The era of economical recovery

You will all have noticed that we're having some economical trouble at the moment, with the science slider at 30%! To solve this, I propose the following:

Diplomacy
I say we stop the war with Napoleon, and take this peace-deal:


We should also take this deal:

These deals will give us some usefull techs and some needed cash. Calendar and Monarchy can be used for happiness, and Polytheism leads to Literature.

Military
We should move most of our troops back into our own territory to save a lot of unit upkeep. We should only send out a small taskforce of Keshiks to capture the barbarian city. We shouldn't build any more units until we can afford some more troops.

Technology
After receiving Literature, Monarchy and Polytheism for free, we can now start on Literature.

Religion
Our first Great Prophet will be born 5 turns from now! He should head for Equus Aurum immediately, to found the shrine there. That should give us a bit of money.

Domestics
We should focus on economic builds now. The cities furthest from NoneOfTheAbove (City #1, Coppertown, Rheims, any new cities founded/captured and Orleans) should start building courthouses as soon as their current build completes. The cities producing a lot of commerce should focus on markets, libraries and monastries.
We may also want to build some wonders now. We could build either the Hanging Gardens or the Great Library in NoneOfTheAbove, and we could build the Colossus in Rheims when it has finished it's forge and courthouse. These wonders are all well fitted for an economic strategy.

New cities
Settling Fishing Village would be way to expensive now. We should probably settle one city near the Indecisive Lakes, and one near the Silk/Horses/Cows east of Equus Aurum.

By taking all these measures, we can insure that we stay the biggest and most developed civilization on the planet.

Any comments or better idea's?

dutchfire said:

Military
We should move most of our troops back into our own territory to save a lot of unit upkeep. We should only send out a small taskforce of Keshiks to capture the barbarian city. We shouldn't build any more units until we can afford some more troops.

Click to expand...

I'm also contemplating disbanding some of our Warriors to save upkeep and have more advanced units replace them.

May keep the "Honor Guard" Warrior in NotA though, but still haven't decided to do the disbanding or not.

considering that we might be switching to hereditary rule soon, those units might be useful. We should also keep some fogbusters.

I agree with this plan totally we can't afford to take any more French cities, I'd even be cautious about using the two settlers. We need to ramp up our economy quickly otherwise we risk losing our tech lead.

Many thanks for starting this thread.

We might want to eliminate Napolean via razing cities, and get the techs he's offering via trade with the others. I'm in that civ-less time of the day (work) so cannot analyze which is better.

What effects on the economy can we expect from a civics switch? Any higher free unit counts available, given half our defecit is unit costs?

The problem is those deals treat the symptoms not the sickness. We need to get producing commerce. The trades are good for a short time cure but not for a long term solution. We can not expand any more our costs are killing us. And remember this is with a city running 2 gold hills. We HAVE to increase our commerce and cut down on some expenses. We need to do it quickly before we fall behind techwise.

/I also would have NEVER built two settlers right now. But thats my own opinion, i rather take cities than build them at this point

DaveShack said:

...We might want to eliminate Napoleon via razing cities, and get the techs he's offering via trade with the others. ...

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I agree we should look more critically at razing cities than we have so far. The deal that Napoleon is offering us isn't all that amazing, and not particularly desirable IMO. It may be time to think about trading Alphabet. I'm not sure if we're getting that much mileage out of the monopoly anymore, and it might be useful to allow Germany and Rome to trade, which should open new (and cheaper) trade opportunities for us. At the very least it will drive down our research costs.

robboo said:

The problem is those deals treat the symptoms not the sickness. We need to get producing commerce. The trades are good for a short time cure but not for a long term solution. We can not expand any more our costs are killing us. And remember this is with a city running 2 gold hills. We HAVE to increase our commerce and cut down on some expenses. We need to do it quickly before we fall behind techwise.

I also would have NEVER built two settlers right now. But thats my own opinion, i rather take cities than build them at this point

Click to expand...

I agree completely with robboo. The more cities we build the more our costs will go up. I suggest we stop building settlers, and wait before we build new cities with the existing settlers.

We also need to make sure we're building the right improvements at the right times. Building libraries and markets too early, for example, may not be worth it. There's nothing critical that we need to research at the moment (and we have more than enough financial horsepower to research Monarchy). After we eliminate France we should be able to get our economy growing again fairly quickly.

