Civilization – How to stop unit cycling in Civilization V

Here, I just made one for you, based on information available from the actual game files.

Click the image to see a larger version!

Notes:

• This is updated up to the June 2011 patch and DLCs; however, unique units always upgrade in exactly the same way as the units they replace, so if some unique unit is missing from the chart above you can just find out what it replaces to see how it upgrades.
• Gun units and melee units are not the same - in particular, they differ in some promotions, you can check my promotion chart which uses the same icons.
• The Giant Death Robot is indeed considered an armor unit.
• Missiles, bombs and SS parts are non-upgradable (and removed from the chart for brevity).

Short answer: Maintenance is a function of the turn and the number of units. The function resembles a third degree polynomial for both variables.

Advice for keeping maintenance low: Don't keep a lot of units, as each new unit costs more than the last. If you are going to have a lot of units, have them early in the game, where the costs are still bearable.

Analysis: I tried to edit the global settings as bwarner suggested. Here is what I found:

Turn  Units   MULTI   DIVISOR Maintenance cost
46    10      0       0       0
46    10      1       1       6
46    10      20      0       0
46    10      20      1       18
46    10      20      2       16
46    10      20      3       15
46    10      20      20      14
46    10      100     1       73
46    10      10000   1       10005
46    10      100000  1       123533
46    10      1000000 1       1526640
46    10      1000    1       818
47    10      1000    1       847
48    10      1000    1       878
49    10      1000    1       909
50    10      1000    1       941
51    10      1000    1       973
52    10      1000    1       1007
53    10      1000    1       1041
54    10      1000    1       1076
46    10      10000   1       10005
47    10      10000   1       10417
48    10      10000   1       10842
49    10      10000   1       11280
50    10      10000   1       11731
51    10      10000   1       12195
52    10      10000   1       12674
53    10      10000   1       13167
54    10      10000   1       13675
55    10      10000   1       14198
56    10      10000   1       14737

It takes some time to reload the game between trials. Apparently setting either of these settings to zero reduces the cost to zero. We can also conclude that raising the multiplier increases cost, and raising the divisor lowers it.

While this is obviously not an answer, I posted it anyway as I don't have enough reputation to add a comment. Maybe if we work together on solving this problem we might discover the answer. By the way I did some regression analysis on the numbers, but I wasn't able to find anything useful.

EDIT: I tried to change the INITIAL_GOLD_PER_UNIT_TIMES_100 value as well, but that didn't seem to have any effect on maintenance cost.

EDIT 14th of oct: I've updated with some more data that seems to shed a little more light on the issue. Increasing the multiplier to a large number has two advantages:

• It clears the shroud of rounding (maintenance can apparently only be an integer).
• It puts focus on the particular product of the equation that is supposedly multiplied

A couple of observations can be made about the formula:

• Each spin of the turn counter increases maintenance cost
• Increasing the multiplier increases the cost by more than a proportional amount
• Each spin of the turn counter increases maintenance cost more than the last, in absolute terms
• Each spin of the turn counter increases maintenance cost less than the last in relative terms
• Polynomials share those two last properties

Feel free to chime in with any considerations you might have.

Here is some more data:

• Two units, 1000 multiplier, 1 divisor, turn 6 - 100
• 2-20 units, 1000 multiplier, 1 divisor, turn 133-163

EDIT 22nd of October: The patch that has come out changes the formula. I will take a further look and then report back. What is obvious already is that the only-every-second-unit-counts rule is gone. I have updated the advice in the top to reflect that.