Forge, depending on the number of trees around. This lets me grow as fast as possible so I can get the Library built.

I also try to wait about 5-10 turns between founding cities.



Hey, wait a moment. How come I've never seen a message about Jesus being born?

[Just_Matt]

Rounding

I checked all of my cities in the game. Most with Courthouses and a couple without. I didn't see an odd numbered maintenance cost. So, after I built the Courthouses it was always exactly half.

I'll keep watching it.

[Vaugula]

Fortunately our friends over at CivFanatics have worked out civic and city maintenance costs,
Civics: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=148840
Cities: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=138473

As you can see civic upkeep is indeed related to both pop and cities as Gherald suggests, so the lagging economy after expansion that DirtyMartini has experienced is probably related to civic choices.

[KerThud]

The cost of each civics increases with both the number of cities and the total population (sum of city sizes) of your empire. The details are worked out here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=148840

Note that an organized leader halves the civics, but not the city maintenance--distance and number-of-cities--costs.

And, of course, when you found a city, you drop your unit count by one. And that unit was likely--but not necessarily--outside your cultural boundaries. So, you may notice a decrease in 1) unit costs for number of units and 2) support costs for away units.

The distance cost for a city is distance from capital divided by 4.5 and then rounded down. (If Versailles is closer than your capital, I think you use the distance to it instead, but I'm not exactly sure.) Each square directly east, west, north or south counts as 1 distance unit, each diagonal is 1.5.

That means that you should be able to figure out your city's share of the "number of cities" cost by subtracting out its distance cost.

I also think there's a rounding down in the courthouse computation (e.g., -5 becomes -2 after the courthouse is built), but I'm not exactly sure about that either.

Nice threadjacking, by the way

(As I was typing, Vaugula posted, but I'll go ahead and post this anyway.)

[DirtyMartini]

Thanks all,

Very helpful. I hadn't thought about the increase in civics cost as cities are added. It sounds like what I've been doing -- delaying a courthouse until granary/forge are in -- isn't too bad an idea.