Personally i think we have really overstretch our resources that any more cities, whether captured or built will just send us into freefall. We want to be victors in this war not losers which we will be if we wreck our eccomny. Now is the time to pull back, we have smashed nappy enough so he won't come back as a major threat. He has three cities now of which one is isolated. Also we need to make our new cities sustainable and profitable before we consider an agressive war again and to get our science slider back up to 70-80%.

I've had the chance to take a quick look at the save, and our economy isn't all that bad. We can improve things quickly.

Moving the stack of troops outside Lyons into Lyons will save us most of our units supply costs (at least until we move them south into France). Micro-managing NoneOfTheAbove, Coppertown, Equus Aurum, and Rheims will give us +6 gold. Not founding towns with our two settlers will save us a boatload of gold; we should save them until later. (We need to move them into our territory; as long as they & their escorts are outside of our borders, though, they'll count against our unit supply cost). If we want to take on the cost of another city I'd much rather take the barb city E/SE of City #1 - there's some nice land and resources around that city - rather than settle locations that will take awhile to develop.

We should also manage our workers better to improve our economy. For example, we've built only two! cottages thus far (both have grown to villages), and aren't even working one of them (the one by Equus Aurum). Once the revolt in Lyons is over we'll have a hamlet, a cottage, and a village to bring online; and there's another village in Lyons' fat cross that is currently in French territory (France is playing less like the AI and more like a human in regards to its economic development!) We need many more cottages, and should build a couple at the least around NoneOfTheAbove, as well as Equus Aurum, City #1, and Coppertown. (We may also want to replace the farmed flood plain at Riversight with a cottage, though that will reduce our food there.)

I'm sure there's a lot more we could do; but this would be an immediate start at fixing our economy.

More stuff:

Our current expenses are:

• Unit costs: 13
• Unit supply: 8
• City maintenance: 24
• Civic upkeep: 21
• Inflation: 3

The market in NOTA will give us some gold starting next turn.

Coppertown is costing us 5gpt in maintenance. Building a courthouse there will give back 2gpt if it rounds down and 3gpt if rounded up, plus make it more economically feasible to either capture or build another city.

Rheims would be able to pay its keep if we chopped a forest to a cottage. A courthouse there would save 2g, plus more after we have more cities.

City#1 just needs tons of worker actions. It will do quite well after chopping jungle for cottages. Eventually it will benefit from a courthouse.

Lyons can use a courthouse to get back 2g (+new city impact).

We can't see yet what Orleans will do to the economy. I think it will increase city maintenance by 5 after it drops out of resistance.

See attached financial advisor thumbnail for reference

We are spending far too much on city maintenance, civic upkeep and unit costs, a total of 58gpt.
(as DaveShack mentioned)

It could be reduced with courthouses, disbanding unneeded units, bringing units back into our territory etc. However, courthouses might be difficult in newly built or captured cities as there is not enough production to build it and/or not enough population to whip.

ordinaryguy said:

See attached financial advisor thumbnail for reference

We are spending far too much on city maintenance, civic upkeep and unit costs, a total of 58gpt.
(as DaveShack mentioned)

It could be reduced with courthouses, disbanding unneeded units, bringing units back into our territory etc. However, courthouses might be difficult in newly built or captured cities as there is not enough production to build it and/or not enough population to whip.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't disband the units. Rome is growing in power now, and we may need those melee promoted axes... Once we take out Paris (and their other little city, hopefully), our forces will be in our territory again, meaning less unit maintenence.

Again: please read the turnchat. We can make money if we set the tech spinner to 30% (as it was at the start of my session). It's now at 40% and we're making 1 /turn.

True, but slowing the tech rate risks putting us behind other civs. To ensure we keep tech parity with Germany (who are following a different path) we need to keep our scientists busy. The way to do that is to address inefficiencies in our economy, and add new ways to get income.

I didn't mean to say we should spin down to 30% . I wanted to get across that even with 40% we are "recovering".

Chieftess said:

I wouldn't disband the units. Rome is growing in power now, and we may need those melee promoted axes... Once we take out Paris (and their other little city, hopefully), our forces will be in our territory again, meaning less unit maintenence.

Click to expand...

I meant that those fog-busting warriors who are not really needed now as we are quite powerful.