Generating Gold

[Eric Daniel]

I've tried several tactics for getting gold semi early on in the game and never seem to generate much. One of the best tactics is to build mines, which works well, until your city expenditures exceed your income. By expenditures I mean regiments, roads, city improvements, etc. I can usually only keep around 400-500 gold until each turn starts to subtract say 15 or 16 gold and I am not generating any new revenue. Please help! I'm new to Civ 3 and any help is much appreciated!
Oh and one other thing is that for a city improvement, I've tried wealth which says it takes 1 turn, but really takes many more and have never noticed any results. What is the point of this and does it really work?
Thanks!

[Terser]

It's tedious as all get out, but it works: every turn you can adjust your science rate slider to yield the maximum amount of gold while still yeilding the max amount of research. A lot of times--especially in the early game--decreasing your science rate by 10, 20, 30, 40 or even 50% will have not increase the number of turns till your next discovery. It will, however, yield more gold for your treasury (in the first few turns, this often means going from +0 income or deficit spending to +4 or 5 GP's per turn). The amount yielded each turn is not great, but it does add up over time. Every little bit helps.

The tedium (and the danger) comes because you must check every turn to make sure you're not losing out on valuable research turns. For example, in one game I was able to lower my science rate from 70% to 30% while still making the same per-turn progress toward literature. Unfortunately, I didn't check or adjust the slider for five turns--later I learned that had I upped the rate to 70% the number of turns to discover lit would have dropped from 27 to 22. Those five turns would have made all the difference in the world when the Romans beat me to the Great Library by three turns.

[Marquis de Sodaq]

Use taxmen in cities that have either excellent or no growth potential. They toss a few extra coins into the coffers.

Also, sell your techs. If you are first to discover something that others may soon have, sell it to them for a per turn payment. Then you can count on a fixed boost for 20 turns.

[Skanky Burns]

Wealth turns your cities production into gold. Before economics 8 shields get convert to 1 gold, and after 4 shields become 1 gold. So if your city is producing 1 shield, it will get 1 gold extra instead.
If it generates 8 shields, it will still only get 1 gold extra.
If it generates 9 shields, it will now get 2 gold extra per turn.

Needless to say, its not the best way to generate money.

Research currency as soon as possible, and build marketplaces.
When you discover banks, build them too.

Put roads in every square your cities harvest to generate more trade.
Mines dont affect gold production, only how many shields the city produces.

Finally, build courthouses in cities with average corruption. This will decrease the amount of gold lost to corruption. Courthouses too close to your palace (in cities with no corruption) wont help as they will increase your upkeep costs. Courthouses in cities too far away from the palace also dont have an effect on corruption.

Hope this all helps

[Darth Sidious]

re @ Terser

That wont do much i think

you can indeed often get the same number of turns,but unless you keep it at 40, it will only be when your research is almost done.

As was more obvious to see in call to power, a researcg simply costs a certain amount of comerce, 72 for example for bronze working. so if you are 20 commerce from completion with 6 sience per turn, it will be 4 more turns. would be the same with 5 sience per turn.
you could now adjust it to make 5, but your cience might just increase next turn, making it a turn faster if you do not decrease the sience spendings.

For this reason, you should just do this every LAST turn of researching. Depending on whether the exces sience will be used for the next tech you research. Not sure, but i think in call to power it was used, in wich case it would be best to just leave science at max al times.

I do check my sience /tax every turn, but just to keep happiness rating as low as possible and sience as high as possible at all times.

for money, seel techs and of course have roads everywhere.

[Darth Sidious]

or

since you metioned "especially in early game" maybe you just change the slider without changing the way it is spend.

if you only have like 2 or 3 commerce, you can adjust the slider while the money will be spent the same.

[Skanky Burns]

If your going to go with just the maximum time to research, you might as well just turn a single citizen in some back-water city into a scientist and devote your entire income to tax. This way you get heaps of money, can do science even in Anarchy, and only lose production in a city that would only produce 1 shield 1 commerce anyway due to corruption.