WTH! Civ4 has Inflation? How do I control it?

I was checking out my tax screen when I saw this...

How do I lower inflation?

Unfortunately, I don't think you can control it at all...

You don't. It is totally out of your control. It increases over time no matter what you do.

You don't. You can't. Inflation automatically kicks in after a certain time, and automatically rises. It's just a certain amount of money inevitably going down the drain each turn. The only "counter" is to increase your income.

Damn, 51% inflation is just plain scary to me. I need a Alan Greenspan mod.

Inflation is a deliberate drag on the economy, one of several designed to prevent players from settler-seeding the entire landscape in the midgame.

It's a balance to make sure you don't research technologies too fast, because in the late game youre making a ton of money

Just another way of chargin you money while giving a realistic reason.

ahsingjai said:

Damn, 51% inflation is just plain scary to me. I need a Alan Greenspan mod.

Click to expand...

51% inflation in Civ4 terms doesn't mean the same thing that 51% inflation would mean if Greenspan said it. When we normally talk about inflation we talk about annual rates, but thats measuring the total amount over thousands of years. Its closer to saying the cost of living index is 1.51 compared to 4000 BC, although that isn't accurate either, since real inflation would also increase your commerce production.

In real life as a rule of thumb, inflation doubles roughly every 20 years, at least for the past couple of centuries or so. The relative prices of things and lifestyles change over such timescales though, so its hard to compare apples with apples. From that perspective, the in game effect is virtually nonexistant.

Its best to think about this stuff in terms of game balance rather than realism. The playability of the game has to be the first priority. The most realistic way to model inflation for civ 4 would be to just ignore it, since increased costs are balanced by increased production and the decreasing value of your savings are balanced by interest from investment, but inflation is the label given to this artificial balancing factor added entirely for gameplay reasons.

You find, especially with the 1.52 patch, there in a pretty hard limit to how fast you can expand without going broke. Makes "filling up the land before the AI" on low levels impossible.