Unit Maintenance Costs ?

[dschur]

I could not find this in a thread using search, so I apologize for bringing something up which must have been discussed already.

How do I know what a unit costs to support? It seems almost random sometimes. I delete one extra worker and I get back 10g, one more, nothing. I looked on the tab that shows total costs for support, and I seem much lower than the capacity of this, but is there some other scaling cost of additional units? The Civilopedia says the cost varies based on difficulty, so you need to look at the units directly, but I did that and don't see it anywhere.

Do any unit types cost more/less than others? Do they all cost the same to support regardless of deployment? (Friendly Territory, Enemy Terr, Embarked, etc)

[Louis XXIV]

It's not transparent and I've heard conflicting things. However, at a minimum, support is done in pairs of two. Deleting one unit might not get you anywhere, just deleting two. I suppose an obvious thing to check would be whether or not it's an odd number of even number of units that count (if it's really that simple, it could be things like workers and naval units being relatively consistent in my game, so it only looks like it's done in pairs). This is something that probably could be resolved through testing, but I'm kinda hoping someone else will do the testing

[pdxsean]

The maintenance for units seems to be the same regardless of unit (ie a worker will cost the same as a naval or ground military unit) and increases over time. Although I haven't gotten exact numbers yet, I think it is safe to say that they increase generally based on the tech level you have achieved, and there are few (if any) free units from supply.

As a general rule, I assume a unit costs 1g/turn at the beginning of the game, which increases to around 6/turn when I discover railroads, 8/turn around the time I enter the modern age. Which makes workers pretty expendable during the slow times when you've gotten all of your hexes improved but don't yet need to lay rails, and then again after all rails have been laid.

Hope this helps. The info in the documentation/civilopedia is misleading and incomplete.

[weregamer1]

The "pairs" theory is also not correct. I have seen changes when deleting each of three units in a row.

I'm pretty sure the real answer is a nonlinear formula and that they are doing at least one round or truncate to an integer before doing more floating-point math, resulting in odd anomalies like the number sometimes not changing when deleting a single unit.

I love so much about this game, but the incredibly bad manual/civilopedia/UI transparency on basic formulae is extremely annoying. This particular one is the very worst. I am astonished that nobody from Firaxis has stepped up to reveal the actual calculation algorithm.

[Proteus_MST]

The "pairs" theory is also not correct. I have seen changes when deleting each of three units in a row.

I'm pretty sure the real answer is a nonlinear formula and that they are doing at least one round or truncate to an integer before doing more floating-point math, resulting in odd anomalies like the number sometimes not changing when deleting a single unit.

I love so much about this game, but the incredibly bad manual/civilopedia/UI transparency on basic formulae is extremely annoying. This particular one is the very worst. I am astonished that nobody from Firaxis has stepped up to reveal the actual calculation algorithm.

I absolutely agree...
espececially something as important as unit maintenance should be more or less calculable by the player themselves, so they can make an informed decision on whether to build new units or not. At the moment building new units is always a big vcause of uncertainty...you never know if a new built unit won´t immediately raise your unit maintenance costs to a point, where you have to disband a unit just to retain a positive income. Considering the fact that units take an extremly long time to build (at marathon a knight might take 40 turns for example) this seems to be rather bad gameplay mechanics

[jobe]

Sean got it right. Unit maintenance is counted in pairs and scales over time. I think it´s adjusted somewhat for later era starts, so you don´t have to pay more for one unit than your entire empire is generating in the first couple of turns.

There is no way to see what is going on maintenance wise as far as I know.

I´ve deleted workers for 13 gold more per turn.. It´s better in this game to delete all workers from a certain point on and just reproduce one or two when needed again. Especially also since producing a worker and deleting it for money is much, much more effective than producing Wealth in a city. Like in many places the math is just random here.

[Ming]

I wish they would stop considering workers and great people as equal to military units, or even just take them out of the equation.

It really sad that in a game of Civ, you want to play long parts of the game without a worker

[jshelr]

Yup, the worker thing is definitely annoying. You tend to capture them during combat and, at least in the games I've played so far, the workers tend to complete their jobs relatively early in the game. In earlier versions of civ it seemed to me that the game was balanced from this viewpoint. A "normal" number of workers would have new things to do right up to the point where railroads were completed. They are very very expensive now. So, while "delete" feels like "kill" to me and it's wrong to kill your buddies, you have to do it.

[Hermann the Lombard]

A "normal" number of workers would have new things to do right up to the point where railroads were completed.

For me, this was mostly because I spammed roads all over the place. I was (am) very much wondering about the maintenance cost of workers, because last game I had quite a few of them just standing around with nothing to do, more or less waiting for railbuilding. I deleted one and saw no change in my costs, so I wasn't even sure I was paying maintenance for them; if I had deleted two...

[Ming]

Spamming roads can get expensive. And yes, you would have seen a difference if you had deleted two of them

[MxM]

So, if the worker is killed and then a new one produced or captured, then the new worker will have less maintenance???
Same question goes for military unit... I assume that buying upgrade does not create a new unit.

[Ming]

I'm not sure of your question?

What I was saying is that it is true that it seems to deal with units in groups of two. Deleting or lossing a single unit may not change your costs... but lossing or deleting two units will.

[rah]

No. The maint is the same. The point that people are trying to make is that Maint is so oppressive that it makes sense to delete all your workers once they've done their job. If you need one in the future it's cheaper to just build a new one instead of keeping a few in reserve as in previous versions of the game. In my opinion, this really sucks.

[jobe]

By deleting a worker you basically exchange future production for the gold you´d have paid for each worker during the turns from worker deletion to construction of a new one. Sadly the game favors such behaviour.

[Ming]

I think it's sad that it's better to build cheap units and disband them upon completion then it is to use the city "wealth" feature.
Converting only 10% to wealth is a terrible design feature.