Tricks for keeping your economy afloat

[Simplicity]

I find the hardest aspect of the game to be curtailing my expansion in order to keep my economy healthy. You want enough land to be able to field a military and keep up with research, but not enough to be crushed under maintenance costs. Anyone have any tricks for this?

Some obvious economy strategies:
1) Found a religion immediately. Build temples/cathedrals to generate a great prophet. Build the shrine. Spread that religion!

2) Cottage spam.

3) Market+grocer+bank. My problem with these is that I typically have them dead last in my build queue. My science is always over 50%, so why build this when I can build a library?

4) Caste System to get Great Merchant, and then bleed yourself to 0 gp over a very long time.

5) Harbors + Great Lighthouse.

Any others tricks I'm missing that people like to use?

[Velociryx]

Well, the single biggest trick I can think of is....



#$@^%&%^$#%@#$%#




!@$SFDSf


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The original author of this transmission has been silenced in the name of national security.

Nothing to see here, please carry on.

We now re-join your regularly scheduled discussion, already in progress.



-=Vel=-
(I'd tell, but it's apparently a state secret!)

PS: Actually, at work now, so no time to give a detailed answer, but will try to do so when I get home!)

[mimi]

yep... conquer other nations' cities... get gold... build more units... conquer more cities.

[VetLegion]

I'm practically playing blindly because I have no idea how do mainenance costs depend on number of cities and map size / difficulty. If someone can point me to a thread discussing this issue, it would be very appreciated.

[Simplicity]

Originally posted by Velociryx
(I'd tell, but it's apparently a state secret!)

State Property perhaps? I've heard that this is a killer civic in terms of maintenance. I haven't been able to try it yet though...

Hey, who are those guys in trenchcoats?!? What are you... urk!

.....

[Common Sensei]

Originally posted by VetLegion
I'm practically playing blindly because I have no idea how do mainenance costs depend on number of cities and map size / difficulty. If someone can point me to a thread discussing this issue, it would be very appreciated.

Check this thread out. Lots of number crunching and graphs to illustrate maintenance costs. It was done when the game is released, but I think it still generally applies.

[Simplicity]

Originally posted by mimi
yep... conquer other nations' cities... get gold... build more units... conquer more cities.

That works great... for a while. But on a huge map, you'll fall apart. ~100 gold per city conquered is not going to keep you in the black. Especially when you'll start getting -5 to -10 gold per turn from each city you conquer in addition to the expenses of your units themselves.

[Velociryx]

Quick answers before the boss comes back:

* Pillage income can do lots to keep you afloat, as can the (previously mentioned) sacking cities for gold. This applies to Barbarian cities too!

* A lot can and should be said about civics choices because you can see some real cost savings (which is the flip side to actually making money)...the cheap civics are powerful two ways...one, in their effects (slavery being the earliest and most obvious example), and again, in their cost savings.

* A lot of folks nay-say the idea, but I have run too many 1000+gpt games to pay it much heed, build money multipliers EVERYWHERE. Build cottages EVERYWHERE. You are shooting yourself in the foot and losing heinous amounts of cash if you don't. It's just that simple.

* Whenever possible, combine effects. Examples of this are:

Vassalage = price break for troops (usually expressed as some number of free troops) = recepie for conquest = money FROM conquest = savings in multiple ways.

Slavery = pop rush = faster infrastructure = Markets, Grocers, and Banks built really fast = big multipliers, easy.

And of course, there's the oft-overlooked, but very simple, adjust your research slider. Pay attention to the f9 summary screen. If you have a 1000gpt economy, and your next biggest rival has a 200gpt economy, you can run at 50% research and STILL out-pace that rival on tech. THAT is the biggest advantage to horizontal growth. More land = more tiles = more cottages = More GNP. And there's no counter to a big GNP. Nothing trumps it....well, except a BIGGER GNP, but then, that's the point, right?

Seriously...if you want to not worry about money, then you need to do more than just pay lipservice to GNP. Most folks view GNP as the means to keep their research boosted to near-100%. Actually, the more effective mindset is to reverse that. GNP is the most important aspect. Research is secondary. Focus on making your GNP as big as you can, and the research will take care of itself.

-=Vel=-

[Civrocx]

1) Dont stop @ 1 religion.You can't say enough about
shrines,when your talkin moeny matters.I was playin a game the other day where the AI had closed borders with the civ i was @ war with,and as soon as i took over a city the ai would have a missionary there to spread their religon. And of course i had mine on the way also.
I use to try and wait for the shrine to spread the religion for me which works fairly well early on,but as the game progresses,you wanna have a missionary
there as soon as the city is founded.

