Huge Gold Shortage in Late Game...Help!

[Midnight Rambler]

Hi all. I am a veteran player from the release of Civ II back in 1996 and have played and enjoyed every version of the game since that time (except Civ III which I did not enjoy). Anyway, my problem in Civ V is with cash flow. I recently finished my first game as the Americans on Prince level and managed to win a points victory. The game proceeded pretty much as I expected until the dawn of the 20th century when I began facing a cash crunch. No problem, I thought, I'll just build more stock markets. Unfortunately, this didn't help nearly as much as I thought it would, so I then switched several of my largest cities to focus on producing gold. This provided some relief but I was still losing money every turn except during Golden Ages. My next move was to switch production in several cities to gold. In all previous versions of the game this would provide a huge windfall of gold, but this time I only gained a few gold pieces per turn in income!

Now it is true that I built many buildings in my 20+ cities, but my army was fairly small to the point where my neighbors often sent me messages saying how weak my military was. And while I did build roads to connect my cities, I didn't get crazy with them and used them only when necessary. Finally, I ended up deleting all of my workers but one but I was still facing a huge gold shortage!(-100-200 gold per turn!). I had no problems with gold until very late in the game, but once the problem started, I never could fix it.

My question is: Where did I go wrong? In previous Civ games gold is hard in the early game and easy towards the end. Now it seems the opposite is true. So where did I go wrong and what do I need to do in the future to get a healthy cash flow in the late game? Any help will be appreciated...

[pdxsean]

A lot of us have run into the same problems. There's a rather large thread I started a while back called "Late Game Economic Problems" that has a lot of good info in it, but basically the problem is a combination of high maintenance costs of late game buildings, and the increasing maintenance costs of units over time.

I just discussed unit maintenance costs here:

http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/193336-Unit-Maintenance-Costs

Over time, you'll get a better feel for balancing out your growth with late-game costs in mind, but after my first game I built more trading posts over time, less culture and happiness buildings, little or no military buildings, and the least number of units possible. Less is absolutely more in many ways for Civ V.

If you're holding puppet states, that can also cause some real economic problems, as I discussed a bit in a blog post.

http://apolyton.net/entry.php/74-Puppet-%28Vampire%29-States

Good luck.

[Midnight Rambler]

Thanks for the reply. I had already checked out both of those threads but thanks for the info. I'm now actually pretty upset about this, as I had hoped to find some obvious thing I was doing wrong. The idea that cash flow should be such a problem in the late game is just wrong. Modern societies are vastly more wealthy than ancient/medieval societies for one thing. For another, the late game is when you have the capacity to fight a real world war, which is hardly possible when you're facing a massive cash crunch. I'll lay odds right now that this gets fixed in the next few patches.

My only problem now is what to play in the meantime. I was already building as few structures as possible, and didn't touch military buildings or city defenses. A player should be rewarded in the end game for making wise choices, not punished in a way that totally kills the fun. Guess I'll have to re-install Civ IV...

[pdxsean]

I said the same thing when I first encountered it, so hopefully you'll feel a little better about it after a few more plays through. I do hope that they tone it down a little bit (a lot of post-railroad scaling is wrong imo) but I've done pretty well preparing for it in the last few games. A lot of the late game things seem crazy expensive... even with a factory, workshop, and windmill most modern units and buildings take 20-40 turns to build, and things like the Stock Exchange or Science Lab take easily 50 turns for an average 10 pop city.

These are in epic settings, so they're a little long, but they're still out of scale compared to the construction time of mid- and early-game buildings/units.

[Asher]

Thanks for the reply. I had already checked out both of those threads but thanks for the info. I'm now actually pretty upset about this, as I had hoped to find some obvious thing I was doing wrong. The idea that cash flow should be such a problem in the late game is just wrong. Modern societies are vastly more wealthy than ancient/medieval societies for one thing. For another, the late game is when you have the capacity to fight a real world war, which is hardly possible when you're facing a massive cash crunch. I'll lay odds right now that this gets fixed in the next few patches.

My only problem now is what to play in the meantime. I was already building as few structures as possible, and didn't touch military buildings or city defenses. A player should be rewarded in the end game for making wise choices, not punished in a way that totally kills the fun. Guess I'll have to re-install Civ IV...

I think you'll reconsider this if you actually look at government spending.

The vast majority of governments have major debt, and currently major cashflow problems...

[ColdPhoenix]

I just finished a game as the Egyptians and was rolling in money at the end. Their unique building (burial tomb) is great, it gives 2 happiness and 2 culture with no maintenance costs.

