Upkeep in 1.61

[Blake]

Wow, the new lower civic upkeep (undocumented, I think?) really has a large effect on emperor+ difficulty. Non-organized leaders no longer start at -2, they can have a second city and still be at only -1. For one this is simply like 20% faster research, and secondly it makes expanding far less painful.

While it does diminish the value of Organized greatly for emperor+, in this patch some no-upkeep civics have been changed to low which means Organized is probably a bit more useful in the mid-game, when people would have been running Slavery and/or State Property. Roughly speaking running Slavery+State Property used to cut the civics bill by ~40% - no longer.

[cal_01]

I haven't taken another look at Mercantilism yet and what the upkeep was, but going Merc + free Merchant specialists may be a good mid-game strategy now...

[uberfish]

Apparently the -2 upkeep on emperor and higher was a programming mistake in 1.52. I think 0 upkeep is better as it reduces the dependence on Huts, and with slavery bumped up in cost it won't take long to see savings from Org anyway.