I'm new to the civilization series, and noticed that my units disband when my gold drops to negative.
How can I improve my gold production to prevent this from happening again?
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I'm new to the civilization series, and noticed that my units disband when my gold drops to negative.
How can I improve my gold production to prevent this from happening again?
Apparently there is a flawless strategy in civ5 and if you apply it correctly, winning on deity is rather easy. And you don't even have to make some special settings for the game. Just I have to warn that its much more fun if you discover it yourself rather than get it from internet, as in that way it kind of ruins your game experience as it did to me to some level.
The easiest way (as Irony Man correctly pointed out) is setting the map type to archipelago, as AI is totally hopeless on water. Just expand all the time, build some naval units to fend off any aggressive AIs, grab those resources, trade and develop. You should be able to get any kind of victory quite easily.
You can also use continents or Pangaea maps. You need to apply a flawless strategy to get a win on those. A strategy might be slightly different depending on which faction you are playing, but there are some basic rules which work for all of them. The specific faction strategy is to get the most of the special ability. That means if you are playing for English - build naval units, if you are playing for French - build a lot of small cities, if you are playing for Romans - build all that is needed in Rome, etc.
The most important bit is a good start. I would divide it into three phases:
Now if you still haven't lost your army at this point you should be doing rather well and can continue playing the way you like. Or if you want to be really effective and crush them all you can apply an ICS (infinite city sprawl) strategy. This strategy is genuine and it works perfectly, but honestly I don't like it myself at all, as it takes all the fun off the game. So if you enjoy Civ5 so far and want it to continue better close this post now, but if you want to further ruin your game experience read on..
The basics of ICS are explained elsewhere much better than I would be able to, so I'll just quote. Here's the theory behind Infinite City Sprawl, as written by alpaca in his Infinite Rome thread on Civfanatics:
The idea of an ICS strategy is to settle cities as close as possible to leverage the additional growth, production and commerce that small cities have over large ones. In Civ5, there are a number of game mechanics that lend themselves well to this kind of strategy. To wit:
1) Maritime city states. The bonus granted from maritime city states is per city. Each adds +2 food to the city tile at the start, increasing to +4 over the course of the game. Since every city benefits from this free food, a single maritime CS ally will allow you to set up two additional specialists in every in the later stages of the game. Obviously, the more cities the better, because each gets the bonus.
2) Happiness buildings. In Civ5, happiness is global... or is it? In fact, only the consumption of happiness is really global. The production is local. Each city can build happiness buildings, and the low-tier buildings are more efficient and more effective than the higher ones. If you have lots of small cities, each can have a Colosseum and a Circus where available, and some theatres. This actually rules out happiness as a long-term limiting factor and turns it into a growth-limiting factor because you need to set up these buildings in each new city.
3) Purchasing things with gold. Provided you have enough gold, you can buy buildings where and when you need them. Spamming trade posts is a typical strategy, and it's possibly even better in ICS. Just spam trade posts, make money, and buy the buildings you need. This is especially good for the more expensive buildings which have a better gold/hammer ratio.
4) Certain policies, like Communism and much of the Liberty tree, scale with the number of cities. So do some civilization abilities or buildings, like the one of Harun al-Rashid or the Chinese Paper Maker. For them, you also want as many cities as possible.
5) Research favors large empires because a tech will cost the same, no matter how many cities you have. Since having more cities usually means having more science, you will tech faster.
6) Trade route maintenance makes you want to put your cities as close together as possible. City tiles are free roads, after all.
There is a significant drawback to ICS which I won't hide from you: The speed of unlocking social policies. This is the only thing that is really better for small empires because, roughly, your average culture per city is what determines policy speed. Since there are sources of culture that don't scale with the number of cities, like wonders and cultural CS, you will be slower at unlocking these SPs, so make sure you only pick those which are most useful to you.
You can find some great comprehensive examples of how it is applied here: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/liberteordre.html or here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=390302 and this one is very short and straight to the point: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388793
A few tips I personally employ:
Build trading posts! It might seem like the measly 1-2 gold isn't worth it, but trust me that it adds up quickly. As long as my city has enough hills and forests around it, I often prefer to build trading posts on most tiles rather than mines and lumber mills. If your city isn't surrounded by enough hills and forests, though, you should stick with mines/lumber mills on them, otherwise your production (hammers) will just not be high enough.
Specialize your cities. Gold is produced per-city and many buildings provide a percentage-based bonus to gold income in the same city; so a very economical approach is to have some cities work a lot of gold-producing tiles and then build the percentage-increasing buildings in these cities first. This is especially useful when you have a city surrounded by many gold-producing tiles.