I just followed some simple rules, they might be pretty obvious but I'll list them anyway:
- build plenty of gold generating buildings. They have no maintence cost but will bring in extra cash from each city.
- build roads linking to your capital for trade routes by the shortest route. Try not to build too many unecessary roads.
- only build buildings that will benefit the city. Does a city with 6 hammers need a workshop? Does any city need a forge? How many cities need a barracks, maybe one at most?
- some social policies will help
- be aware of how many workers you have. After you've build railroads and a decent amount of tile improvement delete some. You get some cash for disbanding them and will save a surprising amount of gold per turn. If you've 2 or 3 spare, improved but unused, tiles around each city then you don't need an army of workers improving tiles that you won't use for hundreds of turns.

In the industrial/modern era of my (prince) game I was making between 150 and 250 gold per turn. It was a small map and I had about 15 cities. Each city had all the cultural buildings, most had all the gold buildings, most had all the research buildings. The high production cities had workshops, factories, hydropower, nuclear etc. I didn't have a massive army, about 12 mech inf, 2 artillary, 4 destroyers (and only 2 workers). All the cities were linked with rail.

I was going for a cultural victory. They're tough! In the end I just took out the final remaining civ capital as there was no way I was going to make the culture victory. They need to make changes to it, certainly free social policies shouldn't increase the cost of the one you're working on. They should be completely free and given independently from the culture being built up.

[adilali99]

Stock Exchange

Stock Exchange, Currency Exchange Rates,Currency Exchange NewsBeing the main force driving the global economic market, currency is no doubt an essential element for a country. However, in order for all the countries with different currencies to trade with one another, a system of exchange rate between their currencies is needed; this system, is formally known as foreign exchange or currency exchange.

In the early days, the system of currency exchange is supported solely by the gold amount held in the vault of a country. However, this system is no longer appropriate now due to inflation and hence, the value of one’s currency nowadays is determined through the market forces alone. In order to determine the value of a currency’s exchange rate, two main types of system is used which is floating currency and pegged currency.

[LDiCesare]

Stock exchanges are so expensive to build hammer-wise that I don't know how you can even build them. Unless you already have a factory and a workshop in your city, which means the cost of these is probably offsetting the benefits of the latter.
The best way to avoid maintenance issues is to have a small, modern, veteran army. If the ai doesn't hate you for having a small army, you probably have too many units.
You must trade with the ai. Sell them luxuries (300 gold every 30 turns). Sell them strategic resources if they are far away (even your neighbour you want to invade if you don't need them: his units will fight at -50% after you stop giving him the resources).
As for buildings: Don't build them unless absolutely necessary.
Also, do you spam trading posts?
Never build a road unless it's connecting your city to your capital. Remove roads which the ai built and replace them with your own smaller road network.
Did you pick social policies that would help lower your costs, like -20% on road maintenance?

[quinalla]

I too think the maintenance costs get too high, especially for large empires. I like what they are trying to do which is force you to make choices instead of building roads everywhere, having every building in every city, having tons of workers and maintaining a huge army, but I just think the implementation is overkill and needs some balance.

[rah]

I'll be the first to say that this has been a hot topic with the testing team. Many changes have already been made (including the % of hammers to gold when you switch your production to gold and the reduction in maint on certain buildings) Expect some more but don't expect it to be like IV.

[mkorin]

Pillage often. I'm half way from wining a conquest victory on a huge King map and I find that as long as my army keeps moving my cash flow stays up.

[Ijuin]

We currently have four Science buildings that are buildable in any city (Library, University, Public School, and Research Lab, with the Observatory being limited to cities near mountains), but only three Gold buildings (Market, Bank, Stock Exchange). As such, I propose a Modern Era Gold building--call it a National Reserve or something (by analogy to the US Federal Reserve system). I would have it available with Electronics and give it a 33% bonus to base Gold and allow 1 extra Merchant specialist (i.e. same as Stock Exchange).

[Provost Harrison]

And how much would that cost? A million hammers?

The stock exchange is hugely expensive as it is...overly so in fact.

[rah]

Yeah, most of the time I look up and see I can build one and look to see how many turns it will take and go. "gee, I hope I've finished the game by then"

[Ijuin]

Ok, then move the Stock Exchange forward from Electricity to Electronics, and put in a new Gold building at Economics. The short of it is, though, that we do need an additional gold-multiplying building in the game.

Another thing: In earlier versions of Civ (and also SMAC), we had trade route income from other nations that we were at peace with. Perhaps having a route to another civilization's Capital that you are at peace with should count as a trade route to that city for income purposes?