Army maintenance balance: production or gold?

I know that previous Civ titles had army maintenace based on production, which one do you think is more balanced, the gold based or the production based? Which one would limit having big armies more?

Autoclave said:

I know that previous Civ titles had army maintenace based on production, which one do you think is more balanced, the gold based or the production based? Which one would limit having big armies more?

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Its a good question.

Production-based is unfun, as it means that if you maintain a decent military you lose agency in building stuff.

Gold-based punishes defensive militaries in favour of aggressive ones, as you need to be conquering cities to pay for large armies.

All in all, I wonder if the best approach is one that lets the player exercise a degree of choice. For example, some military stuff running off gold, some off hammers, some off happiness, some off food. It'd be more complex, but I think it would be satisfying to micromanage.

So, for example, you could have your ancient era units needing just food to keep going, while your later ones need paying in gold instead, and your unpopular stuff (like say nukes or privateers) being self sufficient but costing you happiness (but not on a 1:1 basis, certainly).

If you play OCC then it's the supply part that hits you as you can prolly only have ~15 units(includes civilian units). In non-OCC games the only issue is gold.

I think paying gold as maintenance makes more sense. IMO production based maintenance is much more restrictive.

Happiness based - higher army count you have outside of your territory the more unhappy your people will be.