what's the best way to increase my gold with a non-financial civ? cuz i usually lose all my gold during war even if the civ i'm fighting is on the same continent as i am. a lil' help pls

If you lack gold...
You should buy some !

Research Code of Laws, use slavery as a civic. Use slavery to create courthouses in all your cities when your economy is going down. Research currency for the extra trade routes.

Also keep an eye on your losses; if you are bleeding out cash, set your science to a low value so that your gold lasts longer so that you have time to reverse your economy.

An alternative that I used when I began playing was that I switched to caste system and ran merchants to balance the economy. The great merchants that often results from this tactic provides enough gold to pay for quite substantial losses. I don't think this is optimal, but it might be useful if spiritual. Another benefit of this is that you can use artists to pop borders in newly captured cities.

Don't forget to build and work cottages.

Don't forget to build and work cottages.

How many cottages would be best to build near every town?

You can now steal gold with espionage too. I had a game where I was almost constantly at war and stealing gold funded my campaign quite nicely!

And if you don't already, setup one major city as a major financial city. Cottage pretty much every square. Build only commercial buildings like Market, Bank, Grocer, Wall Street...etc

Otherwise, yeah, lots of courthouses in every city. Cities that you don't make into production or GP farms, make them into either commercial:financial cities or commercial: scientific.

How many cottages would be best to build near every town?

That depends a lot. Many people try to specialize their cities, meaning that they designate some to be production cities, science cities and so on.

Generally speaking you should never leave a worked tile unimproved. So as soon as you see that a city gets enough food to grow and has sufficient production, I would build a cottage and work it immediately.

It is also important to build cottages early since they grow slowly.

For a normal city I would say you will have about 2-5 cottages. For cities specialised on commerce up to 10.

Greetings,

Rince

thanks guys!

In BTS you can now plunder the world too. In my current game I have successfully pirated almost everyone for about 200 years. Build privateers (i found building two together one as an attacker and one as a healer ship) and send them out to blockade enemy and allied cities. I can't even begin to tell you how much I've made this game alone... somewhere probably in the 1000's of gold.

I tend to build 2 commerce-focused cities. Since I play Financial Civs, this is easier and I usually make my capital city my Commerce/Science city and shoot for Bureaucracy.

The best commerce cities are floodplains or grasslands. The goal is to put cottages on plots that already have 2+ food, that way the plot is self-sustaining. A coastal city is your second best choice.

On hills, build Windmills. On plains, build farms.

Also pay attention to the civics that boost coins and also the buildings that give a bonus.

After these 2 cities are cottaged-up, I usually don't put any more cottages down on other cities. Some people like having cities that pay for themselves. Others, like me, like having a couple cities that pay for everything.

Things that will royally hurt your finances:

1. Too many troops.
2. Corporations within your own civ.
3. Cities on other land masses. I think the cost is about 10x.

Ways to boost your finances:
1. Build courthouses.
2. Trade extra resources to the AI for cash.
3. Blockade. I usually get about 3-7g per city. Privateers can cover up to 3-4 cities at a time.
4. Open borders for trade.
5. Corporations in your opponent's cities.
6. Founding a religion, getting the wonder, and spreading it.

Privateer Blockades, Spies and Plundering enemy resources/cottages seems to help a lot. Privateers are especially cool, I found most civs don't seem to do anything about them until they have overwhelming odds against them, so you can rake in a lot of cash that way until the middle game is over. Spies or ok, but not a big source of income unless you invest a lot in them. Plundering can be amazing cash, but you might not want to do it if you think you will own the city they belong to soon (or maybe you will anyway if your workers aren't busy).

I'm too lazy to control most of my workers, but they build a lot of nice cottages in the early stages on their own.