Angkor wat will help you generate great prophets
and a great scientist can help you found philosophy,
once you learn math.

2)Load your capital up with housing,+50% commerce
is huge. If your not able to stay @ 80% science
time to build more houses.

3)Without the financial buildings to support the literacy buildings ,your literacy buildings lose some of their effect,25% of 0 is.....

4)Not a big fan of the caste system anymore ,i find it quite costly,yet not that helpful. I can slam my science slider to zero and generate more cash than a great merchant is worth in just a few turns or less.

5)Harbors and Lighthouse all well and good ,Colossus
is a big plus thats for sure.If i had a choice i would pick colossus over Great light house.



a)pick a financial leader

b)dont use civs that you dont need,make good choices there

c)Keep tabs on your moeny,know where its goin so you can make the adjustments.Such as Build courthouses etc.


d)Sell resources,keep an eye on who has highest amount of gold available per turn,sell high.


e)Keep open borders with everyone possible in order to get best trade results.Open borders are a must imo.


f)Not big on pillaging but it can be quite profitable.
I keep a mount ready for when other civs war,once the culture boundries "shrink"from a takeover anything not in boundries is fair game.

g)coastal cities are great ,use slavery to get those financial buildings in place.

h)make plans for wall street early on,your gonna want that in a city with a shrine.Two shrines...even better.

I)Great prophets,good sources of income and with angkor wat you get 2 hammers i think.add those to your wall street city.If im lucky enough to get the free merchant i'll add him to.

Well theres a few i can think of that have helped me.

[Simplicity]

Lots of interesting tips in here... My comments:

Originally posted by Civrocx
1) Dont stop @ 1 religion.

Agreed, but at higher difficulties, it's pretty hard to get more than 1 religion except through conquest. But more is always better there.

Angkor wat will help you generate great prophets
and a great scientist can help you found philosophy,
once you learn math.

At that point in the game, I tend to stick to creating academies, but it is an interesting strategy. You might even be able to use this to help get to liberalism first.

2)Load your capital up with housing,+50% commerce
is huge. If your not able to stay @ 80% science
time to build more houses.

I'm not sure this works at higher difficulties (Monarch+). I seem to always fall below 80%, and there's not much cottages are going to do to prevent that. But if you can raise the raw commerce amount, then the amount going into the science can stay the same...

4)Not a big fan of the caste system anymore ,i find it quite costly,yet not that helpful. I can slam my science slider to zero and generate more cash than a great merchant is worth in just a few turns or less.

Great merchant/artist spam is the only use for this civic that I can think of. And putting your science slider to 0 is a waste of Oxford.

a)pick a financial leader

Big time agree there. Playing as Washington makes you feel like you're rolling in cash throughout the game.

d)Sell resources,keep an eye on who has highest amount of gold available per turn,sell high.

I find that I have a hard time converting gold to resource value/tech value. Tech vs. Tech compare is easy... But what is the conversion formula you use there?

[Swiss Pauli]

I was pretty hammers (or, rather shield) obsessed which was fine on the easier levels, but I kept noticing just how much cash the AI had and how many more cottages relative to farms they had.

Also, the military kept being upgraded by the biggest AI whilst maintaining a good pace in the tech race.

So cash is king and cottages are the power behind the throne. Multiply this by buildings and cash-driving civics and you are, in every sense, 'quids-in'.

[couerdelion]

I can’t echo the words of Vel enough. This game is, first and foremost about the economy. Some think in terms of it being too heavily weighted to a military strategy but I have to disagree. More money = faster tech = better units. Money can be converted into unit promotions and since food and forests can be converted into production you limiting factors in the early-mid game are really food and commerce.

Of course, you’ll have to judge the right civics for your own situation. This would involve paying close attention to your civic and understanding why they are what they are. If you are on an island then vassalage will almost certainly be inappropriate since you’ll probably not need much of a military anyway and will therefore pay more for that expensive civic than you would save in unit costs. In fact, if you have a religion, pacifism would be the ideal religious civic here with a little extra cost on the units but no cost for the civic itself.

