emperor help

[Mike III]

i recently started playing on emperor. I am having great difficulties keeping my economy afloat. money buildings do little, tradings posts dont do much, and it comes down to trading my lux sources for quick cash. what is a way I can keep my economy good, because any more units thatn I have right now brings my economy to a crash.

 

[Ra's Head]

You are right that money is a bigger issue on Emperor. You are also right that selling luxuries is essentially the basis of your economy, especially in the early game. Here are some ideas:

1 Maybe you have too many buildings/roads. Make sure your roads are efficient and only build the buildings you need. Not every city needs a barracks or garden for instance.

2 Also sell your strategic resources. Often, particularly early game and mid game when you are not using horses or iron, your opponents will pay for them. A stack of 5 is almost as much money as a luxury (225 if I remember right).

3 Early on, it can help to sell embassies and open borders too. Later, this is perhaps more of a risk and you will have to get embassies anyway.

4 It sounds like you are a war guy, so generally your money problems should disappear after a successful conquest resulting in a good number of puppets. Make sure you send workers to convert all puppet land to trading posts.

5 You can do it the easy way by founding a religion and taking 'Tithe.' Then just spread the religion like crazy and the money rolls in.

Hopefully, some of this helps. I had a struggle at first transitioning to Emperor, and I found that dedicated selling of resources and reevaluating what buildings to build made a big difference.

 

[Mike III]

i couldnt get the beleif in time. I do sell strategic resources alot. coal is high paying. i also sell some buildings. but your tips sound good. now if only there was somebody weak enough to take on. what i would do is use great merchants to make custom houses.

 

[gunslinger6792]

I've found playing on emperor and immortal is you need to pick and choose what buildings you make. Designate cities for specific jobs like money making, troop, production, science and so on. Doing that will help keep building costs down. Your military might also need to start running a little leaner. Hope this helps some.

 

[Monthar]

Custom houses aren't worth it. The only time great merchants are worth using is sending them to a CS in the late game if you've completed the commerce tree, because then you actually get a lot of gold out of their ability.

You'd be much better off with a GS, GE or GA.

 

[budweiser]

i recently started playing on emperor. I am having great difficulties keeping my economy afloat. money buildings do little, tradings posts dont do much, and it comes down to trading my lux sources for quick cash. what is a way I can keep my economy good, because any more units thatn I have right mow brings my economy to a crash.

You always want to trade stuff for money. Explore! The more you trade the better. Limit your cities. Make sure you can defend yourself, then make more cities when you have happiness and can defend.

 

[Civsassin]

1. Puppets, puppets, and more puppets
2. Cash wonders - Colossus, Machu Pichu, Big Ben, etc.
3. High pop cities with trade routes

 

[Mike III]

these are good tips. but wonder building isnt exactly easy. the ai doesnt even have to beeline to get in a good wonder. what ill do is get a merchant, change my specialists, trade resources, and build money buildings

 

[Civsassin]

these are good tips. but wonder building isnt exactly easy. the ai doesnt even have to beeline to get in a good wonder. what ill do is get a merchant, change my specialists, trade resources, and build money buildings

At Emperor, you can get most any wonder you want if played correctly.

 

[Socrates99]

How far apart do you normally settle your cities? One thing that helped me when I moved from king to emperor was to settle my cities as close as possible to eachother. Sometimes in order to get a nice natural wonder nearby or to make sure I get a unique luxury I'll settle a little further than the 4 tile minimum but I try to avoid it when I can. Your cities do have to share tiles but you can reallocate them depending on your needs in each city as you go along. Shorter trade routes mean less population is needed in your cities to pay for the roads and the sooner you'll actually be making a profit off that trade route.

If you're not using Military Caste you also only have to garrison the cities that may be targeted by the AI, especially if you have settled close together since fewer units would be needed to protect your cities. If you are using Military caste and want to help solve some of that cost opening Tradition for Oligarchy isn't a bad idea even if you're going wide since it will make all those garrisoned troops free. The border growth from the Tradition opener is nice for any empire even if the 4 culture per turn is kind of weak for a wide empire so even that isn't a totally wasted policy and you'll always be able to pop legalism later in the game for the free buildings.

Sometimes if my economy is really hurting in those early years where I can't shift production to gold or research I'll build buildings without maintenance, like walls or circuses just so I'm not adding any more maintenance and both those buildings are usually worth building anyway. Wonders work good too even if you know you won't be able to complete them especially since it will turn that production into gold anyway.

The thing is, even the best players often run on negative GPT for much of the classical era. Just watch some of the deity LPs people have on Youtube and you'll see that. Selling anything you can afford to is probably the best answer.

 

[mintcandy]

these are good tips. but wonder building isnt exactly easy. the ai doesnt even have to beeline to get in a good wonder. what ill do is get a merchant, change my specialists, trade resources, and build money buildings

One thing that isn't very clear is how much gold per turn units cost to maintain. Yes, military units like Warriors and Knights have gold upkeep per turn, but civilian units also have gold upkeep per turn.

This means that it is disadvantageous to have a huge surplus of inactive workers, because it costs a LOT to keep them around.

It also means it is disadvantageous to keep a LOT of Great People around. Most Great People won't be around for that long...except for Great Generals and Great Admirals. If you have five or so Great People hanging around that aren't supporting your military, you might want to consider disbanding a few.


However, my primary means to increasing my gold per turn is through war.

Conquering an enemy city usually nets anywhere from 50-200+ gold.

Puppeting the cities I conquer increases my gold per turn, both from the actual gold the puppet cities generate and through trade route income. Better yet, puppet cities increase my culture per turn without increasing the cost of social policies.

Make sure to use Trading Post improvements on all workable tiles of a puppet city.

