How do you manage gold without the slider?

[Zap Rowsdower]

This isn't a gripe, but a request for tips. Now that the slider is gone, it's much harder to react to a budget deficit quickly. Should we be deleting units and buildings?

I was playing as the Babylonians and found myself on an island. I expanded, built up some defensive troops, etc. With not much military action going on, I just kept creating buildings and units. I tried to develop trading posts and markets/mints in my cities as well.

So I had a golden age, earned lots of money and thought I was doing pretty well.

Then the golden age ended and I had a major deficit every turn. The only way I could think to respond would be to delete units or buildings. (My economic advisor told me I had too many troops, even though I really only had 1 or 2 per city.)

I had considered switching a city's production to Wealth, but it only gives like 10% of the hammers produced in gold form, so it seemed like waste. Perhaps there is a hidden benefit to not producing something that will require maintenance.

Another idea was to build troops and then immediately disband them for the bit of extra gold you get for that.

Any other ways to manage your economy without the slider?

[Aekar]

Just harvest the right tiles.

Also, since the cities can now defend themselves, having 2 units per city is a bit much if you have too many cities, especially ones without access to gold-supplying tiles...

Besides, there are early things to supply gold, like the antique markets (don't know its name in english).

[Have a nice game]

You can also try to trade some of your resources for gold.

[Timferius]

I find a big thing that's new to me is you can't just pump all buildings in every city. You need to look at the maintenece cost and your budget, and decide if you can afford the benifits for the cost.

[Hythian]

You really need to be more careful about how many cities you have, how you improve the land around them, what buildings you place in them, and how many units you have built.

Basically the economy takes a bit more thought than in past Civs where you could just spam cities, buildings, cottages, and spread a religion / corporation for profit.

Definately look for Silver & Gold resources and get a city with a Mint built near those.

Only build roads to connect cities to your capital. If you can, build short stubby roads connecting city to city to capital instead of longer roads to the capital. You pay upkeep per turn on those roads so it's one way to quickly go poor if you are still in Civ 4 habits.

Markets and Banks are great ways to increase a cities income as they don't have maintenance costs themself and provide a 30% (I believe) boost to a cities income so while they may take time to build they'll help even a low income city make more money over time.

Happiness buildings seem to be among the most expensive in terms of upkeep, really try to find Luxury resources first and then only build as many of the buildings as you need to keep your empire in positive happiness. City-States are a good way to get luxury resources you don't otherwise have as while they cost money to buy and maintain their friendship, they are more reliable partners than the other Civs are when it comes to luxuries.

On a similar note, while you do need Culture to unlock Social Policies, not every city needs to be making a ton of culture. It may be cheaper in some cases to have very few culture buildings in a city and just spend the gold to buy the hexes you need to expand the city. Also, it can be cheaper to give gold to a cultured City-State for the culture bonus from them at the Friend/Ally levels than it is to build and maintain culture buildings in all your cities.

You don't need as many military units as you did in previous Civs. Its useful to have smaller, but more developed armies and just promote units over time to better unit types than to build additional units. If you do have too many units you can disband them and get some gold back, or gift them to City-States to makes friends with them (especially if the city-state is currently being attacked).

The one I haven't figured out yet is Puppet cities. I *think* you pay all the upkeep on their buildings even though you can't choose what they build (unless you annex them) and that seems like it can get really expensive as in the two games I've played to the end so far in both of them the Puppet cities had a tendency to build a lot of military buildings (even though they don't build units) and those also can have pretty high upkeep costs and in the case of a Puppet city are completely useless.

But basically, in Civ 5 for gold management it's a lot more about what you choose not to do instead of what you choose to do. Don't build more units than you need, don't build more buildings than you can really use, etc.

Also, once you get a bit of the way up the Tech tree you get the option to choose 'Gold' as a production choice and if a city has nothing else it needs built at that moment it (like in past Civs) can be a way to bolster your economy. Especially given how much more important Gold is in Civ 5 vs Civ 4.

[Timferius]

Ah, here's a quick question I have pertaining to this. Are there international trade routes anymore? Everything only refrences connecting things to your capital, so I'm guessing not, just confirming I guess.

[Quethas]

@Timferius - I am 99% sure that there are. Building roads to connect to other civs over land generates trade routes as well as harbors in coastal cities creates trade routes with other coastal cities (which must have harbors as well I believe). I've only played one game so far, but after taking over my continent (step aside Alexander and Napoleon, Rome coming through), I finally explored the other continent to find the last 2 or 3 competing civs, and received pop-ups saying that trade routes had been established.

I am unsure of the subtleties as of yet, others here may be more suited to provide details.