If city maintenance is a problem then there may be no other option but to put up courthouses. However, I think I tend to take a different view to some of the more experienced players here – which probably means that my approach is weaker. In short, increasing costs are better countered by increasing income rather than reducing the costs. This means vertical expansion and for this, markets are useful, not just to increase your gold but to provide a little extra happiness. Grocers are less useful but can provide a good alternative to an aqueduct in addition to their gold benefit and may also allow one or more city to move towards specialising in gold. For financial civs, banks are too cheap not to be built. And for a shrine cities, markets, grocers and banks are the priority builds except in cases where you are about to lose them.

[Velociryx]

Lionheart - I don't think that your approach is necessarily weaker, but here's how I see the tradeoff:

* If you focus on vertical growth + money multipliers to solve your economic woes, it will surely get the job done. Those multipliers are powerful things indeed. However, vertical growth means less tiles worked, which by extension, means a highly specialized economy. This tends to leave you in the position of being able to do one thing very well, but sorely lacking in all the other aspects (ie, you can either have good research, or good cash, or good production, but seldom all three, and in practice, seldom more than just one...whatever your current focus is.

* If you focus on horizontal growth to solve your economic woes, what you're counting on is raw commerce + expense reduction to carry the weight, and while this is less efficient from a hammers spent perspective, it allows you to pursue multiple objectives at once (ie, with so many tiles being worked, you can afford to do it all...increasing the economy doesn't mean giving up a production edge, or cutting into your growth rate unduly.

Both, of course, have their advantages and drawbacks, and both can be mitigated by hybridizing their respective approaches to a degree.

Take vertical growth to too much of an extreme, and you'll be working so few tiles that even a single act of pillaging can hurt you dramatically. The upshot is that you're running an exceedingly efficient operation, and see huge returns on your hammers invested, but the civ that does this must take great care, for it is extremely fragile (in general, greater efficiency = greater fragility). Another vast strength here is the concentration of resources. Highly concentrated hammer production, for example, is what builds wonders. A civ focusing on horizontal growth (unless he has some OTHER edge too, like Ind, or Stone, or Marble, etc), is at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to wonders, because while the RAW production is significantly higher, it is also spread out over a number of cities. Unit production is unparallelled, but wonder production is almost always inferior to a vertical approach.

Take horizontal growth to too much of an extreme and you wind up with a boatload of marginally productive cities that can barely keep your empire afloat (well, actually, taken to reckless extremes, you can outright implode your economy, but I've never actually managed to do this...still, I know others who have, so I know it's possible). If given sufficient time, you can ALWAYS grow your economy out of this type of hole, but it might be too late to matter by the time you do. Your main strength though, is raw hammer production and the sturdiness. It's very hard to hurt you when you have twenty to thirty production centers, each capable of cranking out reasonably good troops in ten turns or so (and this is true, even if they are somewhat dated). Big drawback is the dispersed production. Of course, most horizontal mavens will tell you that they'll simply TAKE whatever wonders they want when they conquer cities, and there IS something to be said for that, however, the wonders won't be concentrated, and thus, the GPP's won't be concentrated, so a horizontal player will likely see fewer G-Men as well, which can be hurtful.

Anyway, that's a little offtrack wrt economy, but that's my take on the whole shebang...

-=Vel=-

[tetley]

There's also the strategic resources. If you're vertical you want high population, and to have high population you need happiness/health, and to have happiness/health you need resources. And to have resources you need to horizontally expand. Even if you thought you could trade for them, you still have to have something to trade in return. A few resources on your trade network can save a lot of hammers in temples/acqueducts/etc.. Of course if you're TOO horizontal & have a bunch of little cities you're really not going to care about happiness anytime soon.

[couerdelion]

When is the right time to settle

If the truth be known my first game at emperor level ran into the sort of accelerating expenses that have haunted many. Rapid growth through food benerated new settlers and workers quickly but happiness limits and the inability to solve them simply fell back to the simple solution of churning out more settlers or building cheap troops to keep them happy.

You can see where this is all going because the marginal expenses were at least as high or higher than marginal income. I guess this was me simply playing CivIV in a CivIII style and knowing that the AI at higher levels just gobble up land.

Nowadays, I think I follow more of a gut feel approach to the question of when would be the right time to build a settler. If I've got 4/5 cities around 0 AD but seeing expenses rising a little high then I'll start looking closely at costs before looking for another.

If I have one then I guess I just open another bottle and start a new game.

As for fragility, I will certainly admit that I run as fragile a civ as I can unless I have already decided that my next city site just happens to be where a rival already has a city. As long as you can direct the war your way, it should be possible to take on a rival with 50% more production than you simply because the AI is just that little too predictable (excepting that Corsican lunatic)