about city maintenance cost

[guermantes]

I was reading Vel's strategy guide (in the making) and in one paragraph he mentioned that on Monarch you get 2 free cities before you start paying maintenance for them based on the number of cities you have. If I understood correctly from the third city onwards there is an increasingly growing maintenance cost coming from 'number of cities.'

With this in mind I wanted to find out what the numbers were for my chosen difficulty level, Noble.

So I fired up a couple of savegames and had a look at the figures in the city screens.

This is what I found (N.B. this refers only to maintenance cost from 'number of cities' - the 'distance from palace' penalty is not counted in what follows):

1 city
City I pays 0

2 cities
City I pays 0
City II pays 0

3 cities
City I pays 0
City II pays 1
City III pays 0

4 cities
City I pays 1
City II pays 1
City III pays 1
City IV pays 1

5 cities
City I pays 1
City II pays 1
City III pays 1
City IV pays 1
City V pays 1

6 cities
City I pays 1
City II pays 2
City III pays 1
City IV pays 1
City V pays 1
City VI pays 1

7 cities
City I pays 1
City II pays 2
City III pays 1
City IV pays 1
City V pays 1
City VI pays 2
City VII pays 2

This strikes me as very weird. Ok that the costs from 'distance to palace' will vary from city to city but I would have thought that the cost from 'number of cities' would be the same for all my cities at any given time during the game.

Have I misunderstood it completely, or is my game buggy?

[Quillan]

The distribution seems weird, but the numbers don't. Mind you, I don't know the exact formula for city maintenance, but I'm fairly certain it's just a division of a total cost that's not evenly divisible by the number of cities. In your example, with three cities the total maintenance is 1. Each city paying the same amount (must be whole numbers, remember) would overcharge you 2 gold per turn, so only one city pays. At 6, you get another odd total so again city number 2 pays the excess.

[guermantes]

Ah... right... good to know my game is not buggy :-)

Thanks!

[docfrance]

That's odd... when I play on Noble, as soon as I plop down my first city (after my capital), my maintenance increases by one. For the next city, it increases by two.

[Jaybe]

As I recall, maintenance costs in Vanilla Civ4 were displayed as integers. In Warlords you get 2 decimal places.

So, if you don't have Warlords, take those figures with (grains of) salt. If you ARE taking those integers from Warlords, then WTF is goin' on?

[Quillan]

Originally posted by docfrance
That's odd... when I play on Noble, as soon as I plop down my first city (after my capital), my maintenance increases by one. For the next city, it increases by two.

He's only listing half the city maintenance cost, the number of cities part, and leaving the distance to capitol part of it out. No matter if you have 1 city or 100 cities, plopping down a new city in the same spot will have the same distance cost regardless.

[guermantes]

And they refer to Vanilla Civ4 patched to 1.61.

[DrSpike]

There's a detailed study over at the site than cannot be mentioned (been there for ages). There are a few kinks, depending mostly on map size and difficulty IIRC.