Military Upkeep Help Please

Jpizzle

Chieftain
Joined
Sep 22, 2010
Messages
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Military Upkeep is a very important thing to manage for many obvious reasons, but I cannot find the Upkeep per Unit Cost anywhere.

Civilopedia under "Unit and Building Maintenance" says that these values are listed on their respected pages, and also that these values change based on difficulty setting. Only problem is, they are not listed for units and also not listed when u check the production tab in your city.

I decided to manually test upkeep by deleting extra units which led to a rather bizarre discovery. At first I deleted a catapult, my expended income went down by 5 (noble setting) Excellent I thought, Catapults cost 5g per turn, simple enough.

Then I deleted a horseman, 4 per turn
Then I deleted another horseman, *no change at all*
Troubled I deleted another Horseman, 4 per turn
Then another, No change again

I can think of no reason for this, for common sense purposes why not make horseman 2g per turn upkeep?

So does anyone know where I can find an accurate list of Unit Upkeep Cost per turn, either in game (making me a noob for searching and not finding) or online.

And also can anyone explain this rather bizarre discovery of mine?

Frustrated I looked online and couldn't find anyone with a complaint about this or a solution so I came here.

Thanks for your help in advance
 
I've noticed something similar, but I've also noted that it's possible the interface is lagging behind or perhaps there is another reason the unit was not costing upkeep at that moment.

Cause just a few moments ago I started deleting Workers because of their upkeep and every single one of them dropped the cost.
 
could it have something to do with where the units are located (e.g. a unit inside your borders doesn't cost money)?
 
The Civlopedia has so much information, yet is lacking in a few critical things like this...

Does anyone know for certain if units in borders cost more/less maintenance?
 
For what it's worth, I was deleting some workers in a recent game and I noticed that my upkeep went down with every other worker I deleted.
I have no idea what the deal is...
 
I heard a rumor that every other unit is "free", but that seems... a little more than bizarre. I do know that unit maint cost does scale with difficulty (or at least, thats what the civilopidia said). But it would be best if these things could simply be seen on the military overview, which, of course, they can't. It's probably one of those oversights they'll fix soon enough.
 
Upkeep is factored by every two units. So, deleting one unit may or may not reduce your upkeep. deleting 2 will always reduce your upkeep one step - but if the first one reduces your upkeep, the second one will not.
 
Are all units valued the same, or should I try to make "pairs" of units for the best cost efficiency?
If I build 1 warrior and 1 horsemen, am I paying for two of each or am I paying for two units total?
 
Are all units valued the same, or should I try to make "pairs" of units for the best cost efficiency?

They seem to all be the same. You can delete a worker late game and save 30 gold per turn sometimes. So word to the wise, delete your useless workers.
 
Military screen talking about supply? with out no future explanation. Can available supply effect upkeep somehow? On other hand I have no idea how supply calculated.

One of developer were talking that units demanding resource upkeep, but if they are not getting it (You iron/horses negative) money upkeep increased?
 
Well, this is entirely anecdotal evidence, but I'll share my experience with worker deletion:

Workers count the same as military units for maintenance (as far as I can tell), so I'm pretty pro-active about deleting them for 30 gold and maintenance savings. One thing that I've noticed is that it almost always only decreases my gpt every other unit. E.g., I delete 1 worker, it reduces my maint by 0 gold. I delete a 2nd worker, and it reduces it by 11 gpt. I then delete a 3rd worker, 0gpt reduction, and so on with the 4th worker reducing by 11gpt.

Another thing to note is that it *seems* like each successive even unit deleted uses the same amount of gpt, which means that the maintenance scaling is linear in your age. That is, each unit costs X gpt, and X doesn't change based on how many units you have.


Again keep in mind this is just my experience doing some worker deletion testing on immortal/deity, and is by no means rigorous testing.
 
Can only reenforce what has already been said.


I did notice one other thing though. While in the modern area, i upgraded (as in 'build new', delete old) all my old riflement, swordsmen, infantry into Mechanized infantry. Before i started doing this i had around 31 units and 180 gold maintence cost. After i got done i had 30 units and ~210 maintence cost.

So either more hammer-expensive units cost more upkeep, or in the 30-40 turns it took me to upgrade my units the maintenance cost got progressively worse (note, i was already in the modern era - so no era change happened).
 
Do costs increase per era? I'm thinking yes but there is no mention of this anywhere.
 
I'm fairly certain that upkeep "inflation" is based on the number of turns, not the era. There is a variable that refers to upkeep percent in the game speed xml.
I don't know what the formula is exactly, but it definitely seems to be related to how many turns have passed.
 
Its absolutely ridiculous that its so opaque. And the fact that it is only for every second unit, when a single unit can be 10++ gold per turn.

Also antithetical to their "what you see is what you get" design philosophy. Weren't they supposed to be getting rid of annoying hidden mechanics like inflation?

Military upkeep is also so high that strategic resource limits hardly ever bind.
If my entire army is only ~10 units, it hardly matters that I "only" have 12 horses.
 
I really hope they fix this and other similar "missing information" issues. How are we supposed to be able to make intelligent decisions in a strategy/empire management game if we don't know the costs and benefits of our decisions? I'm sure many people don't want or need exact numbers to have a fun experience, but there are also many who want this information, so it needs to be available for those that do. If you have to hide it from the target market (newer players) that's fine, but put it SOMEWHERE that normal people (non-XML wizards, or those who don't want to scan a bunch of code) can find.
 
I'm fairly certain that upkeep "inflation" is based on the number of turns, not the era.

Correct. Also, there seem to be two other things to note:
1> The values are being stored as floats, not integers. So you might see your unit maintenance go from 31 to 32 on the next turn; obviously, then, that isn't any kind of flat "8gp per two units" rate.
2> The first few units (ten or so, on normal difficulties) seem to cost less than the rest. In the Modern era, for instance, my units cost a pretty flat 12gp per two units, but as I was disbanding (as a test), the cost started going down; units 9 and 10 saved me 11gpt, 7 and 8 saved 10gpt, etc, with the last two units only costing 7gpt.

It does not, in any way, seem to depend on the quality of the units involved. Workers and ancient-era scouts cost you just as much as a Modern Armor. (I'd kept a scout to watch an empty area known for barbarian encampments. Once I realized how much upkeep he was costing me, I replaced him with a Modern Armor.)
The result of this is an "Up or Out" syndrome. Every military unit should either be upgraded as much as possible or disbanded; there's no point to keeping any outdated units around. If you don't need a unit and it doesn't have a ton of promotions, disband it instead of upgrading.
 
Its absolutely ridiculous that its so opaque. And the fact that it is only for every second unit, when a single unit can be 10++ gold per turn.
I agree - this is one of my complaints with the new game as well.
 
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