Choose smart places for new cities. You can toggle the tile yield view (default is by clicking y, and you can also toggle this from the little button next to the minimap) to get a feel of what tiles are best for money generation. In addition, remember gold and silver mines produce a lot more gold once you build a mint in the city working them, and that many resources also give additional gold when improved - you can quickly see how much extra gold they give by toggling the resource view and then hovering over the resource icons (to toggle resource view use Ctrl+r or use the same menu as mentioned before with yield view).
Remember you can change cities to produce more gold by re-allocating citizens. You can either do that automatically by choosing "focus on gold" from the citizens window in the city screen, or you can do that manually by clicking the appropriate tile slots / building slots. In particular, remember some gold-producing buildings also have "specialist slots" where you can put citizens - this also appears in the city screen.
Don't spend on things which aren't needed right now. You want a new ship to explore with? Maybe you can wait the 10 turns it takes to make it. You have the possibility of upgrading a combat unit? Maybe wait a little and invest in culture-producing buildings in the meanwhile.
Remember golden ages produce a lot of extra gold; try actively working towards these, by investing in either happiness, great people generation, or just appropriate social policies. Remember great merchants can be used differently to gain money, though - by building custom offices or conducting trade missions.
Avoid building too many roads - they cost money each turn.
Avoid fielding too many units at once - they also cost money each turn.
Some social policies can make certain money-spending activities cheaper or money-making activities more profitable. You can hover over the gold number in the top status bar to see a rough breakdown of your spending (a more detailed one is available in the economy window) and see what aspects are worth making cheaper. For example, if you find yourself spending a lot on roads, maybe it's worth taking the Trade Unions policy (or working towards Machu Pichu).
Best Answer
There are two factors at work. One is that you could be making more money, and the other is that you could be spending less.
Increasing Income
One major source of income is your cities. You can build tile and city improvements that generate gold per turn, like Trading Posts and Markets. It helps to specialize one or more of your cities for gold production by placing the city in an area with a lot of gold-per-turn bonus tiles like Gold, Silver, or Gems, and then focus heavily on building things like Trading Posts and Markets.
The Great Merchant can also build the "Customs House" tile improvement that produces a lot of gold per turn. Alternatively, he can be used to conduct a trade mission to a city-state for a lump sum gold bonus.
Remember that by default, the city will decide which tiles to work and which to ignore. You can change the automatic focus in the city screen, or you can manually specify which tiles to work if you're confident you know better than the automated system does.
At a Civilization level, you can generate more gold by establishing road or railroad connections between your cities. With BNW, you can establish profitable trade routes with other Civilizations as well. Finally, you can sell excess luxury and strategic resources to your neighbors for gold per turn or lump-sum gold. This can be a staggeringly large amount of gold per turn for a well-connected empire.
Decreasing Expenses
Buildings in your cities are generally in the top 2 reasons why you are spending money. Not all buildings cost gold per turn, but most do. If you have every building in every city, chances are you're going to have a bad time.
You can sell buildings in the city view, which gives you a small gold boost and reduces the gold per turn cost. Think carefully about what a particular city is good for (usually production, science, or gold - perhaps two of those in a very large, well-placed city) and only build the relevant buildings in that city. For example, while every city can produce units, generally it makes more sense to only produce them in a small number of cities that are optimized for production and have the relevant military/production boosting buildings.
The other thing in the top 2 tends to be military. The larger your military, the more you spend per turn. On most of the average difficulty levels, you'll want to field a small army of front line troops and siege units. There should be enough of both to defend your border cities (1 siege + 1 infantry is generally sufficient) while waging a war with whatever neighbor you deem worthy of destruction (3-5 infantry + 3 siege is a good start). Trying to fill the whole map with units is going to kill your finances very quickly.
If you have a surplus of units, you can disband them. You can also gift them to city-states in return for a small relations boost.
General Stuff
You can view your sources of income and the costs of running your empire by hovering over the "gold" part of the status bar at the top of the screen. There will be a detailed breakdown of where gold is earned and spent.
Strategically placing your cities, specializing them with the proper buildings and constructing the proper tile improvements pays massive dividends. Conversely, if you dump a bunch of low quality cities in bad areas, they'll drain your gold and happiness without being productive enough to make up for it.
Lowering the difficulty can also help, as you'll need a smaller military, more units will be free, and the AI will be more intimidated by you and more likely to give you advantageous trade deals.
If you're into spreading your religion, there are a few religious tenets that can increase gold production.
Finally, there are several social policies (and a whole social policy track, Commerce) dedicated to producing and conserving gold. Similarly, there are wonders that can do wonders (lulz) for your gold production, either by saving you money on buildings or improvements you would normally pay for, or by helping you earn gold directly.