When I'm conquering another civ's cities, it is common for me to capture 1 worker per city. It doesn't take long for me to have more workers than I know what to do with. If you disband these workers in your own territory, you get a small amount of gold.

Finally, the closer for the Honor tree means that I get gold for each unit I kill, something that happens a LOT in wars.

 

[Mike III]

yeah, I finished honor as well, so its no surprise I made some much needed cash after taking Bouddica's now weakened city. I plan on killing a city state, and when I reach the Info era, I want to take off a chunk of Darius' Empire. Honor does work well in war. I am now finishing off the commerce tree to get more cash. I layed off the better part of most my workers, and I have 1 unit per city. Hopefully Darius doesnt decide to DOW on me.

 

[mintcandy]

So, after further consideration, I would assume that the biggest reason for the negative gold per turn is that you have too many units/buildings for the amount of cities you have.

If you have a number of units outside of a city tile that are consistently inactive/fortified, that's a good sign that many of those units are unneeded.

Similarly, it's not a good idea to build every single building in every city. As a very simple example, I don't build Granaries unless the city in question has at least one resource tile that takes advantage of the Granary. I have a very similar treatment for Harbors.

 

[Socrates99]

Similarly, it's not a good idea to build every single building in every city. As a very simple example, I don't build Granaries unless the city in question has at least one resource tile that takes advantage of the Granary. I have a very similar treatment for Harbors.

I've made that a similar rule of thumb for almost all of those tile improving buildings like forges, stables, mints etc. I usually will only build one of those buildings if it will improve two or more tiles. To me spending production building a building just to get one more hammer out of a single iron mine or pasture just isn't worth it. Of course I'll make exceptions if I want to take advantage of the other production bonuses from that building (building a lot of mounted units, a lot of land units, etc.) but that's pretty rare.

 

[Monthar]

Another reason from the economy crashing is having cities too far apart, thus needing much longer roads for the trade routes, or starting on the roads too soon.

 

[Monthar]

I've made that a similar rule of thumb for almost all of those tile improving buildings like forges, stables, mints etc. I usually will only build one of those buildings if it will improve two or more tiles. To me spending production building a building just to get one more hammer out of a single iron mine or pasture just isn't worth it. Of course I'll make exceptions if I want to take advantage of the other production bonuses from that building (building a lot of mounted units, a lot of land units, etc.) but that's pretty rare.

Mints, like all other gold buildings don't cost any maintenance and increase your gpt, so even if you only have 1 gold/silver a mint is still worth it.

 

[mintcandy]

Another reason from the economy crashing is having cities too far apart, thus needing much longer roads for the trade routes, or starting on the roads too soon.

Or having redundant roads. That was a mistake I made when I first started playing Civ.

Still, I would imagine that someone playing on Emperor difficulty would know not to spam roads, and wouldn't try to build every single building in every city.

 

[Socrates99]

Mints, like all other gold buildings don't cost any maintenance and increase your gpt, so even if you only have 1 gold/silver a mint is still worth it.

Yeah that's true, but I'm not sure the production spent building it is always worth the 2gpt. Probably a bad example in a thread asking about building maintenance though isn't it

 

[WeaselSlapper]

The best advice when it comes to is to found your cities near rivers whenever possible. The 1 GPT from rivers adds up quickly.

The second is even if a city isn't producing much gold always build a market since it will usually provide you at least 3 GPT and it allows you build a treasury which will net you at least 10 GPT (when you factor in the market bonus in that city). There are two few buildings that I cue in all my cities as soon as they're available. One is the market and the other is a University.

I almost never build barracks. If I only have a very small number of cities I will sometimes build one in every city and quickly build the heroic epic in what will be my military city, the sell all my other barracks (and sometimes that one too). However I usually don't build any until I can build an armory and I only do that so my ranged siege units can get to logistics quicker.

Normally I won't build stables/forges until later in the game when I have a gold surplus and they are quick to build because 1 > .

I also always build granaries in my cities (although not a high priority except in cities with resources or strong production). A granary provides food to feed 1 citizen so that 1 citizen will always provide more value than 1 GPT. However, in cities that are already well fed the extra 2 food isn't worth it when you're having money problems because the food won't provide an extra citizen, just help the city grow a little quicker.

As others have said make sure you don't have too many roads (a good rule a thumb is that a city doesn't get a road until that city has more citizens than road segments it will take to connect that city). When I play maps with a lot of water I actually only build roads to my land locked cities and all coastal cities are connected with only harbors (unless I need the roads to get my units around more quickly because of war). The other advantage of a harbor connection is that it creates a RR connection as soon as RR are available and you don't have to build 1 (assuming your capital is on the coast).

 

[Lord Yanaek]

Just recently started playing at Emperor myself.

I almost never build barracks. If I only have a very small number of cities I will sometimes build one in every city and quickly build the heroic epic in what will be my military city, the sell all my other barracks (and sometimes that one too).

Lol, i never considered selling extra barracks after building HE

As others have said make sure you don't have too many roads (a good rule a thumb is that a city doesn't get a road until that city has more citizens than road segments it will take to connect that city).

Hmm, not sure this is really a "rule of thumb". it would be if roads were good only for economy, but when you get caught between two treacherous AIs and you're not sure which one of those "friends" will declare war first, raods, even if not economically productive can help you defend your civ, or maintain a smaller army which in turns, saves gold.
I often consider that a road that costs me a couple GPTs is worth the tactical benefit, and will often build roads to connect to forts/citadels at my borders just for that.

Something i didn't saw in this thread (or totally missed) is religion. There are 2 founder beliefs that are a real boon for your economy. 1 will net you 1GPT per 4 followers, the other will net you 2GPT per converted city. If you can get one of those (or both if playing Theodora), GPT will rarely be an issue. Of course, it comes a little bit later in the game.